Things are still going pretty well in St. Lucia. Sounds like there is a lot of snow back home. Do you know what we have? A bunch of sand, surf (not for us of course), and shine! I am surprised at how fast I have gotten used to the warm weather again. We have A/C in our apartment and we sleep with it set on 78 degrees and I still have to sleep with a sheet on every night! My companion thinks that I'm nuts but he's only been out for about 6 months. Once he has a summer down here under his belt he'll understand. I will admit, I do miss being truly cold though.
So our family of 17 is doing okay. We are teaching 5 of them now. They are all excited about the gospel and 2 of them have baptism dates set for this month. Their names are Sheba (26 year old woman) and Samuel (he's 20 something). We are also teaching the Augustine family that live in Vieux Fort itself. The Mom and 2 of her kids are planning on getting baptized sometime in February too. We watched the Testaments with them last night and it brought up a lot of good questions. Even the father sat in with us and showed some sincere interest. Things are starting to look up in this area. I just hope that it continues to grow.
We had 5 people at church yesterday and they have all committed to be baptized during February. We are so excited about that! They all attended the baptism of a little lady named Lucy yesterday after church. That was pretty fun. This was the first baptism in the branch since November. The waves were huge so she and the elders kept getting knocked over! It was a fun day!
The pictures in today's blog were taken from the Faux's Blog (the senior couple in Jonathan's area). The first picture is from Lucy's baptism and the second is from Branch Choir practice on Sunday (unfortunately Jonathan's face is blocked by he microphone).
Things with Elder Morris are going pretty well. He has a short fuse and allows things to get to him pretty easily. It makes me a bit frustrated to be honest. It's weird to find myself describing someone like that because I know that's how I used to be! He also likes to spend most of his time by himself but I think that's because he and one of the other Elders in the apartment don't get along. Elder Lundberg (the other kid from Logan) and I just laugh about it and talk sports which neither of the other two do. I sometimes almost wish they weren't here at all! Elder Morris has started to mellow out a little bit though. It's bound to happen because I'm one of the most layed-back people in the mission and he's stuck with me all day, everyday! It will just take some time but he'll get there.
We spent most of our day on Saturday rebuilding our branch president's bathroom for a service project. We built him a brand new bathtub out of concrete and cinder blocks. We will be doing the tiling sometime this week. It has been quite a project but I am starting to get the hang of using cement. It's almost like building a giant sand castle!
Tuesday was our district meeting. This is a picture of lunch. Yum! Pizza!
Do you remember Tom Penrose? The guy that was the med student that helped me in St. Maarten? His mom is going to med school too and you'll never guess where she is going... Vieux Fort, St. Lucia! Just down the road. She's in our branch but I haven't met her yet. She is away right now but she should be back this week.
My patois is coming along slowly. I would say about 1/2 of the language is the same as Creole but they change a few of the vowel sounds. I can understand most of the stuff people say but I can't really respond because of the differences.
Anyway, life is good. My toes are fine. I wish we had a bigger super market though. It's like being in Tobago again. Food is already starting to get repetitive.
The scripture of the week is Mosiah 3:5-12.