Dear Family and Friends,
This week was so long! Holy cow! Usually they go by a lot faster. But a lot of good things and a lot of bad things happened.
Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite
The worst thing is that Tuesday morning Elder Erickson woke up to bed bugs all over him sucking his blood! so nasty. There has been a crazy bed bug epidemic in the mission. It happened a couple nights. I never got bitten. But we cleaned the heck out of our house. had it fumigated and bleach mopped and vacuumed and swept everything. Then we washed all of our clothes and dry cleaned everything else and I even got rid of twenty something ties! (It was hard, but I still have seventy something. I know, I’m working on cutting it down.) We vacuumed our mattresses and then looked at our box springs and there were bed bugs and eggs and larvae everywhere. It was one of the nastiest things I’ve ever seen. We just looked at each other and didn’t have to say a word. We chucked those box springs like they were nothing! so now we sleep on the cleanest tile floor in Houston and we are awaiting some new beds 🙂 but since then, they haven’t returned. That was a huge stress!
Exchanges With the Assistants
There is a lot of other stuff that happened but I will try to be brief! First off, we had exchanges with the AP’s. Elder Cope came and spent a night and a day with us! It was so sweet because we all are so close. We have all served together. The best part was seeing how much we have all changed and grown. It was lots of fun too. On Saturday we got to go to the baptism of Leo Vivas. Elder Bruneel and I had taught him when I first started my mission. When I left, Elder Cope came with Elder Bruneel and kept teaching him. He was the president of a huge fraternity at Texas Southern and was involved in a crazy party life. He read the Book of Mormon and wanted to change. He quit the fraternity and stopped drinking. He knew it was true but didn’t want to upset his catholic parents. Well now… over a year later.. he finally got baptized! We were able to go. It was so sweet. His whole countenance has changed. He is loving the gospel and loving church!
Teresa!
Also, Teresa got baptized. On Monday night we gave her a blessing to help with her smoking and she didn’t smoke anymore. It was one of the most spiritual baptisms I’ve been too. She cried a lot. A lot of her family came. One of them, her son who lives with her, is super gangster and smokes tons of weed and is kind of scary but after the baptism he came up to us and said he wants to be baptized too! He came to church with her yesterday and we taught him and set a date with him! Crazy how the spirit changes people! Anyway that will have to do it for this week! I love y’all!
Love,
Elder Viitanen