So, what are we doing here, anyway?

Our call as 'Member & Leader Support' missionaries means several things, and sometimes I think we're just starting to learn what our job is!

We've been assigned by our mission president to assist in seven branches of the church here in this area.  The Urdaneta Mission covers, pretty much, the province of Pangasinan, with is about 2100 square miles.  The seven branches we serve are in the five towns of Manaoag, Mapandan, Mangaldan, San Jacinto, and San Fabian.  We attend Sunday meetings in two branches each week, and try to meet with branch leaders, also, to see what needs there are that we can help with.  Some of these leaders are fairly new to the church, themselves, and don't have the background that would help them in their callings.  (Remember, our church has a lay ministry - - unpaid and not professionally trained.)  We can provide training and support for these leaders.  Occasionally this is by specific assignment from our mission president, but more often it's at the request of local branch leaders, or maybe that we see a need and approach it.  We're also trying to promote more missionary work among the local members.  So, much of this part of our calling is kind of self-directed.

                                                            Our chapel at San Fabian. 

                                     Some chapels are smaller, like this one at San Jacinto.

I've also been asked to provide some music training.  About 10 women and girls in the branches had begun piano lessons with the senior missionaries here before us, and most of them have continued with me, and I've added a few new ones, too.  I'm certainly no great pianist, myself, but have enough knowledge to help these students, and it's fun.  Most of them have already completed the church's piano course and they learn hymns from the book, Hymns Made Easy, and some have moved on to Simplified Hymns, and they all play in Sacrament Meeting.  Before the senior missionaries started teaching piano lessons here, piano accompaniment in church meetings was pretty scarce and congregations just sang a capella.  So, while at home a pianist is usually pretty accomplished before accompanying in sacrament meeting, here in the Philippines, any level of skill is valued and utilized.

Another thing we've been asked to do is to secure and prepare housing for the new missionaries coming into the mission.  Well, we actually have four assignments involving apartments:

• First, we inspect missionary apartments in four 'zones,' quarterly.  This is to check not only on their housekeeping practices, but also to see if the places are in good repair and if there are any landlord issues.  Tony brings his tools along, because we're always finding faucets or light switches that need repair. 
• Secondly, we've been converting some 2-elder apartments to 4-sister apartments.  This sometimes requires some upgrades and moving in more furniture, etc.  (I'll tell you more about Filipino housing another day!) 
• Third, a few apartments have just proven to be too awful for our missionaries -- repeated flooding, leaky roofs, theft, electrical issues, unresponsive landlords -- and we're having to find better places for them.  This is done mostly by the missionaries and members by word of mouth (no craigslist here), but we have to check out the places they find and get them approved and take care of getting leases signed, etc.  
• Our fourth task is similar:  finding places in new areas where we'll be adding missionaries. With the increase in the number of new missionaries coming in, we've been busy with this, too.  We have new missionaries coming every six weeks, with a large increase in the number of sister missionaries, especially.  This is due to the lowering of the minimum age requirement a year ago.  (Young men can now serve a mission at age 18, rather than 19, and young women at age 19, rather than 21.)  So, these are exciting days in the mission field! 

                                        Getting ready for group photos at a transfer meeting.

Our four sister missionaries here in Manaoag:  Sisters Va'enuku (Tonga), Augustin (Utah), Bonifacio (Philippines), and Palmer (Utah).  Bonifacio and Palmer have now been transferred and replaced.

So, we are keeping very busy, but we are loving this life!  It's a good mix of spiritual and physical kinds of work.  Getting to work closely with all these young missionaries is great, and we love the Filipino people, too.  I love seeing new areas and each new (to us) apartment or house is remarkable in one way or another.  So much of what we see here makes us grateful for the comforts we've always been blessed with.  This is an incredible experience and we highly recommend it!

                                                   Sunset over the river near Dagupan

Manaoag

 Our entryway, complete with rosary . . . minus its cross.

Manaoag is the town we live in.  Actually, it's the name of the municipality we live in, which is something more like a county, with a town in the middle of it.  And we live in the middle of that town.  According to Wikipedia, Manaoag has a population of over 62,000.  The native language in this area is Ilokano, but everyone is taught Tagalog (Pilipino) and English in school, so we can communicate pretty well in English with most people here.  We're slowly trying to pick up a little more Tagalog as we go along, though.

Map:  https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Manaoag,+Region+I,+Philippines&hl=en&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=34.396866,77.607422&oq=manaoag&t=h&hnear=Manaoag,+Pangasinan,+Ilocos+Region,+Philippines&z=13

Manaoag (pronounced mah-NAH-wog) is a busy little place, and I'll try to post some video footage of it.  There are countless tiny businesses lining the main streets, many of them open-front stores each with a roll-down door - - think of a row of storage units with garage doors on them.  There are so many multiples of similar businesses, I wonder how they can make a go of it.  Seems like everyone sells phone cards, photocopies, filtered water, snacks and pop.

