Monday, September 13, 2010 - Baptism

So, first things first; as the title implies, we got a baptism this week. His name is Redeemer (awesome, right?). He was like a gift given to my companion and I. We showed up for my first week of Church here and some kid we didn't know - Godwin - walked up to us and said "This is my friend, Redeemer. He's been taught all the lessons by previous missionaries, but we just moved out to Tchokome. Can you baptize him?" Tchokome is a beach place (with the classic straw village huts and everything - kinda cool) which just happened to be in our massively huge Mc'Carthy II area, so we said yea, interviewed him that day, and baptized him on Saturday. He was really excited too. We also found out that he has a friend named Joseph who wants to learn the lessons and be baptized, as well as three younger brothers - 9,10, and 13 - who have been taught and been to Church tons, so they'll be baptized this Saturday.

Which brings me to my next point - as Pres. Smith put it, "this is a baptizing mission - our goal has been shortened to 'baptize people and help them endure to the end." The Mission goal is 7 baptisms a month; some areas in the mission get a standard of about 20 per month. Apparently, Mc'Carthy Ward (which includes Mc I & II) is one of the lowest baptizing ones. It makes things interesting; most people think that, due to all the baptizing, it makes the mission easier. In some ways, it does; you basically just have to tell some people what your message is, and they pray about it, read a bit, and gain a strong testimony and are baptized. Teaching becomes almost a formality - you essentially just finish explaining the rest of whats up, and they just eat it up.
So, easy mission right?  What makes this a difficult mission, I think, is how that affects the missionaries. You grow apathetic; in truth, the mission demands it. You cannot keep your shoes clean; you cannot keep your pants clean; you cannot get your clothes nice and neat when hand-washing (without a washboard, mind you - it's literally all hands). The food often has 'crawling pepper', which is to say, tiny little uninvited, protein-enriched guests, and you have to just suck it up, think of pizza or In-N-Out or something, and just eat it. Electricity and plumbing are more like occasional guests than standards, and many others things of which if I were to list, I'd never finish the rest of the letter. The point is, to some degree, you have to learn to ignore and just not care. You just shrug your shoulders and press forward.

The problem is that, with the apathy, you have to maintain a perfect mix of diligence. You have to remember why you're here, what you're suppose to do, why it's important to do (or not do) certain things... In short, you have to remember the Work. I've talked to quite a few missionaries here will unfortunately tell you, they just don't care about a lot of that either. Profanity is rampant here - 'American' profanity isn't recognized in the culture here (other than saying 'fool'; go figure), so they swear freely and many things (such as no t.v., only Church music, no movies, no Facebook - email only, etc) become nothing more than suggestions to follow if you feel in the mood that day. The mission doesn't try missionaries in the face of opposition; it tries missionaries in the face of success. Never before has the whole cliche 'put a frog in cold water and turn up the heat till it boils to death' metaphor been so blatantly expressed in real life. It makes things very hard; but alas, herein lies the beauty of the aforementioned process. One must simply shrug their shoulders and press forward. So long as you don't let it get to you - no matter who says you should - then you're fine. But nevertheless, it does make things hard. I think, by the time I'm done here, I'll have a much better understanding of the scripture 'charity is long-suffering'; haha.

Anyway, back to the people. It gets hard teaching; for me, at least. I love the depths of the Gospel. I eat it up; it fascinates me to dive into it. But it does me nothing here to know any of it. Every lesson has to be taught as if I were teaching a primary class, which is fine, except we don't get to do the fun coloring activities - what a bummer; haha.  Someone asks a question; I know the answer to such a precise reason that no form of logic could possibly contradict without encountering countless fallacies. But, I have to then stop, rethink it, and explain it in simplistic words - which tends to cut out 95% or the reason as to WHY it actually is that way. It's really tough for me, because sometimes someone can't get past something, and I know I can explain it, but they wouldn't understand anyway, so you just have to pray for them (and encourage them to pray and read the scriptures), and move on.

