Hey all! Do you remember last week, when I told you about that guy that randomly came to church and wanted to be baptized, named Dacio? Yeah, his name isn't Dacio (whoops). His name is actually Antonio, but his legend remains the same! Turns out there is a guy named Dacio, though. We'll get to that later. Anyway, Elder Dup and I taught Antonio all the lessons this week. He had us over at his one-room house every day, where we taught him every lesson known to missionaries (when I say we, it's all mostly Elder Dup, since I'm still struggling with the language. I helped though!).
Anyway, we got to the Word of Wisdom, and we were going through what it means, and Antonio is all like "Hey! I drink coffee! I've been drinking it all my life!" (again, that was in an entirely different language, so it's a very rough translation) and we were all like "No way! Will you stop drinking coffee?" Then he was all like "Heck yeah I'll stop drinking coffee!" (seriously, this all translates very odd). And then, he stopped drinking coffee. Cool story, huh? Except Antonio gets even better.
During our first lesson, teaching about the Book of Mormon, we found out that Antonio can't read. For us missionaries, that's a pretty big stumbling block. So, we simply invited him to pray and ask God if what we were teaching was true. The next day, when we followed up with our invitation, Antonio said that he had prayed, but then he said that he thought he didn't do it right. We thought that meant that he hadn't recieved an answer. So we asked him if he recieved an answer. He was like "Yeah, I recieved an answer. I just don't think I prayed right. Also, I know that the church is true. When can I be baptized?"
We were absolutely dumbfounded. Even among the people here, Elder Dup says he has never seen anyone with so much faith! We scheduled his baptism for Saturday, and asked his member friend, Dacio (See? There he is!), to baptize him.
Saturday, everything went up into chaos. I guess there had to be opposition for such a great guy. First off, we couldn't find the baptismal clothes anywhere (we literally spent three hours looking for them). We had to get some loaned to us by the Bishop in a different ward. Second, when we went to pick up Antonio and Dacio, we couldn't find Antonio, and Dacio said that he was too tired from traveling all day to do the baptism. Thankfully, we later found out that Antonio just walked to the church himself, true to his awesome! Antonio was also fine with Elder Dup baptizing him.
But when we opened up the baptismal font, after arriving at the church, we discovered something else. The font had leeches. LEECHES! How did they get there? Where did they come from? Why do they look so evil? Nevertheless, Antonio went through with the baptism. It went well, and afterwards, neither Antonio or Elder Dup had leeches! Hurrah for Israel!
And that was how the week went. Atê mais!
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