Quetzaltenango!!: 2011 Feb 28

2011 Feb 28

Hey!

I`m sending some more pictures this week but I am sending them separately so that you can get them before 7pm today. I was going to send you guys a video too but it was too big and gmail won´t let me attach it. It`s okay though because I have some mannerisms that I didn´t realize that I was doing. But I am going to make a smaller one next week and send that one to you guys. I didn´t realize that the videos were so big on memory.

I`m pretty sure that the package is perfect. It didn´t look tampered with at all and I think that I would have been able to notice because everything in there was packed pretty tight. Tell Katie and Brooklyn that I got their pictures and I loved them! They are amazing painters! And that is so amazing so that Karla and her family got the letter that I sent her! One because I was really starting to doubt the mail system in Guatemala (there`s got to be some reason why I`m not getting that many letters through the mail right?) and two because it`s really great that she appreciated the letter that I sent her. She and her whole family are amazing people. That honestly made my day a little bit better. :) Tell her thank you for me. Yeah, I have found a bucketload of amazing scriptures that are amazing as I`ve been reading the Book of Mormon so quickly. You wouldn`t really think so because you are basically just skimming to get everything read but it was really good.

And I am going to take a step back in my Spanish and work on the basics so that I can be better. I think that my problem right now is that I talk to quickly. So I am going to slow things down a little bit and see how that works. And my comp, Elder Alvarado wants to learn English so I just tell him random stories in English in my regular English so that he can learn it. And it works out really well because it`s kind of hard to get along with him sometimes just because we are so different but, this way, I can share with him some of my deepest stories without worrying about him actually knowing them. So far it has helped a lot. Haha, I was telling him a story about something at BYU and I was like "and they were perfect. I can`t even say how perfect they were" and he was like "not perfect." and I was like "you don`t even KNOW. Let me tell you about it." I thought it was awesome. Good guy, he is.

And Baptisms on Saturday... This week was so awesome! Right after I finished emailing you guys on Monday, we visited Sonia and Karen and Sonia told us that she was going to have to go to the Capitol so that she could sell perfume so that she could have money for her newly adopted children and that she might not be back until Sunday or Monday. So we were like, "what the garbage?" (afterwards) and then we visited her on Wednesday and, long story short, we baptized her on Saturday. :) The whole time, she was saying "if it is God`s will that I return for the baptism on Saturday then I will return" and I was like (in my head) "don´t be ridiculous. You are not going to be able to make it." But because of her faith, she did it and God was able to work a miracle. Later, I was reading in Mosiah 24 and verse 16 says that God will reward us according to how much faith we have in him. She had so much faith in God and I hope that some day that I will be able to have the same amount of faith that she has right now. We were going to baptize someone named Luis then too but he wasn`t answering his door or his phone so we couldn`t set a date for the interview so he couldn`t be baptized but, today, on the way to here (internet) we saw him on the bus on his way to school! So that was awesome. Sonia was the first person that I had ever personally baptized and we forgot to practice before the baptism and so it was pretty ridiculous and we had to do it twice because her feet came out of the water because I forgot to tell her to bend her knees... It was a good experience, though. I was having some doubts in how sincere Karen was with getting baptized but we decided on doing it anyway but we saw her in the baptism and she was so happy. And the day after, on Sunday, she couldn´t stop hugging us and smiling. :) It was a good day.