BIG spiders and zombie dogs

this was a good week we played basketball with the bishop, and on saturday i baptized a boy named jon jon and my kauban baptized kyle  we have lots of people close to baptism. it was awesome to baptize someone and now we are pretty good friends with his family and teaching his brother and sister. we also are teaching the torib family they are cool. two of them are keeping commitment and progressing but there are like 20 of them so its hard to talk with all of them. they are really funny. i am teaching little bits of the lessons so that is fun!  we taught family home evening sunday night to lots of people and that was awesome too. we bore testimony in sacrament in cebuano that was a cool thing for me and im getting more confortable talking to people. we helped a lady skin her kamote for dinner and a lot of people didnt want to talk to us.  but we got to teach lots and testify to lots of people on the streets. we also found someone who seemed like hes good and wants the gospel we gave him a basahon ni mormon. also the other night we were going by candle light. when we blew the candles out it was spooky and then we heard lots of spooky sounds but we made it through the night and wont be using those candles anymore. we also have lots of massive spider and cockroaches that come in the mornings the spiders decapitate the cockroaches. also a temple was announced her on negros like an hour from me but its in the other mission. at night tons of hermit crabs come out and we like to catch them. also last night we were walking home from a lesson in the dark through some rice and sugar cane fields and a million frogs came out and we worried that we would step on them then i found a coconut and ripped it open and found out the milk inside was rotten so i smelled like rotten coconut for the rest of the night. i love seeing all the animals here on the trails there are goats cows carabao dogs and roosters. there is a wild dog named tupac that lives outside our house that follows us out of the village thing every morning. we havent watched general conference yet but i cant wait hopefully i will understand some of it in cebuano. i love you all!! bye bye 

pictures!!

 The well in our backyard where we pump water for our bucket showers, my bathroom with my bucket shower

a nativity scene we found in a box covered in spiderwebs 

the biggest spider we've found in our house so far

We ran the port

this has been a crazy week! we ate lots of good mtc food and left for the field. On tuesday i ate 5 sili peppers and threw up after the 4th one because my body rejected the capsaicin. then later that night i ate 3 balut! balut is like a duck egg that is somewhat matured then boiled. they weren't too bad. we woke up at like 1 and flew to cebu then we stayed in a hotel and talked to our mission president and he was awesome we did a ton of orientations. and got tons of medicine and stuff. then we went to the cebu temple and it was super cool. after we met our trainers and did more orientations. my trainer is elder brisolara, he's american from Oklahoma he is awesome. we got 72 hour kits and finally left for our area at like 3. we rode this old bus without doors and wooden ouchie seats until like 6:30 and the last boat left the dock at 7. so we had to hurry to get the tickets and stuff then we made it but the sisters were gone so we ran to find them and got on the boat at like 6:58 but it all worked out. then a senior couple drove us to an old mission house that was empty where we stayed the night. then we traveled the rest of the way to our area this morning. we are in a super cute place with lots of bukid like mountains and farms. we also are like right on the beach almost. there are a ton of dogs and chickens and goats and water buffalo here. its awesome. the Lord knows us and where we should go. everything will work out if you put your trust in him. it has for me so far! also this morning i showered in a bucket so that was fun! and they don't have toilet paper here. any i know that Jesus knows all of us and will help us out. i love you all bye bye.

(Koby is serving in Toboso near Escalante on the island of Negros. It's more of a rural area, you take a rocky dirt road to get to his house, he said his house is nice and has actual beds in it.)

we went time travelling.

this week seemed like it flew. we just packed and got ready to leave did a departure devotional 
and spent all the money left on my card so i would have snacks for the plane. it was sad to leave 
everyone in provo because we had become pretty close with the fijians and cantonese people 
in our residence. but then we left for the airport. it was weird to go through lehi and see everything out the window of 
the front runner. 
     the whole time we were travelling no one knew what we were doing so that was sort of 
stressful. we flew to san francisco and then after a  5 hour layover there we went to south korea
which was a 14 hour flight. i fell asleep right when i got on the plane and didnt wake up until 
10 hours later when they gave us eggs for breakfast. it was crazy because when i woke up 
suddenly it was wednesday. i missed dinner so that was sad. on the plane they gave us slippers 
and no one spoke english. we stayed in south korea for 3 hours. while we were in korea we all 
tried a bidea  which was really weird and uncomfortable. it made me think of the japanese
missionaries at provo, good luck. when we flew to manila everything was in korean again and 
it seemed like a really long flight but it was only 3 hours. 
    the first thing i thought of when i got to manila was the safety zone video with the electric 
wires. we drove to the mtc. then we had a snack and some good presentations about how 
amazing the philippines are. this mtc is so much smaller than provo we  talked with the mtc 
president about blankets and irons so its much more personal here. im in a trio, and the food 
here is like real food and they make it right in front of us. we also have nice big rooms here with 
bathrooms and showers inside them! everyone here speaks tagolog so i never know what anyone 
is saying. its super humid here and hot and rainy but its nice. yesterday i did abs and missed 
cross country i don't think i can run here in the mtc but maybe in the field. i love you all and 
im excited to be in the philippines! also i slept from 7:30 to 6:00 the first night we were here so 
that was nice. bye bye! i'll take pictures hopefully next week. 

also i forgot to say we met elder Gong at the salt lake airport and took a picture. i don't know where that
picture went though.

