Eric's e-mail from 9/29/08

Greetings from Freetown,

Ok, so let me first try and answer all of your eleventy-billion questions. My week was great thanks for asking. The most exciting part of my week was definitely the baptism we had on Saturday. We baptized a young boy of 16 yrs old who is amazingly educated for this country. His name is Wusu Samura and he is the son of the Man we baptized 2 weeks ago. Now the whole family is baptized and active. Now the fun part was filling the font before the service. Water here is not always running so in order for anyone to have water in case the pump is locked then you need a huge tank of water that you can draw out of. Well, the tank was not full at the chapel at belliar park (the font is outside) so we could not fill the font. We had to go to the Mission office, which is next door, and steal the water from thier tank to fill the baptismal font . . . Bucket by Bucket. It took like an hour for 8 of us to fill the baptismal font. But we were determinded to baptized these people so we were working hard in our shirts and ties. I actually got to baptize this time and it was pretty sweet.

When we are teaching someone we usually extend the commitment either during the first or second lesson. Now people here learn slowly so we split the first and second lessons into 4 different lessons. So we usually extend the invitation when we start the Plan of Salvation. Their response? Well they have two choices - yes or no. Mostly everyone will say yes, but its up to us to determine whether they will remain active after they are baptized. Teaching straight out of preach my gospel - like having the book in front of me, No. But all of our lessons are derived from it. We teach each lesson differently according to the needs of the investigators. Does it still rain alot - Yes, people here tell me that august is the worst month for rain, but I'm pretty sure September stole the crown from august this year. I'm used to being wet all the time and it really doesn't bother me.

How does Freetown dispose of Garbage? Well in a perfect world we would have trash cans and a dump but this city has NO trash cans so that means that their is trash everywhere. People here litter like its nothing. Our apartment has made friends with the neighbors so we give them our leftover rice in exchange that they take out our trash. Where they take it I don't know but as long as it out of our apartment I'm happy. Other apartments burn their trash, which if jimmy and cj were with me that would probably not be a good thing.

My Krio is coming along just fine. It comes and goes. Some days I can speak it like a Sierra Leonian and others . . . not so much. Krio is dominant in freetown. If i ever go to Bo then the dominant language is Mende but everyone can speak english as well. In Liberia everyone speaks English so no worries.

Elder Kpodi and I get along just fine. We both have a desire to work really hard and our numbers this week showed. We taught 35 lessons this week!!! We had a branch conference this week so our attendance was just shy of 200. We had 41 investigators at church. We have another busy week planned in teaching all of these new investigators.

Mom I'm fine, to answer your last question. This internet is really slow today so I'm not even going to try to send pictures. Osh ya.

Elder Degen