Fireworks

This week we finally baptized! My first baptism in Cojutepeque! Elder Palmer and I have really been trying to baptize together, of course we are always trying to baptize. But when you are really connected with your companion you want it a little more.

The family Melendez is awesome. We baptized the mom and two daughters. We found them earlier this month- and put a date with them for November. But they came to church ever since we started visiting them. They were drinking coffee, but we taught the word of wisdom and they stopped drinking it that same day. The mom went out and sold on Sundays, but we taught the Sabbath day and she stopped. It was amazing! We moved the date up to Oct 29 because they progressed so fast. It was definitely the fastest time a person has ever been baptized in for me. 4 weeks. Huge Blessing. Something interesting is that we found them the same week we really started focusing on the Holy Ghost. So they were one of the first investigators that we tried the new system on. Huge Blessing.

Kind of a crazy experience happened this week. Here the most common firework is called a cuete. It looks like a giant bottle rocket. It is a piece of wood about 5-6 feet tall. On the end of it is the firework part. Which is a big roll of newspaper with gunpowder inside. When you light it you keep your hand on the pole- and when it ignites the whole thing shoots into the air. It flies for about 10 seconds, getting about 40-50 feet in the air, before it blows up. There are 2 explosions about 2 seconds apart. (It took me about 4 months on the mission to be able to distinguish the firework sound from the gunshot sound. (It didn't help that the area where I started had about the same number of gunshots and firework explosions.)

This week we got home and were about to start planning when I started hearing fireworks. I could hear the fffffsssshhhhh sound that they make when they are flying up- so I knew it was pretty close.  I ran outside to the balcony to see where they were coming from, but I couldn't exactly tell where. But I could tell more or less were the guy shooting them was because all the people in the streets were looking at him.  The guy was on the street in front of our house, about 3 houses down. Elder Palmer could see him because he was on the front porch. The guy was dressed in a cowboy hat with an unbuttoned shirt, he was smoking a cigarette and using it to light the fireworks (real smart) and he looked like he was a little drunk. He lit one, and kind of threw it in the air as it went off, which made it go up crooked instead of straight, the firework started spinning around in the air and flying pretty low. It was about a meter above a house across the street when it exploded the first time. Then it did a loop d loop, and dived straight down into the house. (every house has an open part where there isn't a roof- it stays cooler that way.)  Then it exploded the second time. We could tell the rocket was in the house because it made a big echoing sound. Everyone in the street just froze waiting to see what would happen next. A guy came running out of the house straight to the drunk firework cowboy. He was ticked. We couldn't hear very well but it sounded like a little kid had gotten hit in the face. (we're pretty sure it was the stick that hit the kid, though, not the explosion) They wouldn't let the guy shoot off any more rockets. The cowboy was mad too because he still had around 10 fireworks left. About 15 minutes later we started hearing fireworks again. We looked outside and saw the guy on our same street, but now 3 houses above us (six houses away from where he started) shooting off his fireworks. Geez.

Well that's all the time I've got left. Love you all! Have a great week!

-Elder Goodman