We were here a couple weeks before we discovered the actual public market, which is tucked away between some side streets.  Once we went in there, we marvelled at how extensive it is!  How had this been hidden from us?!  So many people with their produce, chickens, fish, rice, and other commodities laid out for sale on tables or on the floor, fans swishing to keep the flies away.  Some vendors are cooking and you can buy your lunch there if you want.  Some parts of the market are under a roof, but some are actually out on a street, with tarp awnings trying to cover the gap.  On rainy days, you have to choose your path carefully, to avoid the edges of those tarps.  Once I walked through with an umbrella and inadvertantly doused a young guy walking past, when the water pouring off a tarp was deflected by my umbrella.  Oops!  He just laughed.  It's so warm here that no one really minds getting wet.

There is a grocery store here, called Magic Market.  It's pretty small and we just go in there once in awhile.  (We do most of our shopping in a neighboring town.)  It's sure interesting to see what products they have that are familiar and those that aren't.  There are also a few fast food spots in Manaoag -- chains called Chow King, Sa Inasal (wow, I wonder if I'm spelling that right!  Google translates that to 'the wrongful conduct!'), and others.  And there's a 7-11!  There are, of course, other businesses of every kind, and professional services. 

Manaoag's claim to fame is Our Lady of Manaoag Catholic Church, with its shrine and its beautiful parklike grounds behind the church.  Tradition holds that Mary appeared to a young man here, and the name "Manaoag" actually is derived from the words meaning "she who calls."  Weekends are very busy with traffic visiting the shrine - - people make pilgrimages here - - and attending Mass, and it's a big day for vendors all around the church, selling candles, statues, and things to eat.  This is just a couple blocks from us, and on special days, such as Mary's birthday last Sunday, there's so much traffic on our little street that we have trouble getting out of our driveway.  Here's more info about the shrine, if you're interested.  It does have a 17th-Century ivory statue of Mary, though the existing church building is much newer.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Manaoag is the wikipedia article.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dh3OkCnd8Y shows some video footage.

Anywhere we go, we've found that most people are very friendly toward us.  There are very few white people/Americans here, so we're a novelty, for sure.  When we go walking or Tony goes running in the mornings, he gets a lot of "Hi, Joe!" from guys passing by (dating back to WWII days of "GI Joe.")  Otherwise, it's "Yes, ma'am" or "Good morning, sir" or "Hello po," denoting respect.  But, besides treating us like royalty, they are a very warm and friendly people.

Well, I've shot lots and lots of video footage of Manaoag and can't get it to load, for some reason.   Am very disappointed about that, but don't want to wait any longer to post this.  Hopefully, there will be more pics and video upcoming!

Our digs

Our new home is on Tiong Street in a town called Manaoag (pronounced like 'mah-NAH-wog').  It's very close to the center of town.
  
Our mission president had referred to our place as an 'apartment,' as he does all the missionaries' places, but we were pleased to find that ours is actually a little house, and a very pleasant one, at that.  We have a gate at the street, where we drive in, and another gate from the driveway into the yard.  (I should say that any property of any value here is surrounded by a wall with a locking gate.  It's not uncommon at all to see barbed wire on top of the wall, and all windows have grids on them.)  Our driveway comes past our landlord, Pablo's, house, which sits right in front of ours, so we actually have a little buffer from the street.  Behind us is some more property belonging to Pablo, with banana trees and another large tree overhanging our patio.  Every day we sweep up leaves, and we're told it sheds leaves all year, but it's such a pretty tree and provides a nice filter for the sunlight streaming in.  I'll have to find out what kind of tree it is.  Lots of little leaves . . .

Banana tree overhanging our truck

Our house is only about 11 feet wide, so our living room and our bedroom above it have windows on three sides.  Lots of light!  And the floors are white tile, so it's always clean and light inside, and with ample furniture.  Our kitchen is small, but there's another room attached, with our fridge, laundry-drying rack, and lots of storage.  We have a small 4-burner gas stove with an oven, a small double sink with a water filtration system on it (because the tap water here is contaminated), and -- oh, yes -- we have one temperature of water.  It's kind of tepid.  : )   Also a microwave, toaster, rice cooker, crockpot, blender, and a water cooler.  All these things, along with all our dishes and utensils, were provided by the mission.  Oh, and air conditioning!  Yay!!!  (Actually, there've been two missionary couples in this house before us, so they had all this stuff here for them.)  There's a bathroom on this floor, also, with a shower, but there's a little washing machine in the shower.

Outside the kitchen door, there's a sink in a tiled counter, where we'd probably be washing our clothes if we didn't have a washer.  I think most houses have such a spot for doing laundry.  And there's a clothesline outside, but it's too risky to use during the rainy season (now).  Actually, without a washer, we probably would've hired some help by now, which we may end up doing, anyway.  You can get a lady to come in a couple times a week for really cheap, and it does provide a job for someone.  It just kind of goes against the grain, to have someone come in and do what we've always done for ourselves, but we may still decide to do it.  We're having to iron a lot, since we don't have a dryer . . .  We'll see.

