This week was mostly dominated by the My Plan Conference. This is for recently returned Filipino missionaries with the purpose of helping them to figure out life after their mission. This isn’t done anywhere else in the world, and it seems to be very helpful to the RMs here. They hold this up in the “mountains” of Rizal in Tanay. The church recently constructed a large facility designed for FSY, so they use this facility. It is an amazing facility- with dorm buildings, a separate building with rooms for leaders, a huge dining hall, meeting rooms and a large conference room. They also have an outdoor amphitheater where we had a giant bonfire. The meals are all catered and their “snacks” are as large as a meal. They have PLENTY of food up there. We were assigned a district, but frankly, we hardly ever met with our district and didn’t really get to know them as part of our district. We just enjoyed getting to know them, seeing what they were learning, and being up in a very pleasant place.

We joined in the dancing, the karaoke around the bonfire, and just generally had a little rest from our usual work. Of course, we also managed to fit in a fair amount of our work while we were up there. A lot of it was in Tagalog, so when that was the case, we worked away on our computers. Many of these missionaries have challenging situations to go home to. Some have families that have been anxiously waiting for their young adults to return home and start working again to supplement the family income. They don’t really want them to go off to school. That is hard when they have dreams that conflict. Or they find themselves in difficult situations where they have to work on Sundays and it is hard to maintain the same level of spirituality they have been used to. So this gives them lots of information about education, employment opportunities, entrepreneurship, etc. Then they meet with their Welfare Self Reliance Managers and work out their individual plans. When they return home, they are paired up with a mentor in their Stake to help them fulfill their plans. A great program! And we had some very fun Senior Couples to hang out with up there!

Two other things of note from this past week: On Sunday, we had our first dinner invitation from someone in our ward here. You know, our Ex-pat ward. We have thoroughly enjoyed attending this ward. There are some very spiritual, kind, capable people who have literally lived all around the world. The invitation was from a sweet family- she is from Costa Rica and he is from Mexico. They have an adorable toddler and one on the way. He is serving in the bishopric and she is the new YW president. So they are plenty busy, but still had time to host three couples over for dinner. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of the other cute couple from Germany or her husband. Since he is a manager for the construction of the Alabang Temple, they live very close to the temple site. So we also got to see the outside of the temple (but not on the grounds, that isn’t allowed). This temple will be finished sometime during the next year.

The other amazing thing was a turnover (of sorts) with the Philippine General Hospital and the Philippine Society of Newborn Medicine. PGH was handing over the equipment to the Society of Newborn Medicine Neonatal doctors so they can distribute the training dolls to the different regions of the country. We couldn’t donate directly to them because they aren’t a PCNC or even a tax exempt organization and we would have had to pay donor’s tax. It was a very long process and Lennie had to work extra hard on this project to get everything just right, but it finally happened the way it was meant to happen in the first place. Dr. Legazpi, the director of PGH is a flexible leader who wanted to see this happen, so it did! We are grateful for his leadership style and his willingness to work with all the parties for this. It was great to be in their presence- great people! And a great cause!!