Hello dearly beloved seres queridos,
To answer Dad’s questions about my comp, she is from Honduras (like Hna Estrada, but she comes from a part of Honduras that is actually A LOT like the United States) I believe she now has 14 months in the mission (two transfers more than me) so she only has about 3 or 4 transfers left. I always work with old missionaries. It’s kind of weird because usually the sisters get to be senior comp after 6 or 8 months or something, but I’ve gotten to work with a lot of sisters who have a lot of experience. It’s kind of nice because they all already know more than me… She loves to joke around and bug me. She wants to be a professional forensic doctor and solve crimes like that. She has quickly converted to Sweet and Sour Chicken since she’s been with me, and she can almost say it in English now.
Saturday… was a very interesting day.
We got decorations up for Felix and Teresa Martinez’s wedding ceremony (green and yellow and pink for lack of other colors in the friendly neighbor grocery store) and filled the font and everything and when everything was ready we got a phone call from Evelyn (Jerry’s friend who brought him to church) saying that Jerry had called and told her that he would NOT be able to make it to his baptism. That some kind of emergency had come up at work.
….Uh oh.
We called Bro Bonilla to go get Brother Fermin and he said that he wasn’t able too, so we called Bro Martinez to go and get him. Around 8 when the wedding was supposed to start, we called Bro Martinez to see if he had gotten Bro Fermin.
He said Bro Fermin wasn’t there. Was he at the church? We didn’t know, because we weren’t at the church at the time.
….This could be a problem…
When we got to church, we were relieved to see that yes, Bro Fermin had made it! Bro Bonilla had changed his mind and went to get him anyways… Fermin said he would have walked if no one had come to get him. And I believe it. We did the math the other day and he is 79 years old. 79!! And he works on the farm everyday. This guy is INTENSE. And hilarious. One of the sisters was like, “You’re finally getting baptized, abuelo!?”
“Yes. You could never convince me to do it before.”
So that was good, but then it was 8 o’clock and Fam Martinez still wasn’t there. Sister Duarte called and just about had a heart attack because she said, “Brother Martinez, where are you all right now?”
“Sister, I’m sorry, but we’re all here in Guatemala.”
Just before Sis Duarte died, he started laughing.
Oh Brother Martinez. What a goofy man.
So they showed up to get married and while they were getting married me and Hna Duarte were running around stealing cell phones to try and reach Jerry and get him and his son to come to their baptism, and I got a text message from Evelyn after I called her to try and find Jerry that he had been drinking and she felt bad so she had left him alone.
Drat. 500 points to Satan. I finally got a hold of Jerry and he said he couldn’t make it and that he would be baptized in a week or two.
But I visited Jerry last night with Sis Davis, and Evelyn told us that his brother had given him some Anti-Mormon literature the day before his baptism, so he’d been reading that and it had discouraged him so we had to explain why Adam and Eve’s Fall really was a good thing… He finally admitted that he had drunk a little but he hardly ever does (like once a week) and he said he would like to be baptized this Saturday, and when we asked if we could ask his son too he said, “Yeah, if I go and git baptized my son had to get saved too.”
And we also are working with Tamara and her 8-year-old son Terik. She’s pure angel. She said she had been praying to find a church the day before we came and that she’d had a dream that she was sitting in a church and felt really good. We were shouting at her window, but she didn’t hear anything, she just felt like she needed to look out the window, and she saw us standing there so she opened our door. (She is Elder and Sister Davis’s neighbor [they’re the old senior missionaries]).
Anyways, time to git goin man.
Love,
Bek