Upstairs are two small bedrooms, both with AC (here, they call it 'air con') and good closet space.  One is used as our office.  We have a good queen-sized bed in the other, which is the one thing I'd kind of worried about before we came.  It's not quite like home, but it's very comfortable.  : )   The upstairs bathroom ('CR,' for 'comfort room') has a good shower in it, and the mission has added a 'flash' water heater, which heats the water as you use it.  And we have another water filter on the bathroom sink faucet.

Everything but the bare bones of this house has been provided by the church.  When you rent a place here, it's really pretty bare.  This house does have kitchen cupboards; some don't.  The same with bedroom closets:  they're built-in in this house, not everywhere.  So we do appreciate our comfortable situation, and the more we see of other housing here, the more we appreciate what we have!  Our landlord has been really on the ball about any problems, so that's great, too.

Home, sweet home!

To Urdaneta July 19

On Friday morning, Brother Clem and his driver du jour picked us up at the Holiday Inn, loading all our luggage and groceries into the back of a minivan.  We dropped off Bro. Clem at the mission office once again, and inched and shoved our way through the Manila traffic one last time.

 Our only pic of Brother Clem Tigno, who was such a help to us in Manila

Eventually, we made it to an expressway and it was pretty clear sailing after that.  Soon we found ourselves in a rural setting and saw our first rice paddies and cattle.  We wondered what kind of cattle these were, all nearly white, with a hump between their shoulders.  Some were a much darker gray.

We also wondered how this trip to a city that is only about 110 miles north of Manila was going to take four hours, as we'd been told.  We were clipping right along and surely it couldn't take more than half that long!  And then, we got off the expressway and entered another world.

The rest of our trip was on a little two-lane highway, and it was nearly as nerve-wracking as Manila driving, though very different.  There were all kinds of vehicles on this road - - some cars, trucks, and busses, but also jeepneys, motorcycles, lots of motorcycles with sidecars (they're called trikes), and bicyles, with or without sidecars.  Needless to say, some of these are very slow, so our driver had to pass whenever he got a chance, and some of these 'chances' were a very tight fit!  So driving along this road was a lot of fast and slow, stop and go.  We would pass through a little town and it didn't seem to matter what time it was -- if we went by a school, there was a traffic jam.  The road was clogged with trikes, picking up kids or dropping them off.  And lots of kids walked, right along the shoulder of the busy road.

 Trikes

 A jeepney

 A family on their motorcycle

These small towns all seemed very cluttered to me, and busy, with countless tiny shops and businesses all along the street, with too, too many signs -- multiples, in many cases.  It seemed too much to take in.  As we rolled through town after town like this, it began to sink in . . . This is what it's going to be like!  Wherever we're going to live, it's probably going to look pretty much like this, with all this clutter and all this traffic and so many people.  Any notions I might've had of sleepy little farming towns pretty quickly evaporated.  We were most definitely not in Kansas anymore!

I thought many times that morning about Anna Leon-owens, who travelled to Siam in the 1800's to teach the many children of the king there, which is not all that far from the Philippines.  How very ill-suited her clothing must've been for the climate!  (Very glad we don't wear corsets these days!  I can't imagine!) 

Eventually, we drove into Urdaneta, which is a fairly good-sized city, with a few lanes of traffic on some streets, and a couple of traffic signals.  We pulled in to the driveway of the LDS church there, which was a sight for sore eyes - - nice, clean lines, clean grounds, a green lawn, a simple wall in front, and -- something new to us - - a basketball court in the parking lot.  (Our church buildings back home have a gym inside, with basketball.)  The mission office and mission home were behind the church building and we drove back there.

As we emerged from the car, a couple came out to greet us.  I knew this was not our mission president, from pictures we'd seen, but these were the Mortensens.  He is first counselor to our president, and she works in the office.  They gave us a warm welcome and after awhile, President Monahan and his wife arrived.  Both these couples, like ourselves, are retired and serving missions, though the Monahans are here for three years, as mission president.  They've been here a year already, and they'd lived in the Philippines years before, in the military.  President talked with us and told us we'd be living in Manaoag, not too far from Urdaneta, and would be assigned to seven branches in nearby towns.  Sister Monahan also talked with us, answering our questions and giving us advice as to shopping, sanitation and so on.

 
The Monahans drove us to Manaoag to see the house they had ready for us, which is really pretty cute.  Then they took us grocery shopping, out to dinner at Shakey's Pizza (!), and back to the office where we picked up the vehicle we'd be using for the next couple years, a Ford Ranger pickup with a canopy.  We then found our way back to Manaoag, to our own little house.  : )
M.A.