Djalute Bapti

Sabado ang 18th

Djulito baptized Lilly this afternoon. The ceremony was late and I was frosted totally, but it came out alright and he will confirm her tomorrow. She bore testimony and it was pretty sweet.

This is very cool. The beginning of a celestial/eternal family. We were glad to see Lily accept the Gospel enter the waters. The little girls are next. They are afraid of being under the water, but they will likely come around in time.

We went to the church this morning, as usual. Nobody came, but I went on an assignment for the President helping Sister Maila Gallarga get her papers off for a mission. The Hamtic Elders helped and Pres. Nabong, her branch president. I gathered them all up and we went back to San Jose and got on the computer in the Family History Library. We got everything done and I got everyone back to their starting points with no problem. Elder Chapman is a bit of a computer whiz. I love to go on these things and sort of direct traffic.

When we went to pick up Pres. Nabong, I parked the truck along side the road. The Elders crossed the rice paddies to go collect Pres. N. There were  some people working in a nepa hut across the road. I kept watching them roll a palm log back and forth. A lady was stirring a wok over a fire. She was using a long stick. I walked over to visit and see what they were doing. I thought perhaps they were trying to cut off the end of the log.

When I got closer, I discovered they were very friendly and I notice the log had a long wooden handle attached. They were rolling the log back and forth over a large table of wood and the log was grinding rice. A man kept pushing the rice up under the log and they rocked it back and forth over the little pile. The lady with the wok was drying the rice and then they brought the hot rice over and put it on the table and ground it with the log. (It cuts out the cost of having a mobile rice grinder do the job.) They were grinding black rice. The husks just blew off the table and then they scraped the ground rice into the sack hanging at the end. It is a community effort. They told me the logs last about 4 years, then they make them into benches. The log the ladies in the picture are sitting upon is an old rolling log. They told me the new log was about 4 months old.

The old nanay (senior woman/mother) gave me a small hand full of the rice and I started in on it. The ladies told me to keep chewing on it and it would get tasting pretty good. It turned out they were right. A little grinding, a little saliva, and I got a cud going and liked the stuff.

I sure liked the people. The old toothless guy thought it was great when I said a thing like "Salamat guid," which just means thank you very much. He laughed and repeated it over and over. He asked me if I spoke karaya. I said, "An itty bitty bit." He again laughed and repeated "itty bitty" over and over, showing his toothless grin.

The old nanay is a stogie smoker. I have seen the old women with rolled up tobacco leaves like cigars. It is weird, because we have seen no men using tobacco in this way. We have seen lots of cigarette smoking men, but no stogies. Anyway, with our limited English/Kinaray-a, we had a fun time talking about rice, and Mormons, and children and America.

I tried to get the missionaries to talk to the people, but they wouldn't . . . bunch of light weights. I don't know how they find baptisms. They ignore a lot of people and I imagine the people think, "Well, I guess they don't think we are worth teaching." I hope that is not the case, but what else could be inferred. It is not like they don't know what the missionaries are doing in their barangays. Hope they get reading Preach My Gospel under finding. They are good guys and I love them, but they ought to be having more fun with this.