We decided to use the church's Christmas initiative "Light The World" in order to spread the Christmas spirit

Us and the Ramos family

Transfer announcements were just two days ago, and it turns out I will be staying here in Masbate for the Christmas season! That's a really good thing because I don't wanna spend my Christmas in a brand new area, that's no fun. Anyways, these past two weeks we have really been spending most of our time teaching our investigators that have a date set for their baptism and setting up for our Christmas activity that we had yesterday. So more than a month ago we suggested to the branch leaders that we were going to set up a missionary activity on November 26, and since then we have been trying our hardest to get the members involved in the planning and preparing, but no one moved an inch when we tried to make an activity. That means that this past week, Elder Del Pilar and I have been trying to set EVERYTHING up for the branch activity. Needless to say, it was a very exhausting week, but we held the activity yesterday, and it was pretty successful.

This was our activity: We decided to use the church's Christmas initiative "Light The World" in order to spread the Christmas spirit. The church released 25 different videos that relate to each day leading up to Christmas, showing us different ways to serve one another on the days until the 25th of December. Our idea was to put up a huge projector screen in the middle of an area where tons of people walk by as a type of advertisement for the "Light the World" initiative. We invited all of the Branch members and we gave them a stack of 300 different handouts to give to people who stopped to watch the videos. Filipinos are a very curious people, so many people stopped by to watch, and by the end of the night, all 300 of our handouts had been given out to people. Not only that but we got the numbers of some people who want us to visit them in their homes and teach them! So I think it was a pretty successful activity.

Sorry, I spent most of my time today emailing my family individually, so my mass email is pretty short. But I'll send some good pictures!

Elder Austin Cook

 District activity. We just put all of the food on a banana leaf & eat it w/our hands

The mama lamb chased him around after this because he took her baby

This dogs name is whitey. He's absolutely disgusting and pitiful,
but he leaves outside of our apartment and always follows us when
 we go outside. Figured I'd take a quick picture with him before he bites the dust.
Yes we do feed him mama!