Email November 17th, 2008

Hello to all of you. I've been trying to copy some of the pictures that you've all been giving me to print some of them for myself but that took up a lot of my time, sorry. This week was full of travel and this upcoming week, meaning tomorrow I guess, we travel more! Zone conference when you're on the island is a three day adventure of sorts and going to Manila was quite the adventure. We were in the bus all day long in terrible Manila traffic and a rain storm, but we got to watch the Testaments and we got to go to the temple. It was amazing. I think I wrote about all of this in the letter I was writing while not sick on the bus so I guess I apologize for the repeat. Sometimes it's hard to think of what exactly to write or how to write it even though a lot happens. We talked with the husband of a member, whose family is also members, but he is a born again preacher. He wants to understand the Book of Mormon, he wants to know if he can be a member without believing in the Book...because he feels it contradicts the bible, he is a firm believer in the bible and his big hang up is on the fact that it says "God is spirit." You can tell he really just wants to know, but he's very hung up on intellectual things and so it's hard for him and we were late getting home so the conversation stopped, we actually only talked with him at all beacuse we were dropping by their house to get my shoes which they had graciously glued back together for me, haha! Anyway, tomorrow we go to zone conference again, but it's actually Wedenesday. We saw the hugest spider that either of us have ever seen and it's probably still wandering around in our closet because it hid from us in the room with no light and it was night so we missed killing it. As for monkey's...I really never see them, only a couple of times and it happens to be that one of the times he decided to pull my hair. The children here don't seem to play with bugs as much, or I just don't see it because they are in school now and in my first area they were on summer break. It also depends if that kind of bug is in this area. They do spider fights also though, they catch these spiders and keep them in little containers and will get them out on a stick and try to make them fight and let them crawl all around on their hands and things. We made a record possible on Sunday...I played the piano, we both spoke for sacrament meeting, we taught the lesson in Sunday school and then we helped to singing time and a sharing time story in primary -- the difficult thing here right now is a lack of people fulfilling their callings an thus we fulfill them for them. It's winter of sorts here also meaning it rains for than other times in the year (so they say) and it's been raining almost every Sunday so a lot of people don't come to church. We'll just keep trying to get them to church, to stay once them come for all the meetings...and read their scriptures other days :) We've both been talking about how our missions have helped us want to magnify all our callings because we see how hard it is for others who make up the difference if you don't, or when nobody is there at all to do it and the church prog rams suffer and the edifying of the poeple suffers and we become disunified and disconnected and fall away from important truths that were once in our lives. Well, I'm about out of time so I guess I'll end there. I'm excited to go to Zone conference and maybe get more mail and to try to send off my letters to you -- they'll come I promise! Love Sister Landrum