Cutler Mission to Dumaguete

The following are words and pictures from our good friends, Nelson and Terri Beard, who are a senior missionary couple serving in the southwest corner of our mission. We had lots of wind and rain a few weeks ago and their area of the mission probably received the most. Here is their story: September 16, 1:29 PM The Sipalay Zone has been under the gun over the last week. We have had many rain and landslide warnings. Many of the chapels have been opened to accommodate those who had to evacuate. Right now, the rain has let up a bit to give us a reprieve. We are all, however, without a signal for cell phones and we are using our Starlink to send this. Because of the frequent electrical outages and lack of a signal, the missionaries have been unable to access any of the ATMs. [Accessing an ATM is essential because the Philippines is a cash-based society and the missionaries withdraw cash from their Mission Support Fund every two weeks to pay for food, groceries, transportation, rent, and ot...

We just returned from Bacolod, where we spent the weekend shopping, having the oil changed in the mission van, and joining in with the National Family Week activities hosted by the Bago Stake. (National Family Week is a yearly event in the Philippines that started thirty-two years ago through the efforts of then-President Fidel Ramos, and the Church sponsors stake-level events all over the country.) Bago is the city I lived in for nine months during 1976 and many of the families we baptized are still in the area. Sister Cutler and I were asked to speak at the stake devotional (actually, I was, but she wound up on the program and you can see her accepting a certificate of appreciation in the photo on the left) and then we spent the afternoon driving around my old teaching areas, which were the three small towns south of Bago: Mabini, Pulupandan, and Valladolid. I can't say that nothing's changed in the forty-nine years since I left, because it has changed, and dramatically so. H...

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 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 their tr...

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...

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...