It's Baptism Season

dear family,

wow, tomorrow i will be an uncle again! i'm pumped for that. i'll be praying especially hard for kimberly the next couple days. child birth must really schmell.

good to hear that mom is such a trooper. i guess it's just in the blood. hang in there mom. know that you're also in my prayers and i would give you my knees if i could.

i can't believe it's football season without me! what is going on in this world?! but round these parts it's baptism season! in the next two weeks we should have 6 baptisms, and in the next month we should have about 10. i'm so excited. we're having a baptism on saturday for this awesome nigerian guy named bright. he's so solid. the way we met him was really cool too. we had just gotten out of an appointment late and needed to grab a taxi because we were supposed to meet a member. we spent probably ten minutes trying to grab a taxi, but traffic was all but completely stopped, so we decided to hoof it. needless to say, i wasn't the happiest of campers, first of all because we were late, second of all it was blisteringly hot, and third of all the walk is about 30 minutes to get where we needed to go. but as we started to walk down this long road, i saw a guy off in the distance walking towards us and i had a strong impression that this is why we hadn't been able to grab a taxi. we stopped him and got his number and the rest is history. he lives with no one, but TWO pastors... and they are the most ridiculous pastors i've ever met. but bright knows it's true, and he's so solid that the two pastors have since moved out of his apartment because they couldn't convince him that the book of mormon wasn't true. what a stud. he's only 21, so we're going to see what we can do to get him on a mission.

next sunday we'll have a baptism for a man named silvan, his wife kamala, and they're son and daughter, deva and thamoli. we met this family my first week in this area, and after dropping us twice, they are finally ready to get baptized. i can't even describe how flabbergasted i am at the change in this family. when we met them it was a completely disfunctional family. now they're so happy! i now know what it means in the book of mormon when it talks about people like Ammon being overcome with joy, even to exhausting their strength. that's how i feel when i see this family. the gospel changes people.

well, we're getting back into the rainy season here. it's rained every day this week... which means we've gotton soaked at least once every day. most days two or three times. umbrellas do absolutely no good, so i don't even carry one anymore.so i had been really wanting to buy a portable DVD player. a lot of missionaries have them and they are really nice because some people here don't have DVD players or TV's, so we can't watch any of the church videos. those are really nice because they have them in their native languages. so i bought i really nice one. i took out some money while i was in singapore for it, so that's where that money went. i'll take some pictures of it and send them to you. don't worry, i am EXTREMELY careful with it. after all, i cost me a bloody arm and a leg =).

i continue to pray for you all everyday. be safe, aight?

love,
elder troxel