Clara Tillie and National Family Day Celebration!

It was National Family Week in the Philippines!

Congratulations Taylor and Anne, Blaine, Roger, Carter, and our co-grandparents, Rozanne and 

Roger!! A baby daughter, sister, cousin, granddaughter!! Anne gave birth to Clara Tillie on Sept 20, 2012 in her patented fashion--quick and easy (I know, the word easy should never be used to describe a delivery, but I'm talking in relative terms).  If only her pregnancy could have been as uncomplicated. 

We got to Skype with them within a few hours of her birth, and Rozanne sent a picture immediately, so we got to feel as if we were there--well, actually, a far cry from being there, but . . . you know. And we have Skyped since and can see that though Anne will have her hands full with Carter (busy busy boy) and Clara, they all seem to be settling in to yet another little Cropper.  That’s an even dozen grand kids for us in case anyone is counting. For more information about Clara Tillie and pictures go to: mrscropper.blogspot.com

As the numbers grow and the list of birthdays expands, it would be easy and maybe forgivable to think of this as just another grand kid.  But we don’t.  Every life is a miracle.  Trite statement?  Yes, but true nonetheless. How can something that has occurred 6 or 7 billion times seem so unique, so mysterious, so personal?  I don’t know how that is, but I am grateful that we can revel in another miracle given to our very own family.

Elder with part of the band. Not too close sisters.

To acknowledge Clara’s birth, the entire Tanjay District held a celebration.  Actually, the whole of the Philippines celebrated all week—National Family Week—and the District decided to participate by having a parade and an all day open house.  There were lots of dignitaries invited.   I’m not sure any showed up, but the Branch members showed up in great numbers, and Amlan in particular was extremely well represented which made Pres. B. very proud and I think personally grateful.

The gathering pre-parade

Our little branch leads the way

On the national highway 400 strong!!

 Colina Family poster

The sister we baptized in action

Bais Branch poster

Of course I had to cry about the whole parade.  There were no floats, and only one vehicle, but there were banners, and family t-shirts, and most people dressed in white (the designated costume) and a marching band, complete with majorette and ‘’minors” with batons a-twirl from Tanjay Central High School and another from I don’t know where, in glorious Mardi Gras colors and lots of people marching and a cop to direct traffic.  It was full on awesome!!  Imagine, the District decides on a parade, and traffic is blocked, people come out to watch, and the band plays on.

What is a parade without majorettes

...and a band

Who knows families better than LDS

Even balloons and missionaries

After the parade, everyone gathered back at the District center for an open house where there were displays set up in every room and videos going and activities for the kids, and tours and a program and awards.  We learned about 72 hour kits and disaster preparedness, and saw demos on how to make virgin coconut oil by hand, and how to make soap from Kalamansi juice.  There was a family picture-taking booth built in the parking lot, with guess who taking pictures (actually he passed it off for much of the day, but his camera was in duty all day).

Elder Cropper and I were the concluding speakers at the end of the day and amazingly there were still people there!!  Most, 400 plus, stayed all day!  The district provided snacks mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and each branch fed their own people lunch, so that right there makes for a great activity.

The parade stretched with members to about a 1/2 kilometer long

Ya gotta love the youth

and more.....

It didn't rain on our parade but it sure rained at lunch time

and rained......and rained

Making virgin coconut oil

WHAT A GREAT EVENT!!  WHAT A GREAT DAY!!!

Welcome to this world Clara, where there are whole countries and small Districts, and individuals who still know and celebrate the value of strong families—a place where God gives his children the guidance of Prophets and Proclamations and, most important, parents.  Clara, yours are the best.  And we all celebrate, YOU.

Shake Shingles

Filipino's are masters at efficiency in mass transit

Who is driving?? The big screen TV?

Hi-Tech power line work

Can’t think a lot of edifying things to share of late, but we promised to try to get back to weekly, and there are some who actually look for a blog weekly, so I’ll have to come up with something, edifying or not.  As some of you know, Elder Cropper has come down with shingles.  (Why do we say “come down with”? I can see, “is down with”, as in, “down for the count”, or, “down and out”, but why, “come down with?”) Well, regardless or irregardless, he is down, and shingles is the cause (subject/verb agreement becomes a real issue in that last phrase; does shingles begin with a single shingle? Is the disease singular, but the symptom plural?).  According to Melissa, our roving reporter and woman-on-the-street, practically everyone she talks to has had shingles.  According to our internet sources, it can get really ugly and last for literally ever, so the fact that Dean’s has been mild is really a miracle.  He is fatigued, headache-y, then the rash and shooting nerve pain and some skin numbness in patches, but all are on the mild end of what we have been told.  We have slowed WAY down in doing any work, and that is another trial connected to the disease.  We are struggling to stay focused and motivated about our work while unable to do it or plan.  It’s tough.  Although it is true that shingles cannot be passed on, it is contagious in that a person who has not had chicken pox can contract that disease from someone with shingles, so in addition to having to stay home a lot to rest, we feel confined due to possible contagion. But we’ve read that if your sores are healing and covered, it is safe to be around people, so we will teach our class tonight, after he takes lots of ibuprofen and acetaminophen. And we will go on our scheduled trip to Cebu tomorrow.

