Email 01/12/09

My new companion, Elder Barate is absolutely wonderful. His parents have been divorced for years and he hasn´t seen his dad for about that long. His girlfriend of ten years was born a member. He joined the church waited a year to get married but he went on a mission instead. The rest of his family joined the church a little while ago, about 3 months. He is a wonderful missionary. He has the strongest testimony. He speaks a little English but it´s actually a mission rule that the latins learn English. So we work on it in the pension.
Jorge was baptized this week. It was wonderful. William Bracho baptized him too. He gets up afterwords to bear his testimony and it was very sweet, very simple and very strong. “I know that this baptism has made me clean. I know the church is true. I know the Book of Mormon is true.” It was so wonderful.
One thing we´ve been very involved in this week was the sisters in our district had a family get baptized. Because Barate is the district leader he gave the interviews. The rock of the family, Genaro has a wonderful testimony and is super strong. The interesting thing with him is that he´s blind. With all the time we spent with them they asked us if we´d baptize them. It ended up being Genaro, his sister in law and his two nieces. His brother needed to wait a bit more to be baptized. So this past Friday I got to baptize. It was wonderful but definitely a bit interesting. To start with we got there a bit early to help the hermanas get ready and that was definitely a good thing. They started filling the font but the water was green. Like old lettuce. And of course the pump didn´t work. So Barate and I had a couple of buckets and emptied it by hand. Not fun. So we tried filling it again and there was no water pressure. By this time the bishopric is there and they suggest using the fire hose. So we did. It was going wonderful, right to about that point. Then sewer water came out. So Barate and I grabbed the buckets again and we were back to square one. So we said a huge prayer and we felt that the hose was our best bet. So we tried that again and it worked without a hitch. And it only took 10 minutes. Finally we were ready for the baptism. The nieces wanted Barate to baptize them and Genaro said I sounded big enough to baptize him. The sister in law, Antonia was scared to death of water so I got to baptize her too. We get in the font and she grabs my arm with everything she´s got. I still have the nail marks. I say the ordinance and she rather surprisingly calms down. I baptized her without any problems. Next it was Gernaro. He´s a little on the heavier side. I help him down the steps and manuever him around and it went really smooth. So we leave the font and go to the bathroom. What I didn´t realize about all of this is that I had to help him get dressed. Nothing overly awkward but I wasn´t planning on seeing any naked men. It was quite the experience if I do say so myself.