We had a baptism this past weekend!

I heard from President Robison this week. I sent him a quick little note asking him about home and this was his reply:

Hey Elder Larson,

It is great to be home, but I feel more comfortable in a tie and white shirt. My goal is to keep feeling that way. I consider your last notes and letters to me some of the highlight payday messages of my mission. I love the miracle that has taken place in you. Read Mosiah 5 and substitute our names and you will see what I am talking about.

Love, President Robison

It was great to hear from him. Anyway, things are not well here in Trinidad, or in Guyana, or anywhere in the mission for that matter. If you remember I voiced some concerns when we found out who our new mission president would be. President Gamiette did alright for a while but he is starting to make a bunch of new rules that are going to make missionary work almost impossible in some areas. One of the most difficult is that you can only work within a 30 minute walk of the church. That's a big problem here because there aren't very many houses that are within 30 minutes! We are in the middle of the city and most of the buildings are stores. Elder Williams and I sent an e-mail to President today asking what we should do with our investigators. We are waiting for his reply so as of right now Elder Williams and I are continuing to do what we have been doing. Our investigators are all cool and we don't want to have to drop them just because they live a long ways away from the church. It's just frustrating because we don't see the reason behind it.

Guyana isn't doing very well right now either. Part of the reason is because most of the experienced missionaries are either in the islands or in Trinidad. The work is really suffering down there because there isn't any leadership.

Well, that's everything that is going on around here right now. Hopefully things will settle down and get going again. The last time I heard, we were in serious danger of not even baptizing 100 people for the month. That would be really bad! I think that part of the problem is that none of the missionaries know what President Gamiette wants us to do. He keeps sending us e-mails about retention and things like that but then he stands up in front of us and tells us that we need to focus on baptizing. There is a lot of confusion right now. It also doesn't help that he is telling us to go to our bishops for everything when our Area 70 told us not to bug the bishop but to go through the ward mission leader. It's all a mess and confusing right now. I'm sure it will get better as President gets some more experience.

We had a baptism this past weekend! The pictures are on Elder Williams camera so I'll have to borrow it from him. I will try to send them next week. The baptism was a little girl named Tekeisha (her nickname is Pinky). She is the daughter of the couple (David and Pheumia) that we baptized a few weeks ago.

We do things a little differently around here with teaching than the missionaries do in the states. The missionaries there would probably think that we're crazy for some of the things we do! For instance, we sometimes invite people to be baptized during their first lesson. It works! We know then if they are really interested or not. If they are willing to work towards baptism then they are worth going by again. We don't do it all of the time but we never teach a second lesson without doing it!

Technically there are 5 lessons in Preach My Gospel but we usually split it into about 8. Lesson 1 - the Restoration; lesson 2 - The Book of Mormon; lesson 3 - the Plan of Salvation; lesson 4 - the Gospel; and lessons 5-9 the Commandments (such as the Word of Wisdom, the Law of Chastity, the Sabbath Day, the 10 Commandments, obeying the law, praying, studying the scriptures daily, and tithing). Sometimes we do the Word of Wisdom and the Law of Chastity as lesson 3. There was even one time that we taught them before we had taught anything else!

Tithing isn't really a big deal around here, most people accept that without question. It is one of the things in the Bible that they understand. With the Word of Wisdom and the Law of Chastity they know they shouldn't do any of those things but they just don't want to change.

On Tuesday Elder Williams and I played basketball with some of the members. It was the two of us against 2 black guys. Believe it or not we actually won 72-56. I was really on and had 58 points! Needless to say I was pretty tired.

I went on an exchange with the zone leaders on Friday. I was with Elder Findlay, my old MTC companion. We went to a place on the eastern side of the island called Sange Grande (I've sent a couple of pictures from there). The zone leaders are tied with us for the most baptisms on Trinidad.

The scripture of the week is Ether 12:4,6,9,12.