November 14, Mazatlan Mexico

Hola Familia,

Hey! Things are going pretty good here right now in Mazatlan. I had another pretty good week. Today it was raining off and on and when it rains here it rains pretty hard! This has been my first experience with that though and ended up being kind of fun.. We have had a lot going on this week but are still trying to find more people. On Saturday though we had our first baptism! Elder Ward baptized this 9 year old boy named Fernando. We had been teaching him the lessons because his grandma had asked E. Ward and his previous companion if the missionaries could when they have time. His grandma and some of his other family are members in the Church but they hadn´t gone to church for awhile. So he and some of his brothers had been going with their grandma to church each sunday. We also had some Zone meetings this week. We had a Zone meeting in the beginning of the week where we worked together on how we can set some more goals. Then on saturday we had a Zone conference where President Cantu came down. He gave us a lot of good information too. We learned more about how we can plan effectively for the week and the things we need to be doing to have the spirit. We always talk a lot about how important it is to have the spirit during our lessons. We need to be thinking about our investigators during personal study time too so that we can share scriptures with them and find out what exactly they need to hear.

This week we have a baptism scheduled for Maria Guadalupe. She excited for her baptism and we saw her at Church on Sunday so that was good. We had one of the members in our ward go with her too so that she doesn´t feel awkward going alone. It´s really important for the people we teach to have friends in the ward too. That´s one of the things we didn´t talk about as much in the MTC that  I have learned more now. We´re working with Marcos and Terri right now and they are still waiting for the birth certificate needed for Terri so that they can get married before we baptize them. It is supposed to arrive very soon so we are hoping to baptize them this week too. Besides that we really want to find more people to teach so we are hoping that we will be able to find some new investigators this week. I´m trying to talk more during the lessons but Spanish is still hard. Every week it is getting a little easier, but mainly understanding it is getting easier still. The talking part still has it´s difficulties. I´m enjoying it here and it has cooled down a little bit so that is good!

Love,
Elder Carlson