Doris was Baptized!

February 1, 2011

Dear Family,

Wow, what an awesome thing to see my family members becoming members of the church and being baptized!!!! Thanks for the pictures of Wendy and Addyson. That is so awesome!!!!!!!!

Well as for me, I have had a super wild week. On Tuesday I had an intercambio with another companionship from Vergara. It went well and we were also able to give Doris her baptismal interview. It was great and she passed. On Wednesday, we got a call from a member of the church in another branch. Apparently he had seen the missionaries doing some things they weren’t supposed to be doing and in the end we had two missionaries emergency transferred out of the zone on Friday morning. On the same day as all this craziness, we had to travel all over the zone to do four other baptismal interviews. It was rough. The original plan was for one of our district leaders to do them, but he was caught up with all the other problems and left early to Montevideo... (It was ridiculous). This past week we had planned five baptisms in our zone alone. It was like the jaws of hell were open against us and we really had to fight hard to get through. But in the end we won and all five miraculously went through. I even had to fix a bunch of plumbing and electrical problems on the pumps to fill the baptismal fonts! We almost had to cancel because the font wouldn’t fill. Luckily I have some experience from before the mission to fix stuff like that. The big news… DORIS WAS BAPTIZED. I have sent some pictures so I hope you like them.

Doris and Elder Sluder on her baptismal day

Elder Rosium, Doris and Elder Sluder

Elder Sluder and Elder Rosium on P-Day

This morning we had an awesome zone activity. I cooked tacos for the whole zone and we played some futbol. They loved it! I had to roll out 100 tortillas by hand last night because tortillas don’t exist here. It made for an interesting night. So I just made ‘em out of scratch and it worked out great!!!

Dad, the last thing I need to mention is something that is actually very serious that I need you to take care of. The other day President DaSilva called me up and asked me why I was using my Facebook account. He dropped a cane on me for it. (Note from Dad: The Uruguayan term is “bajar la caña”, literally translated as “drop the cane”. It is a figure of speech roughly equivalent to the phrase “lowering the boom”). I explained to him that I don’t use Facebook. I told him that you are uploading pictures and you are in control of it. I told him I knew that I cannot use it and don’t even remember the password to get on if I wanted to. I believe one of the disobedient missionaries told him in an interview that he didn’t think that going on Facebook was (that) bad because he noticed that Elder Sluder had a Facebook account and Elder Sluder is a zone leader. Yeah… can you believe that? Go figure! Anyway, President DaSilva asked me to delete it. I said of course, but because I don’t know how to logon without the password, you will have to do it for me. So Dad, please delete my Facebook account! ASAP!!!! I figure I’ll just start one up when I get back in 7 months anyway. (Note from Dad: John’s Facebook account has been deactivated as of this morning)

Thanks, Dad for your letter. I’m super happy to hear that you are having success with your choir and I’m even happier to hear about the family baptism that we had. Congratulations ADDYSON AND WENDY!!!! Well I love you a lot and look forward to hearing from you next week.

Love, Elder JOHN SLUDER

PS. Next week is changes and it will be much different than usual. We will no longer be going to Tres Cruzes for changes. I think I will even be able to email you on Monday and won’t have to take P-day on Tuesday like we used to do before. It’s going to be so much better. Oh and I think that Hermana Lundskog will be here next week. Is that right? If so, I’m really looking forward to seeing her.