Samuel's Mission E-mail June 2, 2008

Everyone:
Rosie's baptism was great! But, I'll get to that in a second. I'll start back up where I left off.
Tuesday of last week, we took Elder Gathro's project up to the mission home. It was a life-size cut-out of a missionary (Elder Hyrum Gene--Hy Gene for short. Yes, it has to do with keeping our apartments clean). We also had Rosie's baptismal interview and visited Luis Magana.
On Wednesday we had Zone Conference. Elder Gene was introduced, and it was explained that he'll be assigned to whichever companionship has the cleanest apartment in the mission, and he'll share a bit of his money with his companion. We also visited Jose Cabrera, did a bit of street contacting, and visited the Aguilar family.
On Thursday we had our weekly planning, tracted a bit, and visited Maira Perez and Luis Magana. On Friday we had companionship exchanges with the zone leaders. The zone leader who was with us, Elder Alexander, is an old companion of Elder Chadwick, so they spent some time reliving old times. We did some street contacting, we taught Erica Nevaro, an investigator of Elder Gathro's who's been out of contact for a while, and Oscar, who we met in the street and is kind of crazy. We also did a bit of service for some members in Bell Gardens, we went over a last few things with Rosie for her baptism, and we visited the familia Aguilar again.
On Saturday we did a lot of tracting in Downey. We met this lady named Esmerelda who seemed really prepared, so hopefully all will go well with her.
On Sunday, we had church. The Medinas had invited another friend of Justin's to church, and he came! His name is Gustavo, and he came to Rosie's baptism, as well. Rosie's baptism went very well, even though she was incredibly nervous about it. She bore a pretty powerful testimony afterwards. We also did a bit of tracting and visited the Taylors, a family in Bell Gardens in which the husband just recently got baptized.
Well, I think that catches everything up. We actually don't have Preparation Day today--we're going to the temple on Wednesday--but we have a bunch of appointments Wednesday evening so we took two hours out of Wednesday to use today. We have those appointments because we just barely found out about our temple day. Communication and organization in the mission... often leave much to be desired. Oh, well. I guess that's why it's an adventure, no?
Elder Samuel Stephens