I guess the edifying part of this is this: when we finally realized what it was, we started on the anti-viral medicine, but it is said to be most effective when started in the first 48, or at most 72 hours, but we didn’t start until 4 or 5 days after the initial symptoms. The missionaries in our area had travelled to Cebu for training, and we were hesitant to call on Elders from the next city, but we did, and they came and gave Elder Cropper a blessing.  I was so proud of them.  They conducted themselves like true representatives of the Savior, and gave the blessing with confidence and power, seeking and gaining the direction of the Spirit. The Elder who sealed the anointing promised a miracle of healing, and we truly feel we have received it.  Like I said, we started the medicine late, but the case has been mild, the pain mostly controllable, and the area affected small. It is still no picnic, but we know God intervened in the severity.

We did take pictures of the sores, but we are going to spare you that experience.  Yuck!!

Okay enough of that. 

Looking up under an Acasai Tree

Does the baby standing up have a child restraint seat?

Mildy interesting language items:   1) In the island group called the Visayas, which cover, I think more than half the Philippines, including the large southern island, Mindinao, the people mostly speak a language called Visaya, though there are other distinct (meaning incromprehensible to each other) dialects with in the region also.  Then, within the dialect of Visaya, is a sub set that has regional differences only—like Scottish, compared to English.  It is called Cebuano. Though Cebuano is a smaller subset of Visaya, it is also more codified/formalized. So, for example, the Book of Mormon is translated into Cebuano, but not into Visaya. 

The National language of the Philippines is called Filipino. (I have no idea why the switch from Ph to F or from one p to two). It was formerly, and is still commonly, called Tagalog. But interestingly, the language spoken by the largest segment of Filipinos in their homes is Visaya. So, at school, the children are spoken to and taught in their mother language (depending on the region), then they study Filipino as a separate subject and English as another separate subject right from grade one.  Imagine! 3 languages in school from 6 years old!!  Unless of course you live in a native Tagolog speaking area, like Manilla, then you are taught in Tagolog, and study the subject of Filippino (same thing) and also study English.

Item 2:  There is no gender in third person in the Visaya language, only singular and plural.  So you can’t say, “give it to her” You can only say give it to siya which means him, her, and/or it or sila which means them.

So, when Filipinos speak English, they have to really work at adding the right gender.  Of course they know the difference between male and female, but in their language, there is no place for it in the pronouns they use, so it's hard to get it straight.  Therefore, we often hear a sentence such as, "the old woman, he said . . ." It's kind of the opposite of Romance languages which have (in my humble opinion) far too much gender--every blessed table and fig is a boy or a girl. Anyway, it does get confusing trying to follow a story where there are several people being told of and the hes and shes are being tossed around, and you're not sure if they are being used correctly or consistently. It's hard to tell if Jane went to school and Mark went to work or vice versa.  And that's when people speak English.

The really big news of the week is that Taylor and Anne will welcome Clara Tilly into the world later today!!  Anne hopes to be delivered of her new little girl in a few hours.  

I'm trying to find what's edifying about us not being there for that, but instead I will focus on the miracle: yet another miracle.

Training and a costume ball

Amlan branch YM reading their new Liahonas

WE are so sorry to have left it this long since we posted.  Any other time our reason has been technical problems, or something tangible like that.  This time, our excuse is less tangible, but no less real, and as I expound on the excuse, it will serve also to catch you up on what we are doing these days.

In the early part of our mission, we worked hard and were physically and emotionally spent at the end of each day.  We spent time every day traipsing around, visiting in homes, helping in crises, organizing community service projects and teaching. Some evenings we were home by dinner, but others we were out late, teaching a family.  Just as some of those efforts tapered down—the families we were working with had been sealed in the temple, the area was recovering from the calamities, the organizations we’d been working with were running along ok—we were called home for Melvina’s funeral.  When we returned, we both had a really hard time getting our footing again.  Before, we hardly had a moment to plan our next move; everything just kind of presented itself to us and we did it. We kept time out for personal study, and even got some exercise in on occasion, but we just kept going till we dropped.  Yes, there were choices, but usually the choice was which of several things we should do, not drumming up things ourselves.  But when we came back from America, we felt done.  And it was daunting thinking of starting over and wondering where to start.

