Elder Olson's Church Mission 2019-2021: week 9: First Baptism

Week 9, 3rd week of first transfer

October 6, 2019

I never thought I'd say this, but I found something worse than spiders and that's cockroaches. I hate them so much. Anyways...

I hope you all enjoyed conference. I tried. It was all in Portuguese so I just got bits and pieces but it was good.

The other day at lunch, we were at a members house and the grandpa lived there and he asked our names and then asked where we were from and all that stuff and then we proceeded to have the same conversation about 30 times.He asked my name, where I was from, what the capitol of the United States was...hahaha. Then he told us this story about missionaries and then he bore his testimony and showed us a picture of his parents. And then he'd go into the other room and do something then come back and restart the conversation. It was pretty funny. There was also this man on the street and we were walking along the street at like 8 o'clock, we were finishing up for the night, and this guy would always follow us and he would be like "ELDERS! ELDERS!" so we'd stop and he'd ask for a pamphlet because we hand out pamphlets sometimes and he was like, "I want a pamphlet about the word of god" (he sounded a little out of it) so we'd just give him a pamphlet, haha. But it was pretty funny.

Last week I said the baptism of Juan wasn't til next week but I guess I was lost in translation because it WAS this week. The confirmation isn't until next week because of general conference. So I baptized him on Saturday. It was good. The baptismal meeting was supposed to be between sessions at 4pm in the afternoon but we went and opened up the font and the ward mission leader had forgotten to clean it (that's his job when we tell him there's a baptism) and it was full of centipedes which, oh, they're so gross. There was one the size of my forearm. It was pretty nasty. Luckily, other ward members came and cleaned it out because, oh, there was no way I could've done that. It was GROSS! But they cleaned it out and after the second session we did the baptism. It was good. The first baptism. Exciting.

We are also teaching a man named Uemerson and his girlfriend Ilani and his brother and wife (not really teaching the brother, he doesn't want anything to do with us) but they all live in the same house. We're trying to help Uemerson and Ilani get to baptism, so first off they have to get married. So we will see how that goes. They are in their mid twenties and they are struggling with money issues so he has been having questions about how he's supposed to provide for his family and stuff like that. So hopefully that can lead somewhere good. Uemerson really likes the lessons we share and we've shared a couple of videos with him and he's gone and watched a couple videos on his own, but they have a problem with keeping commitments. We've invited them to church quite a few times and they haven't come so hopefully they can progress or we will have to drop them because they aren't keeping commitments.

Back to conference, I thought it was really cool that all the talks were focused on Jesus Christ and how He needs to be a central part of our lives and how we can only find joy in Christ. They talked about disconnecting from our phones and connecting to the spirit more and how the devil tries to deceive us with the things of the world but we just need to focus on Christ because He is the only way we can have joy. He atoned for our sins and all of our pains and afflictions. So when we have hard struggles, we can turn to Christ and he can help us. I also heard there were some changes to the organization of the church but I didn't really understand it because it was in Portuguese so I'll have to have that explained to me today when I call home.

That's all for this week!

--Elder Olson

Pictures of the house where Elder Olson lives. Right now there are only 2 elders there but 2 more will join them in a few weeks at the next transfer.