E-mail 09/16/2013

Familia,

Well this week has been slow, their have been highlights like finding a scorpion, well actually an alacran (scorpion) in our house. It´s been raining here almost every day and it has force some of the more interesting animals/bugs out of their cubbys. We found a tarantula in the road, well as far as tarantula go it was a small one. Another interesting thing is, well when I first got here I saw a big area for a river and only a small flow of water, and because this place is called Rio Grande or big river and so I thought well that´s a small thing for a big river. But after all the rain it filled up about a fifth of the space, but a big storm hit yesterday, we had to cross about three small rivers on our way home and this morning when I saw the river it filled up all the base, but it still has high banks so we will see how big it will get. But other then that it was my companions birthday Saturday.

Well as for the baptisms last week what happened is, well we decided that it wasn´t necessary to cure our investigators of leprosy so we didn´t do it in the river. We went and talked to the owner of a water park to see if we could do it in the pool.  Every thing went fine I baptized Hna. Concepcion and my companion did the other two. I went first and well her knees came up out of the water so I had to do it again. Other then that everything went well finished up and left then a few hours later we were taking a quick bathroom break and when I got out of the bathroom my companion said that the baptisms aren´t valid.  I wasn´t sure if I heard him right so I said "what". So he said I raised the left hand and not the right, so I thought about which one I used and well it was one of those moments where you want to bang your head against the wall. Well we just paused for a moment just pondering how we could have made such a mistake, I did worked in the baptistry of the temple so it wasn´t the first time I did a baptism and it wasn´t just me, my companion did the same after me and no one else caught it, not even the witnesses. So after the moment of pondering we started to try and figure out what we could do. We called the branch president and explained what happened and he said that he had a meeting the next day in Fresnillo so we could just take them with and do it in a font. Well the next day when we got to the stake center and started to fill the font, well because the water turns off sometimes during the day and their wasn´t enough backup water to fill the font. So we started to think of what else we could do, then someone told use that they had a baptism the other day in another chapel and that it still had water. So we drove over there and most of the water leaked out but it had flowing water. So we just waited for it to fill. My companion just did all three and we made sure this time it was the right hand raised. So needless to say we won´t be making that mistake again.

Love you all!!

Elder Durrant