Manila Mission: Some draught relief

It finally rained! We have gone several months without any measurable rainfall and finally this week we had a couple of gully-washers! It actually cooled our 100 degree temperatures down at least temporarily. More rain is forecast for this coming week and we sure need it. The rainy season doesn’t officially begin until June but this little head start is welcome.

We had a pretty typical week with visits to less-active members, tutoring, meetings with our Zone and so on. Wednesday we went to Makati for a meeting with the Mission Presidency. We didn’t get home until after 11:00 p.m. so was a long day for us. Our Zone choir is getting ready to sing at Zone Conference on Thursday. We wrote some new words to “Mother, I love you” from the Children’s Songbook. Sister Howard hopefully will be surprised and pleased when we sing to her. We’re on rat #4 during the past 2 weeks. Our back porch is surrounded by fields that are full of miscellaneous crud and vermin. The roof has a gap of several inches between it and the walls so they don’t have to work very hard to get in. There are also assorted holes in the floor and walls. Elder Smith has patched most of them and is always on the lookout for more. These guys are just wimpy, regular sized rats. They’re nothing like the Godzilla rat we had when we first got here last year. (Thank goodness.) We started off the month of May with a baptism in Trece. The projections for the month are looking very good. Our Zone is so awesome and works so hard. We’re really proud of them.

Another new month and new fruit! This time it is Buko. We realize that you all recognize coconut when you see one but buko is the green coconut. It is full of milk and gooey, chewy coconut meat. Once it matures it turns brown and the milk pretty much goes away and the meat portion is much thicker. They are a very popular drink here. There are also buko pies, buko shakes, buko smoothies, buko salads and about any thing else you can think of. The buko in the picture has the top trimmed so a straw can be inserted to drink out the milk. At the palanke the buko is P15 each or about $0.30 each.