Feb. 28th, 2011, from his email:
"We had a couple of interesting experiences this week that I thought I'd share. The first was not very happy. We went to Brother N one day and when we got there we were told by his granddaughter that he was at the hospital where one of the kids of the area (a son of a recent convert, about 15) was just taken into the hospital for a burn. We asked her if the burn was serious and she said it was just a small one and it was fine. So a couple days later we returned to try to catch Nonoy again and met him driving down the road, where he picked us up and took us to the hospital with him to visit the boy. I flinched when we walked in his room. His entire stomach and chest, from waist to head, was covered in third degree burns. We talked with him and a couple other kids we knew that were there taking care of him for a while. The burns were still wet and hadn't started healing yet. So before we left we gave him a blessing. On our return two days later his burns had shown progress and he should recover well. But he'll definitely never be the same. Apparently he poured gasoline on a fire, and the container exploded. He didn’t have a shirt on, but luckily he was right next to the fishpond and jumped in it in less than 5 seconds, otherwise he probably wouldn't have survived. A little wake up calls on fire safety! We are very thankful that he wasn't hurt any more than he was, and that he should fully recover aside from the scars.
Another experience we had yesterday. We went to visit a member that lives really far out of town. When we got there 2 of the little kids (9 and 5, grandkids of the member) were working with their rice. I am guessing they and their grandma harvested the stalks of grain themselves, and now they were in the process of getting the individual rice grains from the stalks and putting them into a bag. It was just such an eye-opener for me about how different the life style of different people are. As kids at home we mow the lawn, wash the car, vacuum the house, and clean our room. These kids were putting stalks of rice in piles, and then with their feet mixing them up, and smashing them together, to cause the grains of rice to fall from the stalks. Then they would throw the empty stalks in a pile, and grab another handful and repeat. And that was their food! I am not even sure how they got the rice out of the shells, I didn’t witness that process. Elder C and I jumped in and helped them finish for a while before we shared with them.
