Dear Family,
This week was quite the memorable week. In case you haven't heard, the Philippines just got rocked by a huge typhoon. They have warning signals for storms 1-5 and it was a signal 4. The thing is, the news didn't warn anyone so it caught us off guard. It hit here Saturday and my companion and I just happened to be in a far part of our area when the storm started.

I asked the members and they said that they thought it was only about a signal 1 or 2, so I told my trainee that we could still work. But at about 5:00 we were at an appointment and I realized that it was getting too bad to work. There were trees falling everywhere and people's houses were getting blown to pieces left and right due to the strong winds and rain.

My comp and I ran to a members house hoping that they could give us a ride home but they were all too scared to leave. We tried texting our zone leaders to see what we should do, but there was no service at all. So due to the fact that we didn't have a ride home and we had no contact with our leaders, we ended up sleeping at a members house on their floor. They lived in a cement house so we knew we were safe there.
My trainee had the bright idea that we should walk home and kept insisting that we could make it home if we had a flash light. I don't know what the heck he was thinking cause stepping outside was like walking into a tornado. Sometimes he has some really weird suggestions and I don't know really how to respond to them.

The next day when we got back to our apartment we saw that our roof had blown off and some of the members were trying to fix it. A lot of my stuff got wet but mostly just clothes and my bed. Other then that everything was ok. Today at district meeting our leaders told us that this week we will mostly be going around our zone and fixing peoples houses that got destroyed in the storm. There was a lot of damage and my area is still without electricity so its been quite the experience.

On the bright side of things our work has been really good. Though we missed a few days of work because of the storm we managed to get 26 new investigators and 31 lessons. We had the highest states in the zone but my trainee acts like our stats are low. Its definitely hard training a new missionary cause he doesn't quite know how things work in the mission yet and sometimes he argues with me about how things are done in the mission though I've been out about 14 months now and he's been out about 3 weeks. Elder Pontino is a way shy guy but there are times when he does talk and it is usually when he has to complain or when he has a off the wall suggestion. Oh well, he'll get over it.

That's pretty much all the news I have for you this week but I hope things are going good with you guys over there. The mission is flying by now and its definitely keeping me busy. The months seem like weeks. I love you guys and write back soon. Elder Anderson