A Description of What We Do

Our mission here in the Philippines is to help young members of our church prepare for their future. We teach a class called "Planning For Success." This class helps them make plans for their future by having them create a work plan, an education plan, and a financial plan. We just started teaching this class to some potential students. After they take the class they can apply for a Perpetual Education Fund loan from the church. The Perpetual Education Fund (PEF) has been established to provide worthy young adults of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with the support and resources necessary to improve their lives through education and better employment to better serve their family, the Church, and their community. We help them with the application process as well.


Getting ready to teach

We also keep track of the students who are in our assigned area. We try to contact them each month by texting them or sending them messages on Facebook. We had never really sent texts very much until we came to the Philippines. Now we text every day. That is one of the preferred methods of communication here. We also learned recently that most of our students are on Facebook and use it regularly. So we are now contacting them via Facebook and have more than 200 Filipino Facebook friends. One other way that we contact them is meeting with them individually. Every Sunday we go to church at different meetinghouses and meet with PEF participants. Some of them are current students and others have graduated. We get to ask them about school or their jobs and we encourage them in any way we can. It is the most fun part of our assignment! We have now met personally with over 100 participants.

Anna and one of our participants

 

Another part of our assignment is to train PEF Specialists.  These Specialists are called to work with students who live in their Wards (Individual Congregations) and Stakes (Groups of Wards).   We train them on how to teach the "Planning for Success" class and how to help students with their loans.  We also meet with leaders in the Wards and Stakes to help them get Specialists called and to update them on how the PEF participants in their Wards or Stakes are doing.

 

We have met so many wonderful people here.  They are always happy to meet us and we shake hands with every one of them.  We love meeting the little children in the congregations.  They seem to think that it is a great honor to shake our hands.  And we love it!

 

To close our blog today I am including a beautiful sunset picture taken from our apartment looking out on Manila Bay.  We have just recently been able to see the sun actually sink into the water.  It was too cloudy when we first got here, and now that the rainy season is over we are delighted by the sunsets.

 



                                                                                         Breathtaking!