Baptisms and Guns N' Roses in the Chapel

This week was pretty eventful.

So last week, (This actually happened before last P-day, but I forget to write about it last time) we got the call from our Zone Leaders that Pres. Leal was going to come to Bauru to make his usual visits and interviews. And, surprise, he had selected my ward to visit! In addition, Sis. Leal was going to visit the house to see how things are. Há, needless to say, we spent a good part of the last P-day cleaning the house. (By the way, in the end she decided that she didn´t have enough time, so our cleaning was in vain...ha ha) Anyway, we were a little nervous. Not that we´re slackers or anything, but you know, having “The Boss” come to visit your cubicle of the office for the day kinda makes you hope that everything goes well.

And actually, it did. That week we didn´t have many investigators at church, but the ones that were there Pres. Leal was really happy to meet. One of them is the wife of our neighbor. He´s an RM, but when they got married he was inactive in the church. But he returned to full activity right after last General Conference, so she´s been receiving our discussions. And what´s more, she accepted our baptismal invite, and is getting baptized on Saturday! Whoo hoo! The power of member referrals at work, eh?

Anyway, back to the visit with Pres. Leal. Turns out he made the visit to our ward because he wanted to see the population of the ward and area, because he might put one more companionship in our area, which would be a real relief. Our area is pretty big, and there are parts of it that we rarely get to visit.

In other news, the Sisters in our district have been teaching a single mom who has three daughters who have all been accepting baptism one by one. The Mom hasn´t yet, as they are going to move to the USA ((Some small town somewhere in New York)and she wants her future husband who lives there to accept the gospel first. And since my comp. Elder C. is the District Leader, we´ve been traveling every week to the Sister´s area to do the interviews. And funny enough, I got to baptize the two daughters who have accepted baptism. Elder C. asked the first kid who she wanted to baptize her (I thinks she´s about 12 or 13), and she pointed and me and said, “I want the Gringo to do it.” So I baptized her two weeks ago, and last week was her sister.

There´s kind of a funny story with the baptisms. When I baptized the other girl´s sister (I´d use names but they´re hard for me to remember...), I was a little nervous with because I was trying to remember the baptismal prayer in Portuguese AND her long and complicated name (all Brazilians have at least 4 names. She had about six.) I had to ask her to repeat it about 6 times while we were standing in the freezing cold water in the font. (The water heater is perpetually broken.) Also, the last baptism that I performed I had to do twice because she forgot to tie her hair up. Anyway, add up all those factors, and I ended up using a bit more force than was necessary when I was putting her under the water. Elder C. said it kinda looked more like a drowning than a baptism for a second. He and the girl´s sister laughed at me for a bit after that. I wasn´t trying to be irreverent or anything, just a combo of Portuguese and cold water = a good dunking.

So, it was a good learning experience for me to practice my baptism skills, and I was glad to help out the Sisters and get to know people outside of my area. The twelve year old girl always carries a guitar around, and has a strange affinity for Guns N´Roses. I never thought I´d hear “Sweet Child o`Mine” being played by a Brazilian twelve year old in an LDS church.

Oh yeah, last night as we were heading back to the house, I stopped and gave a pass along card to a lady standing in front of our house. After I said my part, she asked me if I was American. I said that I was. But even more interesting, she asked if I was from New Zealand! I said that my Dad was, then I asked her how she knew that. She replied that there used to be an old man who lived down the street, (just a few blocks from our house) who was from New Zealand and who spoke Portuguese like I did, and who looked a little like me. (By the way, she is the first Brazilian who correctly identified a part of my nationality. I was getting a little tired of being asked if I am Mexican...) Apparently he died a few years ago, and I tried to found out if she knew his name, but all she could tell me was “Donald something”. She said the other part to his name she couldn´t say because it was in English. Now, I know that I don´t have any New Zealand accent whatsoever, but maybe when you speak Portuguese it doesn´t matter, everybody sounds like a foreigner. Há, it was interesting to find out that there had been a Kiwi living among the Brazilians of Bauru. Small world, huh?

Well, my time´s spent for this week.

Catch you kids later.

-Luke “I´m-Maori/Mohawk-not-Mexican” Heperi