Panama, Baptisms and Patacones!

 

Making patacones. 

My favorite thing.  Green plantains chopped up into biggish pieces then fried a little. You smash them to make them flat then you fry them completely.  Delicious.

 Baptism of Marlon and Eraida

I put my left foot into Panama today. Not my whole body because that would be against mission rules to leave the country.

And thats apple pop. only in Panama

 

Hello.  times have been a little frustrating here..  We did have our baptisms here in neilly with Marlon and Eraida, but all the rest in the zone fell through..  We finished the month without baptizing a single family.  The zone conference was pretty good but it killed us because it took away 3 complete work days here. 

 Elder Martino was very good. He told us that we need to picture everyone we see dressed in white in 3 places.  The baptismal font, the temple, and the celestial kingdom.  The way he said it was way powerful and i liked it. 

The zone counsel went better then i thought.  I was nervous because my zone was sucking.  But when I gave mine they didnt ask any questions just thanked me for preparing a good report.  And afterward president told some of the other ZLs to implement some of the ideas that i had for my zone.  So it was good to be recognized for actually trying. 

But it was kinda exciting to hear some news from Paso Ancho and Elder Cherrington.  When I was there we worked so hard to find people from the directory that were completely inactive.  There was one family we found that had been inactive 10 years.  We were working hard with them and we were trying to get to the daughter in the family who had recently married a non-member.  We taught her about the temple and the proclamation to the world and was crying and said how bad she wanted that for her family and her husband to be baptized.  But she said that he was a tough catholic.  So we put appointments with her and him many times but every time they fell through.  We left them the proclamation for the world and a picture of the Costa Rica temple that was put in the living room. But in the end I never got to teach the guy.  That was about 3 months ago.   2 weeks ago they got a call from her,  saying that her husband had seen the temple picture so much and read with her the proclamation to the world and he wants to get baptized.  He has gone to church the past 2 weeks and last week went to see the temple and he gets baptised next week i think.  Finally, Elder Cherrington gets to see a family baptised after all the work we did there. 

I did go grocery shopping and it was amazing!  I bought shoe polish, dish soap, cups, plantains, toothpaste and food.  I was so happy shopping there.  Now we actually can eat.  And drink.  We didnt have cups to drink in the house. 

Gotta go! Love you, Elder Graham