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.