February 9, 2014

Hello. Happy Birthday Dad and Amber tonight. Tell Amber I hope she gets feeling better soon and to take it easy! I wrote a letter to Dad and Amber and sent it this week, so you might get it sometime next month. Haha. When Maegan wrote me a letter it took 6 weeks to get here. 

So, yeah. What happened this week? We had a baptism on Saturday, which was awesome. I gave the talk and the musical number. I always give the musical number. By the time I come home I'll probably know every song in the hymn book. Funny moment at the baptism. So our investigator goes out into the hall to go into the font, we realize that we don't have a picture with him yet so we chase after him to take a quick picture. The Elders realize they didn't take a picture with their investigator either so they run out to do the same (two people getting baptized). Bishop and our investigator get in the water and bishop starts. I realize something is not right: there are no witnesses. I try to stop Bishop "Bishop, bishop, hulat lang! Hulat! Wa'ay witnesses" He doesn't listen and keeps going. I run out and grab Elder Cannon and drag him in. He sees our investigator go all the way under. I guess that counts here. President Lopez says that when things like that happens, just forgive them. It would have been worse had we told bishop to do it again, he would have been humiliated and gotten defensive. So we just let it go. The church is still developing here. The Bishops are still learning. Just this past week we got cushions on our benches, it was so weird. Yesterday during relief society, I realized that I missed the relief society rooms back home. The soft chairs, carpet, nice walls. We have no idea what we have back home. I never knew what a blessing it was to have such a developed, organized church where people know what they're doing. 

Last week during the Sacrament hymn, the piano played one song while the congregation sang another. It's one of those hymns where there's two tunes to the same hymn. Apparently they only knew one of them, so they sang the one they knew while the piano played the other. I tried to help them get back on track, but it didn't work. So I just waited until it was over. It was... pretty gloomy. 

We didn't have any investigators at church yesterday. It's hard when that happens because that moves everyone's baptism date another month. They have to go to church 4 times in a row in order to qualify for baptism. President still wants us to get a baptism every week, that hasn't happened yet in this area, but we're trying. It's so hard to balance everything: finding 18 new investigators every week, teaching them, teaching our other investigators, helping them get to church, helping them progress, getting to know all of our ward members, finding all of our ward members using a list that's not updated that has no addresses. We're pretty busy here. The time is starting to fly by for me. I can't believe it's P-Day again. 

Anyway, sorry I don't have anything too crazy and interesting to write this week. Both Sister Dequina and I are exhausted today, we'll probably take a little nap later. Next week I'll try to send some pictures and stuffs. The person behind me is watching a really inappropriate show behind me with soooo many swear words so I'm trying to finish as fast as I can. I have not heard those words in a long time and I don't think they understand how offensive they are. Oh my gosh, every other word is the bad F word! Ah! Anyway I love you all and I'm getting out of here. 

Love you all! Love, Sister Watkins