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Hello Family.

This last week was good, we had two baptisms on saturday and we have many more on the way. I'm still astounded at how fast the work moves down here, it's almost too easy. Just yesterday we were visiting an old investigator who we hadn't seen a while and who didn't seem to be going anywhere. This old lady that just talked and talked about her health problems. After listening to her talk for a good half hour or so I was starting to get bored so I interrupted and said: "Hey... Do you want to be baptized?" She paused for a moment and said yes. We set a date and it was as easy as that. Stuff like that happens in this area all the time, it's almost too easy.

Luckily though the ward keeps that easiness in check. Yesterday almost everything that could have gone wrong concerning the confirmations during sacrament meeting went wrong. First our ward mission leader didn't go to the ward council meeting before church so the bishop was uninformed on who was to do the confirmations. Something I didn't realized until after sacrament meeting had started. And when sacrament meeting started the people who had been baptized yesterday hadn't shown up yet. Luckily the opening hymn was a long one and one of them showed up. And when the Bishop invited them up to be confirmed and asked some us, the elders, to come up, he asked us who was going to do the confirmation and we just asked him if he could do it. (Our Ward Mission Leader was supposed to ask him that morning). He agreed and did it. Our other person still hadn't shown up yet so they went ahead and did the sacrament and I was thinking "crap, crap, crap, crap" The whole time. And wondering if they would ever show up and more importantly if the bishop would let us do it. Some bishops are pretty strict on that and if they don't show up before the sacrament they have to wait a week or get baptized again. Luckily they showed up during the sacrament and the bishop went ahead and let him be confirmed. Now our ward mission leader was supposed to confirm him but he didn't show up, so I went ahead and did it. It was my first time ever confirming someone and I was afraid at first that I wouldn't remember some of the necessary parts. Luckily I did it right, it's not too hard, the only thing different from other priesthood blessings is that you have to confirm them a member of the church and then command them to receive the holy ghost, and then say what the spirit tells you. So it wasn't too much sweat.

So that was the weekly fiasco. Not much else happened this week. New Year's Eve was boring, we had to be in by dark, luckily we had permission to sleep over at the apartment of our ZL's (who are pretty chill, both of them I know really well) and our whole district. So we just hung out with them all night, played card games, and listened to all the gunshots outside all night long. The parking lot of their apartment complex was just full of drunk black people the whole night, it was pretty loud.

Well there's not much else to say, nothing too crazy or interesting has happened. Oh I forgot to bring my camera to the library today so no pictures of us and the recent converts so that'll have to wait till next week. Well I love you all and hope you have a good week. PEace...


-- Elder Rice