Week 33 - Ankorondrano - Baptizing in the, uh, River

Well, less than two weeks and it will be transfers again. Crazy. Anyway, Ankorondrano is doing swell. I love it. We had a baptism on Saturday!!! Funny story about that, we had the adult session of stake conference and then the baptism after that, and our ward mission leader didn't show up to take care of everything, so there was no water in the font... On top of that the font was covered in dirt from the last baptism. "Covered in dirt?" You might ask, "why was it covered in dirt??" Well, we're getting there. Anyway, the faucet on the font takes about five hours to fill up the font, so our bishop grabbed the fire house and used that to help fill up the font a little more quickly. Yes, I did make sure to get a picture of that, don't worry. Then the water was brown. Not just slightly brown, but very brown. It was so full of silt that not only could you not see the bottom of the font, you also couldn't see more than a foot deep. So you could say that we pretty much baptize in the river...

Who's excited to get baptized???!?!?

A quick Malagasy Morsel is tain-kintana, TINE-KIN-tah-nah. This is the word that was in the dictionary, so I'll just give a disclaimer and say that I don't know if malagasies actually use this word. It literally means star poop. So of course, it's a shooting star! I thought it was way funny because if you just use tay by itself it is a very crude word for excrement. However, if you use it with another word, other than person, it's just fine. For example, tain-omby is cow poop, tain-maso is the crap that forms in your eyes when you sleep. It's great!

I don't have a ton of time, so I'll just say that the rest of the stake conference was fantastic! The translators could have been a little better (President Adams and a seventy from South Africa spoke) but it was really good! Then we taught some Comorreans, people from Comoros, who were muslim. So when we asked if we could close with a prayer they brought out prayer rugs and turned our chairs to face Mecca... So we rephrased and asked if we could ask a Christian prayer and explained a little more about that. It was hilarious!

But yeah, good stuff. I love this mission! Anyway, next week.
Love you all!
Mozotoa e!

Elder Rasmussen