Up close these look like cherries growing out of the trunk

From further away, is it a fungus or what??

But that lasted for about a week. Soon we were engaged in a very different chapter of our mission.  We had done a little training in the other district, Dumuguete, before our US trip, but now we really started in earnest, by commission from our Mission Pres. and under direction of the District Pres.  Because of our experience in Tanjay District, and our intimate work with the branches here, we have learned a lot, and so we have been training in Dmgt. district in a much different, more encompassing and we hope more effective way.   But, and here comes the excuse:  we are having to do a ton more prep than before to keep up with all the training. And prep time is what we used to use for blog time.  We prep in the evening or in the day during a chunk that isn’t scheduled, and that is when we were sometimes able to write a blog post. Before our schedule was more fluid—we planned ahead, but often ended up not knowing what we would be called on to do.  Now, we schedule far in advance, and our schedule is more predictably solid, but when we are not scheduled, we are preparing.

Oh and we added an Institute-type class that we are teaching weekly in Tanjay Branch. We are teaching Church History and Doctrine and Covenants—which also requires more prep than had we chosen one of the other standard works or if we were not team teaching, which requires more coordination time.  We are having fun with it.

But excuses are mostly ridiculous, since we make time for what matters to us, and we are now repenting. We just can’t promise a weekly blog, but we will try to do better.

Training is boring to talk about, but very exciting to do.  So bear with me as I tell of our exciting work of late. We'll start back in Tanjay again.  Elder Cropper was made the 1^st Counselor in the Tanjay District months ago, and I the District Auxiliary Training Specialist.  These callings allowed us to engage on district and branch levels, but in reality, it limited Elder Cropper’s training opportunities. He had real duties in the District.  He would train for a few minutes in each District meeting he was in, but those meetings had agendas that had to be carried out.  He could make corrections on actions taken in those meetings, and get a little training in in the process, but his focus could not really be training. At the Branch level, we could visit and observe, but then too he would train less and counsel more.  I did much in training in the branches we visited in conjunction with the district RS, YW and Primary leaders, and he too would meet just for training in a certain quorum presidency or other, but it seemed very slow as we worked our way through each branch and each organization therein.

In Dmgt. However, we have no administrative duties, so that is very different.  But the biggest difference is that Dmgt District is actively making specific plans and goals, and steps toward goals in their efforts to become a stake by next year.

So we started at the top and did some training with the district President and the presidency. Then we focused on 2 branches and had 3 trainings in each over 3 weeks’ time, training their leaders on Welfare and on their roles and purposes, and on working together in Councils.  Then we had a big training with all the district auxiliary leaders, AND THEY ALL CAME!!  Then I oriented with the new District Primary Presidency, who all came.  Then we trained in the District Branch Presidents’ Welfare meeting.  So, in very short order we have been in front of a lot of people, some several times, and they have just been so appreciative.  We keep them over the hour and a half we promised, then they ask for more and schedule for us to come back.

Some of the branches in Dumuguete are a little more affluent then Tanjay, but still most of the branch leaders don’t have internet access and so they can’t get all the many tools that are taken so for granted by us.  They are lucky if they have the training pamphlets that can be ordered, or the forms that are referred to in the manuals they do have. So to them, like in Tanjay, training from a live person is like a drink of water to a thirsty guy.  They so want to magnify their callings, but they just have not been taught how.

Our mission president and his wife have SIX DISTRICTS under them!!  That’s in addition to  the 155 missionaries and all their needs and instruction.  So Pres. Schmutz  acts in many regards as the Stake president for those six districts—doing all the first time temple recommends, the patriarchal blessing interviews, the setting aparts and releases for all the missionaries who come and go from each district, the District conferences (which he trades off with the local area authority).  Anyway, the point is he and his wife have little time to train, other than the twice a year they are in each district for their bi-annual conference. That’s where we are trying to help.

District Pres.  Look at the great flowers

tables and ladies all decked out

Rio has nothing on these folks

the co-MCs kept everything moving and fun

The most fun part of this new focus is that right after our first meeting with the District Presidency, they invited us to a costume ball that night—the first such event in the district.  It was an EQ and RS party for adults, held at a local hotel near the district center, and it was so

lively and fun and beautifully prepared, organized and attended.  We told them that if Stake-hood was granted based on a great fun had by all at a costume ball, then they would be a stake already.

winner of the costume contest

the finalists

They had the Young Women watching kids at the district center, so parents could come from far, get their costumes on, drop off their kids, and head over to the ball.  And they came in droves.  Hope you like the pictures. 

We still feel like Amlan Branch and Tanjay District are our home here in the mission, and miss spending as much time with them, but we still have lots to do in both places.  Time is just going by too fast.