Unggoy!

Year: 1999
Place: Almeria, Biliran, Philippines
My age: 21

Alright, so I'm delving into missionary memories now.  Most of my mission was in 1999, so I deem that as perfectly acceptable.  I thought about making a blog of mission memories, but I have enough blogs already.

So, August of 1999 found me in my third area, which was Almeria on the small island province of Biliran.  It was one of, if not the most beautiful of the nine areas I served in, and my companion, Elder Christian Pfister, was one of my favourite companions (I had 16).  One of the reasons I loved this area was because it was a small, isolated, rugged town with some of the friendliest people I ever met.  One family that we were teaching lived in a small group of houses with the ocean to one side and rice fields to another.  To get to it, we had to hike along a beautiful black-sand beach, and then wade through a stream.  There was a house along the beach that we would pass whenever we headed out there that had a pet monkey on a leash out front.  It was a male monkey, so it hated us, but that didn't stop us from visiting it and feeding it snacks when we saw it.  On one particular day, we saw the teenage girl from the monkey family doing this:

She walked up to the shore and just chucked the monkey into the water.  It swam back to her, and she picked up and threw it again.  She did this maybe three or four times.  When we asked what she was doing, she told us that she was giving it a bath.  Finally, after the monkey swam back to her for the third or fourth time, she picked it up and wrapped it in a towel.  It looked like an adorable, furry baby.