I’ll come and get you tomorrow morning to meet Elder Earnstrom from the mission office in Balamban. He will bring the desks and we’ll leave one for the sisters in Balamban and take the other two to the Elders in Lamac.

We walked with Elder Dover down the driveway to the gate where his pickup was waiting. We are going to miss the Dovers when they leave next Tuesday. They have been so much help orienting us.

The hen with chicks was still tethered near the entrance to the sister’s apartment .The chicks are getting wing feathers now. Elder Ernstrom told the Balamban sisters, and the elders who came with us to unload the desk, that all the foreign missionaries need to go into the mission office in Cebu on September 20 to be fingerprinted, with the hope of avoiding the trips to Manila for the exit certificate.

There is an industrial park where large ships are built, in Balamban. The owners originally planned to locate the facility in Toledo, but the “City Fathers’ wanted too much “under the table.” So the industrial park was located in Balamban where the graft was reasonable. Most jobs in Balamban are in the industrial park.

Elder Dover showed us where a member family in Balamban lives. The family invited the Dover’s for dinner when their children started piano lessons with Sister Dover. The main part of the meal was a special dish called “Native Chicken.” Native chicken is different from the usual backyard chicken in that a chicken is penned up and fed only rice and corn for several days to “cleanse” it, and then butchered the morning of the dinner.

Elder Dover thinks road signs are interesting here. There are no speed limit signs, so where there is a school, the sign reads:

Slow down

School

When there is road construction, the sign reads:

Slow down

Men working

When Elder Dover sees a number of men standing around a construction site, he thinks they must have gone to the Slow Down School to be Slow Down Men.

To go to Lamac, we went back through Toledo and south for some distance where we turned off onto a narrow concrete road. It was two lanes, but each lane was only about half the width of the “main” road. The concrete road would change to gravel periodically, then back to concrete. We saw people using the concrete road edge to do their laundry in “bucket Maytags;” also tarps laid out on half of the road for drying of rice. We passed the “Happy Horizons Children’s Ranch,” which is an orphanage runs by some Americans.

We mostly met motor bikes, but meeting a truck was interesting. As we climbed up the mountains, the occasional vista through the foliage was breathtaking. At one point we could see down the mountain and across the bay to the island of Negros. There is a volcano there called Ka Leon. The legend is that a young man named Ka and a beautiful young maiden named Leon were in love, but were from different tribes and marriage was forbidden. The two young lovers (think Romeo and Juliet) threw themselves from a cliff. Where they landed, a volcano formed. Ka Leon is a “restless” volcano, rather than an active volcano. It’s not an immediate danger, but needs to be watched.

We delivered the desks, for which the young elders were very grateful, and began the hour trip back to Toledo. The Lamac elders a somewhat isolated and only make a trip by “tricycle” to Toledo once week to e mail and do their shopping. But they are as smiley and cheerful and the people with whom they work.