Mangoes

I really like eating mangoes here. There are three different types of mangoes here. The Orange ones: these are always sweet and normal sized. They are good but they lack the little bit of sour that we are used to in mangoes back home.

The Yellow ones: these are a lot closer to the yellow mangoes you find in America. They can be either sweet or sour, and grow a little larger than the orange ones. They are normally my favorite and they tend to get very big here.

And the Green ones. These are the unripe mangoes. A lot of people like to eat these with vinegar and salt. They are normally very sour, but sometimes have sweet parts (depending on how ripe they actually are). I normally don’t buy this kind of mango; they arent as good as they other kind – but they are a lot cheaper.

Mangoes are normally somewhere between 30-60 pesos for a kilo. If you are counting back home, this equates to about 30-60 cents a pound – which, from what I remember about the cost of mangoes, that is pretty dang good. They also happen to be better than most of the mangoes I have had back home.

The Filipinos also have different ways of cutting and eating the mango, depending on what tools they have to cut and how ripe the mango is. Just recently, I have been buying a lot of mangoes because the price went down very low. They normally measure by the half kilo. I got around 9 good sized mangoes for around 3 American dollars.

       

Welp, I should probably stop talking about fruit. In the missionary work, we have three baptisms this week. Charito, Mariel, and Nino. They are all pretty prepared and we have been teaching them for quite a while. We are working on making sure that they are prepared to continue to go to church and keep the covenants they will making. Even if someone is prepared for baptism, they don’t usually understand how important that action is in their lives. Other than those three, we may have a few more people ready to be baptized soon. We are working on helping members interact with those we teach so that they will continue to go to church.

       

With three of our people getting baptized, we are also finding a decent amount. We still have a number of people to teach every week, but we need to keep going so we can find those that are ready to hear our message. We have been doing splits with the ward a decent amount, so we may have a lot of progression soon. Splits are when the missionaries break apart to each work with a member of the ward. This is important, as it allows us to work at twice as many appointments and visit twice as many families in the ward.

       

I am learning a lot about Filipino Culture right now and how you need to talk to Filipinos.

        

Culture: Basketball: everyone plays here. They often take it very seriously as well.

Filipino rules:

If there only one ball, and you are not playing a game (everyone is just taking shots), when someone shoots they get two shots.

You always give it back to them after the first shot.

If you do not comply with this rule, they are not happy at all.

         

Tagalesson: I was going to do a lesson on words for playing basketball with Filipinos, but I don’t really like basketball. So I scrapped that idea. Basically we are gonna have 2 cultural lessons this week, and nothing about the language.

Harvesting fruit: Most of the fruit that grows out of reach can be gotten with very long sticks. You get a very long stick made out of bamboo and a net at the end, hold the stick up, and scoop the fruit into the net. I have done this a few times to get the mangoes out of the tree. You can do this almost anywhere. Some people harvest the mangoes and other fruit to sell at the market. Most of the time, people get really lazy and don’t even wait until the fruit is ripe. They eat the unripe fruit! I guess they are okay with it.

Welp, I didn’t take any pictures this week – but I have another of that kitten from last week.

Anyways the work is good here.

I hope that you are all having a good week and enriching experiences without me. Keep on keeping on.

Love,

Elder Faulkner