Elder Mendez is awesome and I have learned so much from him in just these few weeks... not even 2 weeks yet. He is such a stud and has only been a member for 2 years! Yeah, 2 years and he has such a strong testimony and he teaches like he has known the gospel all of his life. I am very lucky to have him as my companion! This is Elder Mendez’s 3rd transfer here and people also love our name combination or the DEZ part of our names… haha! Some new things that we do in this area are pretty much cook every meal!!! Yeah, I was so stoked to hear that from him, so we pretty much cook together and I have learned some new tasty dishes. And of course we have our bad cooking days like earlier this morning... haha we woke up early to cook for our activity later today and we played with the Bicol Express recipe. The sabow (sauce?) was not that great but the meat was pretty good. We are teaching quite a few people but the problem in this area is that it is pretty spread out…so we have to be very organized and on time. I feel we are always on a jeep or trike and most of our money or a lot of it at least is going to transportation. People are still very receptive even more so compared to my last area. There are rich areas but there are still many of the poor areas - but it is more middle class here. One problem we have is getting people to church. Most if not all need a jeep or some way to get to church though the means of money. So we have some goals regarding that and the reason many of our members are not going to church is because of the high transportation cost. We really need to strengthen the importance of faith and of church attendance itself. Just the importance of the sacrament is key. That is why all members go to church is because we participate in such a sacred ordinance every week. Also helping less active members is a big part of our mission focus right now. My next temple trip I think is on November 28th or around there. I want to say the temple is about a 1 ½ hour trip to get there. Not to bad. But I’m way excited to go! Arnold was baptized on Sunday morning and he was confirmed later that day. Not much to say about him because I don’t know much about him. I taught him once and the other elders taught him the rest. He had a baptismal date before I came into the area. But it was cool being a part of his baptism. We were supposed to have a few more getting baptized that week but due to an investigator having a baby and a few other trials we had to postpone that one. It’s great that she had a baby but that was just wrong timing - it's all good though. We also contacted a family and going to teach and reschedule later this week. Man the time just flies and I had so much to say. Well, it might just have to wait until next week. Being in a new area makes me feel the need to write a lot but it would take hours. And also English seems to be very hard right now… it’s hard to speak English… but yeah sorry if this letter is all over the place. All I can say is that the work is awesome. I can’t even explain it right now. Oh, I’m giving a talk this Saturday so I will tell you how that went too. Love, Elder Valdez