We have 11 progressing investigators

These three pictures are from Sis. Robison's blog. She took them at the St. Maarten Zone Conference last week on February 2nd.

Sint Maarten/Sint Martin Missionaries



Jonathan and his companion, Elder Marshall

It was a pretty good week. Zone conference was really nice. My companion, Elder Marshall, left the island to go to zone leader training in Trinidad. He won't be coming back because he is going to Guyana this transfer. I will get a new companion on Friday named Elder Cotton. Until then I am with Elder West. He is a funny Englishman that is still in his first transfer. His companion went with mine to the zone leader thing. So I am a senior companion for a couple of days. I don't know what to do! Just kidding! As much as I loved Elder Marshall, I love being with Elder West. I feel bad for him because he's an awesome guy but he has a forgetful, undependable, and argumentative trainer.
We have 11 progressing investigators but no solid baptism dates. Most of them are Guyanese and Jamaican. One is a 9 year old girl named Celine Mayeko-Coklee. Her parents are both members and they come to church every week but they are separated. She wants her father to baptize her, the problem is that he's not worthy. I would like to change her mind about having her dad do it.

I've been teaching most of our investigators for 6-8 weeks, it's very frustrating. I am really good at progressing investigators but I have trouble getting them to make the commitment to be baptized. The biggest problem is living together. We have 2 guys that are begging to be baptized but they each have kids and need to get married first. Here they have don't stay together and they have kids with other people. There is one family that the children have 4 different last names! Guyana wasn't as bad, they would usually stay together for the rest of their lives, just not get married because it was too expensive (4000 Guyanese Dollars)! They would go through a Hindu Rite. It isn't a legal marriage but most people honor it. We have a sponsor from Colorado that pays for all the weddings for new members, he only asks that we send him a picture of every wedding and that's easy enough.

The French side has a baptism on Saturday and I get to count it on my total as well because I helped teach the guy. He thinks that my french is hilarious! I don't know if I told this, but I can actually understand more French than Spanish now. I didn't think that that day would ever happen. I guess I was just in denial!!!

I'm in Matthew 27 in my personal New Testament reading and 3 Nephi 3 in the Book of Mormon.

The scripture of the week is Alma 3:26-27.

I had an interesting experience last week. The French Branch President invited us over to his house and we got to eat more weird food. This time it was Stingray Curry. It was very odd, it feels like calamari. It really wasn't too bad, just different. Since the guy can't understand me, I didn't feel too bad for making a few jokes about it being "Steve Irwin's Revenge". Little did I know that it would take revenge on everyone that ate it except me. Luckily, I was born with an iron stomach.

I will be leaving the island on April 1st to go to the office. Word has gotten out that I can fix anything, dang it!