Email 1/26/09

We had another wonderful week this week. I´m really tired though.
Jeanet was baptized Saturday. We had a pretty full chapel. 49 Aguilars plus about 30 from the ward. It was really wonderful. For confirmations, it´s the Sacrament Meeting after the baptism. If they get baptized Sunday night, they get confirmed the next Sunday. Yesterday for the confirmation we had a little bit of a scare. The grandparents came early with a couple of kids and grandkids and they asked us "Where is Jeanet?" She had left with a group ahead of them but they hadn´t made it to the chapel. So the grandpa leaves the rest with us and he goes and looks for them. It´s time to start sacrament meeting and still no Jeanet. I´m biting my fingernails a bit but right before sacrament starts the grandpa comes in with Jeanet and the rest of her group. They´d gotten a little lost. Don´t know how. But it was a HUGE sigh of relief. I got to confirm her. This was my first one and I was definitely nervous in doing it in Spanish but it went good. We had 53 Aguilars in Sacrament meeting.
Monday we´re having a family home evening with Familia Medina and we get an urgent call from the Hermanas that a sister in their area was in REALLY bad shape healthwise and needed a blessing. They couldn´t get anyone to come from their area so they called us. It was a fairly sad situation. The lady was about 40, has 6 kids the oldest is 20. She had really bad cancer and she was pretty much comatose (I think that´s how you spell it). We give her the blessing and it wasn´t to heal her, it was to help her pass on. We were a pretty sad group that night but there was this wonderful spirit of peace there. "Not my will by thine be done." She passed away Wednesday morning.
Alberto is doing good. He came to the baptism. He´s really good friends with one of the sons, Hector. Hector is kind of the key to the Familia Aguilar. He´s not the oldest but he´s the one that everyone follows. And Alberto is really progressing. He was practically in tears with the Plan of Salvation lesson. The whole time he was in prison he never thought that he could be forgiven for what he did. He´s going to be a rock here.
Maria was able to come to church too. We can´t convince her friend to stay for church but we´re really happy he brings her. Maria is really quite wonderful. She has a really strong testimony and she has been referring all of her neighbors to us. We try to find about 5 new families a week to keep things going. Most don´t progress too far but as far as I can tell you have to use the shotgun approach to find golden families. All in all we had about 20 investigators at church, and at the rate things are going we could have a ward just for Aguilars. They are quite the interesting family. Only a few of them can speak fluent Spanish. About half of them speak the Spanish/Guaraní mix and the other half is only Guaraní. We teach the little ones Spanish when we´re there. I hope they stay strong.
And no the Medinas weren´t able to catch Coco again. They found a possum though. Cute little thing but they said he bites so I was more than happy to just watch. They have a new pet or two about every week. And I got pictures and videos of Coco, but it was before the escape. My rule is that I don´t have my camera out when I´m wading through knee high water and besides you were right. Video was the LAST thing on my mind.
Things are going really great with Barate. I´m really learning Spanish and he´s learning English. He has a very large vocabulary in English it´s just hard for him to understand it right now. So I speak slowly and it works.