Cold Baptisms

Dear family,

Wow, what a week it has been! Yesterday we had 3 baptisms that almost didn't happen. But, like poppy said, "Thank heaven this is not a church of a man, but it is Jesus Christ's church." And I think for that reason alone we were able to survive all of the challenges. Mara (12) and Melvin (10) were baptized. Their mom came to the baptism and they were just fine with everything. But, we got a call from some elders in another area across the river that said that they had been teaching someone that lived in our area and were going to baptize her yesterday. Yeah, I thought that wasn't allowed. I was right. President Torgan told them they had to combine their baptism with ours, which began a day full of craziness. Our baptismal font was rebuilt and the heater was fixed--or so we thought. While we were filling up the font and making cookies and preparing for the party afterwards, we realized that the water was freezing cold. We were praying that the caldeira would work, but when our members came, they started freaking out. They didn't want us to have baptisms in cold water. I thought it was heavily ironic because most of them had cold baptisms. More than half of them to be exact. I have never had a baptism with warm water in this area. Yeah, needless to say my patience was coming to an end. But, we prayed and asked Mara and Melvin if they still wanted to be baptized. Mara looked at us and said, "Claro!" (of course!) and Melvin said, "Não importa. Tem agua fria em Cabo Verde." (It doesn't matter. They have cold water in Cape Verde too.) Which is not really true, but I didn't want to contradict :)

So, finally, it all happened. On a cold January night, those two kids were baptized along with another girl who apparently lives close to the chapel, but her family lives in the area of the elders. We are pretty exhausted, but we have lots more work to do!

It will be a great week. We are working with Fátima, a mother and her son, Diogo for baptism this next weekend. I don't even want to think about the water issue...but we'll get there...one step at a time.

That's all for this week. I hope that everything is going well for you guys. I love you all!

Irmã Pérez