This week went well, we had one baptism. Stanley, a 19 year old kid that we'd been teaching for a while finally got baptized. He stopped using drugs, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and drinking coffee, so that was a miracle. Now we're trying to get his 13 year old brother to be baptized as well. He's friends with the Stake President's son which is already a good start, and he's already been to a few activities in the church.
Stanley was Elder Vasquez's first baptism in the mission. In fact, it was the first person that he had ever baptized in his life, so that was fun. He ended up having to do it three times because Stanley's elbow didn't want to go under the water.
On Sunday President and Sister Parrella and their family went to our ward and President Parrella spoke. I wasn't there to see it because I was at church in Paraopeba, but they say it was good. Afterwards when I arrived at noon I invited him to stay and watch the baptism and they stuck around. It was good to be able to talk to them a little bit and get to know them better.
As far as Paraopeba goes, well, things aren't looking so good. We met with the Stake President last wednesday night, and he explained to us his plan and what he wants to happen. He wants them to be able to sustain themselves. In theory his plan makes sense, but I'm pretty sure in practice it's going to flop. I just hope it was inspired. So we're not allowed to proselyte there anymore. We can only teach the people we've been teaching and finish up there and leave. We have a few good people left that will probably be baptized soon, but it sucks to not be able to do contacts. It makes me feel useless. I see people in the street and want to talk to them, but I can't. We had one investigator at church on Sunday, we're going to see if we can mark her baptim for this Sunday.
This week the water company cut the water at the Zone Leader's house, where there are four missionaries, and this week all of them went to our house every day to take showers and shave and stuff. It was kind of incomidating, but fun to have a change of pace at our house.
I had a fun experience during a division that I did on Monday in one of the other Elder's in my district's area. They had an investigator who when they went to pick him up to go to church on Sunday gave back the Book of Mormon and said he didn't want to participate anymore with the church. During the division we passed by his house and he was sitting out front, and we went and talked to him and I asked if we could go inside and talk for a bit. I think Elder Serafim (the elder I was with) was still mad at him about giving back the BOM so he just let me do all the talking. They thought that the guy's problem was that he didn't want to give up coffee, but it turns out he just didn't believe in the Book of Mormon. We started teaching him about why it's important and he wouldn't budge or do anything to try to understand. He kept saying "the bible, the bible, blah blah blah" and so I opened 2 Nephi 29 and had him read it. After that we bore more testimony and then he started talking about baptism and how people needed to prepare and how he wasn't ready to be baptized, so I showed him Acts 2 where Peter baptized 3,000 people in one day after teaching them once. Then we bore more testimony. I figured he wouldn't budge and that we were just wasting our time but at the very end when we were leaving I invited him to go to church he said, "ok, this Sunday I'll go. I think my mom said she wanted to go too." It was awesome. Elder Serafim was pleased.
Things with Elder Vasquez are going well. Training is definitely a different experience, but I'm enjoying it. He's intelligent and willing to learn, so it's fun.
'Til next week,
Elder Sisco