Cutler Mission to Dumaguete

It's been a busy few weeks in the mission. Well, it's actually been busy since we arrived. It's always busy! We operate on a six-week transfer cycle where new missionaries arrive in the mission on a given Thursday (September 12 for this cycle, October 24 for the next cycle, and so on) and departing missionaries leave a day or two earlier, depending on their home destination. I manage the travel arrangements, with the help of travel agents in Manila and the United States, for the departing missionaries. (Travel for the arriving missionaries is managed by the missionary training center.) This includes all airline reservations, along with hotel reservations and bus rides depending on their itinerary. I also work with immigration agents to provide photos and other documents required by departing foreign nationals. This transfer cycle we had ten missionaries departing and sixteen arriving. Two of the departing missionaries were picked up by their parents, so I had to coordinate

As promised, here is part two about life in the Philippine Islands! We live in Dumaguete, on the southern tip of Negros Island. Our mission includes the eastern half of Negros, plus the small island of Siquijor, seen in the distance in the photo at the left. Cebu Island is the major island to the east of Negros, and you can see its southern tip in the photo below. Siquijor is due east of Dumaguete, and the southern tip of Cebu lies northeast. Siquijor is seen in its entirety, while just the tip of Cebu is seen in its photo. Both pictures were taken from the plaza and boardwalk that runs along the ocean, just a half block from our apartment.  Cebu and Negros are long and skinny islands, and most people live close to the ocean, although there are small towns inland, up in the hilly jungle areas. There are lots of rivers and waterfalls on both islands. Here is a photo of the church and mission office. The office is the structure on the far right. I took this picture just a few minutes bef

Living in the Philippines is amazing! However, it's very different than living in the United States and I thought I'd share a few of those differences in the next couple of posts. Here is a view from our second-floor apartment window, just above my computer desk. (You can see the top of my computer monitor in the lower left corner of the picture.) I'll spend more time covering life outside our apartment in the next post, but I'm going to stay inside the apartment for the remainder of this one. Missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints pay their own mission expenses. We pay $750/month for our apartment and $150/month for our mission car. Right now we have a Hyundai Creta , but the mission also owns a Hyundai Staria van, a Hyundai Santa Fe, and a Nissan Navara pickup. Add to this our remaining living expenses, such as food, medical insurance, travel costs, and miscellaneous expenses, and we spend around $2700/month. We have a nice apartment, as yo

We just finished our first two weeks in Dumaguete, and the new mission is off to a great start, albeit with the typical teething issues experienced whenever a new and somewhat complex organization is created. For example, it took a few days to gain full access to all required church applications, some office roles and user permissions needed updating, our budget and purchasing systems aren't fully configured yet, and we are behind on processing travel requests that were pending from before the mission was created. (Remember, the Dumaguete mission was created by the division of two existing missions, both of which were fully up and running for many years, so we needed to act fast to maintain momentum.) There are workarounds for each of these issues, of course, and we're making great progress. I'm going to use the remaining portion of this blog post to share a conversion story from one of the families we taught when I was a young missionary. You may remember from the most rec

Today is July 1, the day that thirty-six new church missions are being created worldwide, with three of those missions here in the Philippines, including the new Philippines Dumaguete Mission where Sister Cutler and I have been reassigned. I decided to rename the blog "Cutler Mission to Dumaguete" to reflect this change, although the URL will remain the same. We arrived in Dumaguete on Sunday afternoon, June 23, after having spent the night in San Carlos and then attending the creation of the new La Libertad Branch (located about ninety minutes south of San Carlos) for our Sunday church services. However, before we left Cebu we had a wonderful reunion with someone I met during my first mission to the Philippines in 1976. Judith Delos Santos was only four years old when her family joined the church, and like so many of those early converts she remained faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ. She and her husband, along with several other members of their stake, had come to Cebu

We made it to Cebu! It's been a busy ten days since we arrived, but I'll try to recap what's happened. First of all, we were picked up at the airport by the Eppersons, the senior couple in our mission who coordinate housing. They arranged a temporary apartment in the Prestigio, a lovely three-floor hotel/apartment that is home to five or six senior missionary couples. We're on the same floor as most of them, so it's a little "missionary zone" in the middle of the big city. I say temporary because we won't be staying in Cebu long, but more on that later. The Prestigio is a couple of blocks from the Cebu LDS Temple complex, which includes the temple, two chapels for Sunday worship services, a distribution center for temple clothing and supplies, patron housing for members coming to the Cebu temple from far away islands, the temple president's home, our mission president's home, and our mission office. See additional pictures at the bottom of this