Heyyyyyyo!

Super duper fam, how are you?

Wow this week has been nuts. Haha, as you all know Christmas was great. We ate LOADS of good food which was AWESOME! We put another baptismal date with some people that are actually progressing. Nesto and his sister JoeMary and I got to even perform my first baptism!

This past while hasn´t been exactly easy. We´ve been dealing with lots of rejection and have had to drop almost all of our progressing investigators, and we´ve had people chase us out of apartment complexes, and throw stuff at us and yeah all that fun stuff. But we were super blessed to find a mom and 5 children who were super ready and prepared to accept the gospel, named Atris. We first found her in the hospital, she was a reference of somebody. We gave her a blessing, and she felt much better, and the next visit we were able to visit her in her house. She had already been to the church number of times, and when we taught he she said, “I want to be baptized in the church of Jesus Christ”, which wow that was amazing. We put a baptismal date that following Saturday for her and her children. We went to visit her again and she was sick again, we gave her another blessing and she felt better and was even able to return to work, but come Saturday she was sick and couldn´t be baptized. We found out she was sent to the capital to find out what was really wrong with her. Come Sunday we saw one of our friends in the church who looked really sad, we asked him what was wrong, he said that Atris had passed away that Sunday morning. It´s tough because she left behind 5 children, the oldest the age of 13, they are all over at the capital now, but we are trying to locate some of them to have the missionaries teach them.

We´ve been helping out this Haitian man that lives here. He is trying to learn Spanish so he can get a job in Puerto Plata. HE has absolutely nothing, and his wife left him 3 years ago and went to the states and is living with some guy he doesn´t know. He can´t afford to divorce his wife who is in the states, and he also can´t afford to marry the woman that he has 3 children and lives with, but.. he has tons of desire to know about the gospel, and is reading the book of Mormon in Spanish and all kinds of books we give him and is giving us tons of references. It´s been interesting working with people like him. Now we have to get him to ditch his “wife” for a time until he can afford to divorce his wife in the states and get remarried. Crazy situation, but his brother lives with him too and he is super strong, so we are doing all we can to get his brother Wilkins to go on a mission. Wilkins works and earns all the money for the family and is super strong in the church. We taught the family a super lesson about the temple and the family has loads of desire to go. They´ve also been teaching us some creole which has been fun. Hebert is his name that need to divorce his wife, luckily he knows English because he lived in Jamaica and the states for a few years. This man needs a miracle, he has lots of desire to do whats right, but has to learn Spanish, and leave his family to do so. Tough situation.

ohh what else cool happened this week. OH I baptized someone in the river on Saturday! It was the other missionaries investigator, but they wanted me to baptize Filogem. He is Haitian, and doesn´t really speak any Spanish or English, he doesn´t have a job and he lives alone, we have no idea how he is surviving, but he walks more than an hour to and from church every Sunday. This man has dedication, wow. I was super blessed to be able to baptize him. We went to some river in the middle of nowhere and we arrived late, so it was dark out. Haha I´m sure I felt stuff swimming around my legs when I was standing in the water, but it was really cool experience, and one I´ll never forget. It´s because of people like him and Nikel that I am dedicated to learn creole, to be able to help them more.
This week has been super too because we were led to a SUPER family named Castro Feliz. They are very friendly and are progressing well, and they gave us a killer reference. We went to the references house, her name is Ruth, and she was so happy to receive us, and told us she had talked to the missionaries years ago when she was pregnant with her son, and that she was very blessed by their visits. We saw her son and he is 10 now, but he wasn´t doing so well. He was attacked by some man like Ruth´s old boyfriend or something, with a machete and has a huge scar on his side, but the mom is so humble and willing to listen we are happy to teach her. We have another appointment for Wednesday.

Yup that's about it for this week. Crazy stories. It was great to talk to you all this week! have a super happy new year!
love you all,