Baptism!

Dear friends and family:

We baptized this week!

The story: A few weeks ago, I thought of a less-active member who was baptized the week before I got into Florida, almost 2 years ago. Her name is Mikerlange. I thought, 'we should go and see her.' And so we went and saw her. We found out that her daughter, who had been 7 at the time that she, her husband, and her other daughter were baptized, was now nine. We went back to see them several times and got the ward involved in supporting them and encouraging them to go to church. And we set her daughter with a baptismal date for the 20th.

Skip ahead until last week: Mikerda is now ready to be baptized, we set up her interview with the zone leaders (because the district leader is sick.) We show up to the interview early to fill out the baptismal record. We write in all of the information, and I notice something odd about her birthday. As it turns out, when Haitians say that they are nine, they really mean that they are eight years, eleven months, and two weeks old. So we cancelled the interview, scheduled another one with the bishop, and went ahead with the baptism as a child of record baptism instead.

So... no baptisms in the mission. Instead, we helped the ward do a non-convert baptism!

Next week we will have two solid convert baptisms as well. Lusane and Jonal have been to church three times now, and they finally accepted a hard date for the 27th. We've scheduled their interview for this Wednesday, and their baptism will be on Saturday. Hooray!

Also, our ward had a father's day activity after the baptism on Saturday. It was really slow at first, with not a lot of participation, but after 30-40 minutes the entertainment came. Apparently, they had hired a Mariachi band to come and play for the activity. Everybody was very excited for that, and many people got up to start dancing. It was really fun to watch. I recorded several minutes of audio, but I lost my cord to connect my recorder to the computer, so I can't send it to anybody unfortunately.

Thanks,

Elder Slade