I AM SO DANG THANKFUL

Hey all you party people I hope you had an amazing thanksgiving and spent time with all of your loved ones and ate lots of food and watched the annual dog show after the parade!  Even though I didn't get the opportunity to do those things, I really want to express my gratitude for this opportunity that I have to serve and help others learn how important it is to show our gratitude to everything that God gives us every single day.

As far as how my week went, it's been really busy this week in the office with preparing for transfers and missionary interviews...

Here is a picture of the family home evening we had at the Matias family residence.  Notice Sister Andrada's face on the far right.  She's crazy.

Have a good week love y'all.  Sorry my email was so short, not too much happened that i'd like to fill all of you in on.

(ALSO I'd like to congratulate my my cousins Jordan and Alex for having their new baby boy Mac this week!  Can't wait to meet him one day) 

--

ELDE

​​

R BURDEOS

"

​ I'd like to bury my testimony​ 

"

2016 - 2018

PHILIPPINES MANILA MISSION

Sara Got Baptized

Can't remember much from what happened this week but I just remember it being a blast and a half.  I'll just explain what happened through pictures.  :)

One of the investigators in our area, Sara, had her baptism on Saturday.  Since there are a lot of people in this picture and you might not be able to tell which one Sara is I drew this visual help in the picture below.  

Sara is amazing and it's been such an incredible experience to see her willingness to follow Jesus Christ and the light in her eyes after her baptism.  She is going to be such a great addition to this ward and they already love her. That's her in the yellow behind me.  She's awesome.

I met the Walmart versions of the Justice League while walking to the area one day.

We celebrated my gwapo companion's un-birthday today.  He won't be here for his actual birthday so we celebrated it ahead of time. 

This week was so much fun and our area is really starting to pick up.  That's all I have to say for this week.  Love you.

Elder Burdeos

PICTURES FROM CORON

1. We pulled the car over because there was a nice view of the ocean.

2. Squad

3. Elder McCauley and I next to Coron's baptismal font

4. Squad pt. 2

5. This is what yards look like

6. When flying into Coron we saw this cool whale shaped island

7. Some of our investigators from the night who ended up attending church the next day 

8. "  "

HOLY KWAN (feat. Coron)

HOLY KWAN.  This week was the best week of my whole mission... It was insane.  I'm just going to give you the rundown of what happened this week!  Sorry if it ends up being SUPER long.  

Tuesday:  HAPPY HALLOWEEN I woke up and my thumb was super swollen so we are still trying to find what i'm allergic to...  We zoomed to the office today incredibly fast because there is a holiday here in the Philippines called the Non-working day which is exactly what it sounds like.  No traffic and one very happy Elder Burdeos.  The kids here are so funny, they were all trick of treating and instead of asking for money they would ask for 5 pesos.  Smart kids.  A pretty cool tradition that they have here in the Philippines is called "All Soul's Day"  where tons of people spend the night in a cemetery and it's basically the fourth of July in a cemetery with no fireworks... If that makes any sense.  Lucky for us, the cemetery just happens to be in our area!!  We headed over there and talked to some really cool people.

Wednesday:  Today we walked 2 HOURS to the cemetery... For Papa John's Pizza.  It was a super rare occasion and I regret nothing.  

Friday:  Friday was crazy.  We woke up early at the mission home because they were going to have a conference there.  After the conference we came back and ate Shakey's with some friends in the mission and that was tight.  On the way home I got pulled over FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME IN MY DRIVING HISTORY.  It was because I had accidentally crossed a yellow line which I was unaware about.  The cop was so set on giving me a ticket so I did what I always do to be innocent here and I ENGLISHED HIS FACE OFF.  Filipinos love it when you compliment their English so I just explained how i'm a foreigner and i'm not used to the driving and after 30 minutes I convinced him to let me go with no ticket or 2000 peso fee.  I was way happy and thankful for that tender mercy hahaha!

Saturday:  CORON DAY!!  We got up bright and early and rushed to the airport.  We basically flew to the airport and got there in less than 10 minutes and hustled to catch our flight.  Turns out that our flight got delayed anyways and we were 2 hours early... I didn't mind though we met some way nice people at the airport and that gave us a little time to practice talking to people and sharing our message.  

