Baptism

It was great to have a day at home on Saturday, with only one lesson to prepare. I caught up on a number of things, including fixing the time/date on a bunch of my photo files that had been messed up by a file explorer app. One of the magnets on my new tablet cover came loose, and I tried unsuccessfully to superglue it back in. I also worked on my temple prep lesson for Sunday.  In the evening late I marked up the lesson material for my class the next day and printed out some quotes to have the students read.

The camera on my Moto G5 Plus phone stopped working. At first I thought it was the app, then it happened with two camera apps, so I thought it was the camera. Then I found that, when I took out the SD card, the camera worked fine. My current theory is that my 128GB SD card might be dying. That theory would also account for why taking photos had been slow for a while. For now I put a new 64GB card in, which seems to be working ok, but ultimately is too small for the number of photos I should take by the end of my mission. Maybe a reformat of the old 128GB card will do it, but I might just buy a new one.

At 7pm we had a baptism for Chris, a Nigerian refugee/immigrant who has been participating at the friendship center. He has become good friends with the Canfields, the LDS Charities missionaries working there. Chris has a wife and two sons who live in Lecce, but he is here looking for work. What a nice man! His English is very understandable compared to many of the immigrants. My wife sat down with him before the baptism and asked questions to get to know him. He cried when he showed her a picture of his young family. He asked me to baptize him, which was an honor, though I really don't know him that well yet. I had brought white clothing from California on the off chance that I might get to baptize somebody, so that paid off.

 

 

 

The baptism went off without a hitch, but the garment bag I had used to hold my street clothes had a problem. The zipper pull broke off as I was getting dressed, in such a way that I couldn't get my clothes out! This was a very cheap (3€) garment bag that I had bought on Amazon. At first I thought I could get the zipper to open, but I finally had to rip the bag to get to my clothes. It was weird standing in the bathroom wearing just a towel around my waist and no way to get dressed! I had Chris go get Dee after he got dressed, but by the time she got there I had already ripped it open. She was afraid that I had fainted or was ill or something. Being in a hurry because it had taken a while, I slipped on my black dress shoes without untying them first. It hurt like crazy! I tried again, same result. Finally I realized that I had left a big plastic sock sorter in the tip of my shoe, which was causing the pain. Anyway, finally I got dressed and came out to rejoin the service, without everyone knowing the comedy of errors that held me up.

Afterwards, being Rome 3 Ward, we had a great spread of desserts and lots of visiting.

 

I also brought in a new microphone that I had purchased on Amazon after the old one died. There hadn't been a way to do live translation in our ward for a few weeks. The missionaries used the new mic to translate the service from English into Italian for the locals. Since Chris doesn't really speak Italian, it was the logical choice, and we all chuckled that they were the ones wearing headsets this time.

The Canfields were there for the service. Elder Canfield will do the confirmation on Sunday in Sacrament meeting. Their apartment (on the 2nd floor American style) had recently been burglarized overnight while they were home asleep. The thieves got three cell phones, a bit of cash, and Sister Canfield's wedding ring (the big loss, obviously). As they told us the story how the thieves used a ladder and cut through the window screen get inside, all the Americans immediately responded with "Wait! You have window screens??", which are basically unknown here.  Now we know where to get some. 😀

I really appreciated having some time at home. Of course, there were about six loads of laundry. I also got to concentrate on my lesson for Relief Society. I teach on the fourth Sunday of each month, and I have the same topic for six months: ministering. I have very little direction on materials, so it takes some creativity and prayer to come up with a lesson. Since Wes and Alyssa were coming, I actually started to prepare far in advance, but as the lesson got nearer, I changed tack and focused on Jesus' examples of ministering. Doug gave me some good input, and I had some of my own insights. He is such a great teacher and has a deep knowledge of the scriptures. For novelty, I made a word search puzzle to hand out. We'll see how they respond to that. Games in Relief Society!