Interesting things

Fender Bender not far from our office.

Yesterday I thought it was the worst day ever. Too many stresses and not getting things done the way I had thought.

The new couple, the Bell's opted to take the apartment that the Ayres had when they were here. It is a nice place so I think they will be comfortable. I found out this morning from Sister Wright who had recently left here a few months ago that her landlady in Eastwood told her that the brokers for apartments there were tacking another php5,000 pesos to the asking price for themselves. I shouldn't be surprised but still I am disappointed. Well, it is what it is. But hey....the Bell's are fine and enthusiastic to work. Glad of that.

In speaking with the Goss's from Public Affairs we learned that another couple, The Birds will be joining them here soon. So there will be two missionary couples in the same small office. Leni Pilobello is the church employee there and she has been sick with ovarian cancer and undergoing chemotherapy. She has lost quite a lot of weight now weighing under 100 lbs. Leni feels encouraged that the chemo is working and that she has good doctors. She is responding well and her spirits are up. In the Public Affairs office there is also a temporary employee to help Leni with the Jubilee Celebration coming up in April. PA office is loaded with work for the Jubilee.

We here in Security have the responsibility of overseeing the security for the Cultural celebration along with the rehearsal which is February 26th. We have our SO Peter Negrido from our staff on the committee.

Elder B is also very involved in the MTC security camera and proximity cards for the MTC expansion. So far it has not been easy, I am sorry to say. We can only hope that it gets better.

Our hearts are pretty heavy right now and we hope things get better. We did have reason to laugh a bit this morning. As you know the traffic here is absolutely nuts..... I was thinking about this yesterday as I took a walk to Rustans a small grocery store not far from here. All of a sudden I heard a crunch and looked to the street and saw a small collision. First time I had ever witnessed one. I gasped. The Filipino people never go too fast just don't use rules or make good judgements so you really have to be alert to make sure this doesn't happen to you. I took a picture of the fender bender. You will see that they have departed from their cars and they are all angry and within a few minutes they are yelling at each other. Most people do not carry insurance on their cars. If they did they would just exchange the insurance information and be off. Well it was quite a display of angry emotions and like all people everywhere...there is an audience. Even passerby's decided to stop, sit and watch. Funny today but not yesterday. I got away as fast as I could.

As I posted yesterday, our S.O. Ryan and his wife suffered a loss of a child. At five months gestation she lived only 3 hours. We felt so bad. On the other hand there was a healthy baby girl named Abish (Biblical name) born to another of our officer's wife on January 28th. I wrote to him by email and congratulated him on the birth of his daughter. He wrote back and said, "Thank you and thank you for all the opportunities that THOU has given us." I thought, oh he has mixed up his English a bit and I decided to ignore it. By this morning as I was thinking back on it somehow found it pretty funny and had to share it with Elder. We both chuckled. We mean no disrespect as we really love our staff members. We found humor today when we could not find it yesterday.

Also, the supervisor of our staff, Jess Batoon has been in court the last few days pressing charges on those teenagers that had accosted him back in November. Jess was pretty well beat up and traumatized on this act of violence that had no provocation at all. There were 8 young men all drunk that malled him and nearly broke his fingers, toes and did damage to his leg. There was a hearing some months back right after it happened and the main offender said that he would rather spend time in jail than pay the medical bills. We will see Jess tomorrow and see what the outcome of that is.

A couple of weeks ago we sent two of our staff to Naga to investigate some burglaries and a break-in into an Elder's apartment. The suspect was known and has been known for awhile. He is a member who knew where things were and how to get in. Our officers got a report and enough information for an arrest. We found out yesterday that the Church has found it necessary to prosecute as the suspect had multiple charges against him. Here in the Philippines too many of these cases just get dropped and not followed through. Well....remember its a third world country and there is corruption and retaliation and sometimes people are just too scared to do anything. In this case it is now a formal case and the guilty is going to be prosecuted. Often the church will let something go so that other members are safe. But in this case the perpetrator is continuing his crimes and it is felt that justice must be done.

We don't watch TV here. We could but we opted not to so the Superbowl was not in our faces. However we did see the commercials from the Superbowl on line and had to chuckle at a few of them. The funniest one I saw was the kid dressed up as Darth Vader. Classic. We laughed about that this morning as we got ready to go to work. Needed the laugh.

Stay tuned.

Well, I am back. I had two church Filipino employees here needing their proximity cards reactivated into the places they needed to go. We had audited the cards and if we found that the holders did not come into the office that much I deactivated the cards. So when these two came they found that their cards did not work. I reprogrammed the cards as the holders come in every three months for their business in Welfare. While we were talking they asked me..."If there are incidents should we report them to you?" I said yes and that has not always happened. The church will just pay for the repairs on chapels where things have been stolen, such as copper wiring, electronics, door handles and even levers to the toilets. The philosophy is that if there is a possibility that a suspect becomes known then there would be retaliation on some of the members. Not worth it. So its "Play the game". Just as mentioned above. The brothers I spoke to and relayed this information knew exactly what I was talking about. Sad but true.