We got on our flight which was an hour and a half but felt like a solid 15 minutes.  Flying into Coron was like flying into Jurassic Park and maybe even more beautiful.  We landed and picked up our mission car from the airport and headed on a two hour drive to get to the chapel.  The drive was a pleasant experience though because the only traffic that we had to worry about were chickens and stray dogs.  When we arrived in the Elder's area we were able to arrange exchanges to work for the rest of the day.  We worked in the northern part of the island in a place called Busuanga.  It's an amazing place.  I walked up to the very first door to tract and before I said a word they invited us to come in and we were able to share a little message with them.  We spent all of our time that night on one street because the people kept letting us in and were open to our message.  Each time was just a little testimony builder to me that the Lord really does prepare people to hear this message, and the people in that area are really the Lord's chosen.  At the end of the night we found a little Japanese type restaurant (you know, one of the ones where you sit on the floor and eat with chopsticks) and we had sushi.  It was a good night.

Sunday:  This was a pretty challenging day because we had to find out how we were going to get all of the investigators to sacrament meeting while at the same time we had to make sure that there would actually be a sacrament meeting.  The sacrament meeting took place in a small pavilion on the side of a shaded outdoor basketball court.  We were constantly running back and forth escort people in while bringing equipment to the sacrament from the Elder's apartment.  After a pretty hectic morning we had a pretty good turnout of 45 people at sacrament!!  That was a giant step from the 3 that they had in attendance last week!  It was an amazing experience and it baffles me to think about the amount of faith that each and every one of them must have had to attend a meeting of a church that they have never heard of upon invitation from some random little boys wearing ties.  During the meeting we were actually able to get some investigators to come up and share their feelings since it was fasting testimony meeting.  There is so much potential there and you could feel the spirit so strongly just knowing that Zion is gradually strengthening and this is only the beginning. 

 

​After this week you could say that I am in love with my mission and being a missionary... 

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

Kamusta na kayo? Happy Halloween!!!!! If any of you have any sick costumes be sure to send them to me I would love to see them. Turns out they celebrate Halloween here in the Philippines and you get really cute little kids giving you high fives on the streets while you're trying to baptize their parents :))) Tuesday: Here in the Philippines they have what's called "coding". It means that if your license plate ends in a certain number, you are not allowed to drive for a specific day of the week from 7am- 8pm. Pretty weird but it helps the traffic out a ton. So we forgot our vehicle was coding and woke up late so we ended up walking to the office and to the area which was a total of about 3 hours hahaha. Wednesday: The assistants forgot to switch our van out so we had to walk to the office again and it was even better the second time. Thursday: We ran to the LTO in the Quezon City mission with some missionaries to go pick up their licenses. I ended up seeing one of my companions from the MTC, Elder Casares!! He was very friendly and even though we didn't quite get along in the MTC I realized that I missed him and it was nice to catch up with him. We waited at the LTO for like 4 hours just sitting there then when we left we got a call from the assistants that we needed to move out of the house due to some emergency transfers and housing problems. So we are currently homeless... Not really, we're actually staying at the mission home right now with the Assistants, air conditioning, and heated showers. Homeless has never felt so good. Friday: I went on exchanges with one of my best friends in the mission, Elder Fiesta. He's one of the assistants and he was one of my first friends back in my first area haha. I learned a lot from teaching lessons with him. Something that I would really like to try to improve in my teaching is listening with love to those we teach. Also Elder Asay called us and told us that a couple of the investigators that we taught in our area was interviewed and being baptized so that was exciting!

Front row seats to the car show here

Elder Casares (My MTC companion) and I at the LTO

Best license plate ever

 So as you can tell this week has been a great learning experience for me and I've learned to just go with the flow and if I have a positive attitude about all the trials and hardships that i'm going through right now, the Lord will provide a way for everything to work out, 100% of the time. FUN NEWS: PRESIDENT WILL BE SENDING THE OFFICE ELDERS AND ASSISTANTS TO CORON ON SATURDAY SO THAT WE CAN HELP THE ELDERS DOWN THERE GET THEIR WARD STARTED IN A NEW AREA. I'M SO EXCITED, MY PICTURES NEXT WEEK ARE GOING TO BE SO COOL SO STAY TUNED. BIRTHDAY SHOUTOUT TO MY BIG SISTER ALYSSA!!! Have an amazing week AND A REAL SPOOPY HALLOWEEN!

 -- ELDER BURDEOS
"IT'S BOUT TO GET REAL SPOOPY IN HERE" ​
 The Church of​ ​ ​ ​Jesus Christ​ ​ ​​ of Latter-day Saints​
2016 - 2018 PHILIPPINES MANILA MISSION

Transfer Week and Cole Sprouse

There he is in all his glory.

