Ok I don't even know where to start. This has been one of the weirdest weeks of my entire mission.
Raul didn't pass his original baptismal interview because of a couple of problems he had had in his past. During the interview they called one of the mission counselors, Pdte. Reategui, who told Raul that he wanted a personal interview with him during his next trip to Puerto. They set up the interview for this past Wednesday when Presidente Reategui would be here. Wednesday afternoon Raul had his interview, then afterwards Pdte Reategui talked to our branch president and to us about the situation and to see what input we had. After talking to us about it he then replied "Well, the only option I have left is to tell Raul to get baptized as soon as possible!" With Reategui's approval we were able to move along with Raul's baptism. However, in his original interview they didn't do the last two questions so they had to interview him again to finish those two questions. Elder Wilde, our zone leader, and I decided he could get baptized on the 3rd. That would allow us to do his interview before church yesterday and announce the baptismal service to everybody. However Presidente Cipriano, the branch president, told us that we couldn't do it that day because he'd be traveling. It had to be this week. We were really worried about that because we hadn't invited anybody to his baptism, nobody knew it was going to happen, until Cipriano had an idea. There was an activity for all the youth and YSA in Puerto that was basically like a camping trip 20 minutes out of the city. Raul would be baptized there, in the river. We called Raul he said he was fine with it so Saturday morning he finished his interview then we went and baptized him in the river in the middle of the jungle with every youth and ysa in the district there watching. It was nuts. I don't have any photos right now but I'll try to send them as soon as possible because they were crazy.
I'm so happy to see Raul get baptized. He's such a good kid and he was so excited about being a member of the church and starting over. I don't know what we did to be blessed enough to find him, but I'm so grateful we did.
Yesterday we put another baptismal date with an investigator named Deisy. She's from Juliaca but comes here to Puerto on the weekends and has attended church with us a couple of times now. We never taught her before because she told us she was going to stay in Juliaca but yesterday she came up to me and said "Elder, I don't think I'm going to be in Juliaca anymore and I'm going to start attending here more. Can you baptize me?" Obviously I wasn't going to say no. She's kind of weird though, she records the lessons on her phone so that she doesn't forget anything and she never wants to leave the church. Yesterday we taught her and Raul accompanied us because we were going to teach him after so we finished the lesson and I told her "Look hermana we've got to teach Raul now" kind of like "please leave so we can teach him" and she told me "That's alright I'll just sit in and listen. That way I learn more!" I've never seen that before from an 18 year old girl, it's super weird. But she's really excited and I think it's another sure baptism. She'll be baptized in the end of September.
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