E-mail dated 7/16/19

Kamusta Kamo??!!

Well first off, sorry I was not able to call you guys, we went on an awesome hike for a district activity today. It was so cool, i will send pictures later. But wow this week has been such a good one!! it has been a lot of fun!

So on wednesday of this week we had a service project at the pan family, we replaced one of their wood walls with a cinderblock wall and it took forever, but our service was much appreciated and it was kinda fun, but mostly tiring. We taught the pan family multiple times this week and they are doing good! We also were able to have so other great lessons this week! One of them with this 18 year old kid named richie who we have been teaching for a couple of weeks. We taught him about the Book of Mormon and invited him to be baptized and he accepted. He is such a cool kid. He is not like most of the teenagers or college kids here, he is so humble and will for sure be baptized...im so sad im going to miss it though. I love Sibalom I wish i could have more time here though...i really like it here. This week we were able to have 8 people we are teaching come to church!!! Including the pan fam and richie, and the aldemita (part member) family!!! It was a great week! And richie and the aldemita family are both from bongbongan which you have to cross a river to get to and the were still early to church...so cool!!!

Well honestly just barely started hitting me that my mission is almost over.....and I am so unsure how to feel! Don't get me wrong I am so excited to see you all....but i don't know if i am ready to leave all of this...its like who i am....I don't know I guess everything is coming full circle now because this is almost exactly how i felt as my date to enter the mtc was approaching...haha weird how that works...I just love my mission and the Philippines soo much. The best decision I have ever made was to serve a mission and stick with it until the end...couldn't have done anything better for the past 2 years! I still got about 2 weeks left so i am just going to make the most of it!

Love you guys! Have a great week!

Elder Degen