So much happened this week yet I don't want to go into detail with it.  This week was transfer week which was one of the craziest weeks I have ever experienced.  

Monday:  We went to the area office by riding the MRT (The Filipino Trax).  We picked up the rental car we would be using and on the way back we found giant billboards of Cole Sprouse.  The Robles Family, one of the families in our ward, treated us out to Shakey's Pizza! 

Tuesday:  We spent the day with the departing missionaries, weighing their luggages and taking them to the hotel that they would be staying at for the night.  It was pretty fun because we were with Elder McCauley and Fiesta, the assistants, and it was like an all day adventure.  We picked up the departing missionaries from the mission home and drove them to the Mall of Asia to their hotel.  Of course we ran into another problem and there was a miscommunication between the church and the hotel so we had NO rooms for the departing missionaries.  Turns out the Quezon City North mission had the same thing happen to them so we all just sat in the hotel lobby for like 2 and a half hours.  It felt like it was so late but it was like 11:00 which is about the time I would be leaving the house to go hang out with friends before my mission hahaha.  So we just sat there waiting for some miracle... and it came!  The hotel supervisor comes down and says he "cancelled reservations" (Whatever that means) and they now had 14 available rooms!!  Such a tender mercy.  One of the Elders forgot his stuff at the office so we had to drive back to the office and then back to the hotel again.  We got home at 1:30am.

Wednesday:  We got up at 4am to head to the MTC and pick up the new missionaries.  They were chill and polynesian and stuff.  The Americans went through some problems with their fingerprinting so they were unable to come with us in the morning and we had to hold two in-field orientation meetings.  We drove back and forth from the mission home to the mission office all day and that's all I want to say about that.

Those two days were probably the most stressful and the rest of the week was just fun.  Other cool things we did this week:  

- We watched "How to Train your Dragon 2" for my first time at the mission home on P-Day

- The Filipino greeter from Walmart on 13400 S. walked into the mission office one day and I just about lost it.  What are the odds.

- My Aunt hooked it up with another package at the office

Yeah this week was sick.  i'm loving it here.  

These are the two assistants, the one on the left of me is Elder Zesiger and he went home.  He was the missionary who picked me up from the MTC and i'm the one who took him to the hotel to go home hahaha.  ​

​This is Elder Lopez and he was one of my favorite missionaries in the mission.  He also went home.  By the way these pictures were taken in the hotel lobby while we were waiting there for hours.​

ELDER FAWSON.  He sits at 6'9" and he was a super humble and hard working Elder.  He will be missed.

Love you all have a good week long live Cole Sprouse

Elder Burdeos​

The Office Season 10 (feat. Elder Burdeos)

So much change in so little time.  I got a call on Thursday night from President Fermanis saying that he wants me as an Office Elder in the mission office and that i'll be replacing good ol' Elder Webster.  I had a lot of mixed feelings about that call because of reasons such as:

1. I won't have the chance to finish training Elder Asay or see any of the baptisms that we had set up for the area.
2. Elder Webster (The Elder i'll be replacing) has been in the office for the last 15 months so replacing him would be like when Will Ferrell tried to replace Steve Carrell on "The Office"... A disaster
3. And of course the worst one:  I HAVE TO DRIVE IN CENTRAL MANILA.

So there were some downsides to being called to the office but I learned shortly after that being an office Elder is tight.  We get to do all of the behind the scenes work with helping with transfers and stuff you never take into account when you think about missionary work such as housing, supplies, finances, and mission documentation.  Doesn't sound too fun and it didn't to me at first but now i'm loving it and i'm so grateful for the opportunity that I have to serve here.  

    As Far as the new area goes, it's looking pretty promising so far.  On my first night in the area we met with one of their recent converts, Clair.  Clair has one of the strongest testimonies and it is so powerful to hear her bear it while we teach her.  She hasn't exactly had a break from her problems in a while, she went on about how there are a lot of trials in her life right now like not having any electricity in her house, the city hall losing her health card, and taking her youngest daughter to the doctor after getting hurt outside and stuff like that.  After hearing her problems I would imaging she would be a little frustrated but after explaining everything to us she turned to us and said, "But Elders, I have God and we're going to be okay".  It was pretty powerful and you can tell the spirit has really found a way into her heart.  

Our Zone went to the Manila Zoo this last P-Day.  I give it a solid 8.0/10

I drove for the first time on Thursday and I absolutely hated it :')))

Keep us in your prayers hahaha love you all have an amazing week!

Elder Burdeos