And yet, it's really nice. Day after day, I get the whole 'become as a little child' thing more and more. I know I mentioned that last time, but I can't help but bring it up again. This is truly what Christ meant. I've never seen such a splendid example of that. Back home, it seems so many people get caught up in the logic, and the reasoning, and the this, and the that... It becomes impossible to get through the brick wall they built around their heart. But here... It's incredible. They'll get stuck on something, sure; some kind of tradition or classic belief of their old church will cause a problem. But you just give them a copy of the Book of Mormon, and tell them "read this, pray about it, and ask God. Be open and sincere; He'll tell you what's true." And then that's it; they do it, and they get a testimony. Just like when a little child doesn't understand something a parent says to do, but does it anyways - without a predefined answer - they get what they need. They feel the truth and the Holy Ghost, and their lives are changed for the better. So many have turned their lives around just because they agreed to read 5-10 minutes a day, and then a prayer about it; that's all it takes for so many people here to improve their lives exponentially. It's incredible; I love it!

On a side note, a funny thing happened this Friday. My companion and I went to our first appointment; it fell through. We went to our backup; it fell through. We went to that backups backup; it fell through. So we figured we'd proselyte for a bit. In the space of two hours, we contacted 5 J'Dubs and 3 Muslims. It was ridiculous. By the end of the day, our stats were as follows:

7 J'Dub Contacts
10 Muslims
0 Appointments kept
50 Contacts total
3 Lessons taught total

It was a record high for the District. No one has ever contacted that many un-contactables in such a short space of time, nor had such a terrible record for the day. We couldn't help but laugh about it.  [Quick note: J'Dubs are Jehovah's Witnesses. No one knows how that specific term came about though; it's just what everyone in the mission uses].

Saturday was nice after Redeemer's baptism, and a few other things, we went and prepped Clinton (another investigator) for his baptismal interview the next day. He's 18, and super excited to be baptized. We had to explain a few things to him, but once we cleared up some of the terminology and explained what was meant by some of the questions, he did great, and was cleared for baptism this Saturday. It's wonderful to see people like him, who have such a love for the Gospel. We hope that he'll keep coming; retention is a really hard thing here, since church attendance is culturally not a big deal or encouraged.

Finally, I would like to apologize for any abhorrent slaughtering of the English language I use in these letters. People here don't understand English very well; or rather, the English they do understand isn't 'proper' English. Heck, most people speak Pidgin English here (which uses weird stuff, like 'chop' instead of 'eat' and 'small small' instead of 'a bit' or 'little' or whatever... hard to explain). Anyway, I was told by Pres. Smith that I need to work on talking "smaller", and in doing so every single day, my English is already diminishing. 

 Hope everything is going well for everyone! Things are going...well, they're going here. Haha.

On a more sad note, I forgot to mention last time that, apparently right before my MTC group arrived, some ZL's got sent to jail and sentenced to 7 and 10 years in prison, respectively. Apparently, they had gone on unauthorized splits in their apartment building (i.e. one went down the stairs to buy bread from the lady downstairs with the other person's companion or something). That put a hole in their "we never leave each other's sight" defense. Then, when the bread lady downstairs accused them of raping her several times over the period of several days (the story changes each time they go to court), the missionaries didn't have a good enough defense the first time around, and got sentenced to prison. The Church is currently working on appealing it, but it's still a hard thing for a lot of people here. It caused the mission to have to close an entire area because of it.  I think they will now start cracking down on the whole 'follow the White Handbook' thing. Funny thing out of all it? The missionaries are now teaching tons of people in prison. Their cellmates have already had all the lessons and read the scriptures with them every night, and a lot of the other inmates are getting interested too. I don't know exactly how it works, but apparently they can get reading material in there, so they've handed out pamphlets and copies of the Book of Mormon and stuff, so it's interesting how that's all working out. Also, because of that, they're not being treated badly; many people in there still recognize servants of the Lord, and since they are all loving the Gospel, they're giving them even more respect. It's always interesting to see how things can turn out from potentially destructive situations. We'll just have to see how that all turns out; depending on the reason for the others being in there, Pres. Smith might have a whole lot of interviews to conduct in a little bit.

Anyway, hope that's not ending it on a sad note - we can always hope that it all turns into a happy note. But, either way, that's why exact obedience is the Mission Motto, and why it's so important.

That's it for now. I apologize if I don't give much detail about the week; so much happens that its hard to write everything in one letter a week. I do write it down in my journal, so who knows what will come of that; haha.

This Gospel is true! Take care, and God bless!

--Elder Collings