I'm going to the mtc

Hello everyone! This week on monday I'm leaving to go to the Manila mtc so it will be sad to leave all my friends and family here again but awesome to do something new! Also most of the people I've met are coming with me to Manila. This week was pretty good I hosted on Wednesday and saw elder Harris but didn't host him. And we just keep practicing the language and how to teach. There are a lot of filipinos here and everytime we see them it's fun to try to talk to them. I learned how to say I'm fluent so now I can tell people that. It is crazy because I feel like I can't speak much then we get into a lesson And words just come to you in very broken cebuano. The spirit is awesome and the gift of tongues is real. Someone told us that when they needed to speak they found the words and when it wasn't important they didn't. And I can see how that is true. The gospel is true i love you all. My favorite cebuano word is karnero. Nakasaka ang mga karnero sa bukid. Karnero is sheep. Bye bye! 

1 more week!

 The mtc has been really fun and good. But I also would like to leave. On Friday we watched president Nelson's birthday celebration and it was pretty cool but It was long and made us all late for curfew. Elder Stevenson came to speak to us and we tried to do an english fast. It was cool and kind of hard. I was pretty quiet. Nothing really exciting happened this week except we skyped with a Filipino to practice teaching them. Everything is sort of mixing together here, this week might have been One of the more boring weeks we didn't do anything new or out of the ordinary. We keep going to lots of class and doing the same things everyday. We have had some really good classes and discussions this week, I made an analogy, we were talking about opposition in all things then we started talking about the story where there are two fish and the old fish is like hows the water? And they are like what is water? And I couldn't stop thinking about the cookies and chocolate milk I eat everyday. If you eat a cookie then drink chocolate milk then the chocolate milk doesn't taste sweet.  So I have been eating chocolate chip cookies my  whole life but if i eat something salty the the chocolate milk tastes good again. So in order to get the different salty perspective we need to do service so we can be in others shoes. 

    Class is better than it used to be now that we aren't just memorizing phrases. A ton of people showed up at the MTc this week so that's fun to say hi to everyone. Sorry none of my pictures sent last week I'll try resending them but I think my email is broken.

hiligayonon inheritance

Bula mga amigo, this week we had fast sunday and it seemed really long cause we had an extra hour and a half of meetings. One of my cebuano teachers proposed to his girlfriend, and we had a good devotional about growth mindsets. I also planted an avocado seed in my room. On Monday we hosted the senior missionaries and that was fun and cool. It was nice to do something different.

On Tuesday a district of people going to the Philippines mission right above mine on the map, speaking hiligayonon left and gave us a bunch of stuff the last cebuano people gave them. Some of the cooler things they gave us were a potted plant named hili and a monkey.

We were teaching a returned missionary about charity in cebuano yesterday. And the word for charity is gugma nga putli, and the word for chastity is kaputli. So our whole lesson he misheard us and he was talking about chastity while we were talking about charity. We didn't realize until we asked him to follow christ's example and be charitable. It was hilarious the whole time I was wondering why he was talking about sexual sins when we asked about how christ showed charity and he talked about respecting Mary magdalene we were all a little confused. my kauban and I just thought we were mishearing or something. He was really fun and it was still a good experience and I think he still was edified by our lesson. Anyway I love you all! Amping!!

Pictures:

4 Hili,  the flowers smell spicy when they fall off

3  my avocado, I thought I was a genius with my bottle setup

2 two oak trees I found outside

1 the monkey we received hanging on a banana that I am ripening.

i dont know how to grow acorns

bula everybody! that is hello is Fijian. Since being here my Chinese has improved quite a bit. i can now say hello, goodbye, thank you, how are you, im very good, what is your name, and i dont know. my Cebuano on the other hand has improved even more! i have a lot of things memorized and can make up short grammatically incorrect sentences, but we are starting grammar today so that is good. i also have the missionary purpose, the first vision and the baptismal invitation memorized. So I'm pretty much quadlingual. 

My mood at the mtc goes from trying to gain weight to feeling fat and sick. im getting better at bolibol probably but worse at running. i started planking in between games of kings court volleyball. and this elder who lives next door to me showed me his hand stand workout so i can start doing that. 

last week some elders going to Fiji moved in next to me and so we are friends now. they get to wear lava lava's so im jealous of that. i feel like i should wear one too. also the b in the Fijian alphabet has an m sound to it like a mb in thuMB. 

my Acorns look like they might have started splinting open so that might be good or not i change the water every once in a while and let them sit with no water sometimes. they dont smell really really bad yet. but if anyone knows how to grow acorns please help.

Yesterday we had our first TRC i dont remember what that stands for but we taught a member from here that knows Cebuano in Cebuano. it was really cool to speak the language and practice teaching someone we dont know. i love you all!  sorry i dont have many pictures nothing super interesting happened to take a picture of. But these are my acorns. Bye