This week

How funny to see Mom's pictures of the city where I started my mission. I still look back at that mission as a real mission. I'm really grateful I could be in Vegas for 5 weeks to know have good companions and get going on missionary work.

Well, this week was fun. We baptized G yesterday! His entire family showed up and his grandma made a million tamales for the refreshments. That kid is so spunky. His mom is so happy that he decided to get baptized. 

This week we definitely worked our butts off. We made sure not one moment went to waste in looking for new people, talking to all the people we could, visiting less actives, and so forth. While we had worked hard before this week we really did all we could. We were blessed primarily with a great satisfactory feeling on Saturday night and were able to see a great blessing on Sunday. Sister M  has given us many references before and we've taught them and committed them and everything, but nobody ever goes to church here. To our not-astonishment, her friend this week who had committed to go to church did not show up. But - somebody else did. And she lives in the same house! J just moved from Chiapas to Xalapa (to the M family conjunto de casas) to go to school on Saturday and Sister M took her to church. She loved church, made friends with 5 different families who are active members, got to learn how to say prayers, was given a Book of Mormon, and saw a baptismal service - and all that before we taught her last night! Easiest baptismal invitation I have ever made in my entire mission. She basically asked us to baptize her.   She wants to be baptised on her birthday later this month. Woo-hoo!

I know that wherever somebody is serving in Mexico there's always at least 1 prepared person to receive the gospel. At least 1. The good news is we should have 2 baptisms for the 31st. With all the rest of our efforts we will be putting in day after day I know the Lord will keep blessing us. Even though there aren't a lot of interested people in my little colonia we are finding all the people we can and loving the members and with that I am a happy Elder.

I'm eating up the French grammar book you sent me. The tenses are exactly like Spanish ones but you just don't speak in four of them. I wonder how many languages would be like that. Is German at all similar in that regard? Could there possibly exist more than 14 tenses? I can imagine some weird rules like conjugating differently for all females or conjugations for one, two, or three or more people, or things like that, but I'm not sure if another tense exists in another mindset. It's hard to imagine that.

Also, Anton sent me a German poem of his and the verb ''lassen'' is just like French ''laisser,'' but obviously it's with an n because it's German. Languages are so fun.

My goal is to be fluent in 4 languages before I graduate from BYU - English, Spanish, French, and German. I'm pretty decided after French I'll tackle German with classes at BYU and a friend to Skype and ask any question I want to. This reminds me! Anton says that he's likely going to visit us this upcoming summer with a friend of his who also went to the states for a year. His friend went to California so they're planning to tour the west coast. I told him when he comes he's totally welcome to stay with us and party.

That's it for this week.  Just a picture of a tiny version of the Liahona magazine (at the top) and one picture of G's baptism.