Semana Santa 2016, Bautismo, and an Unwelcome Visitor

One of the Hermanas shared this picture from when I was back in Masaya a few months ago.
It was too pretty not to share.

Well, this last week has been super crazy here. So, in  Nicaragua, they don't really celebrate Easter, per se, but they have Semana Santa, or Holy Week. However, instead of people going to church, most of them just go to the beach and party and drink. So Rivas is the center of the best beaches in Nicaragua, with San Juan del Sur, Playa Gigante, and San Jorge (which is the beach by Lake Nicaragua). So it has been insane here and was pretty much the worst week to try and contact any new people or teach lessons because everyone was at the beach. All of the highways through the middle of my area were full of cars, bumper to bumper, all the way to the beach. Nonetheless, we worked hard and still found a couple of new investigators and brought a few new people to church yesterday. Overall, the area here in Rivas is doing OK, and this next week should be better for us now that Semana Santa is over and life will return to normal here. I kind of feel like I have contacted almost the whole area of Rivas by now, but I am sure there are more people here waiting for us to find them.

We forgot to take a photo before when we were dressed in white,
but here we are after the baptismal service!

We also had our baptism on Saturday! She was awesome the entire week and had no doubts about her baptism. Still, her daughter wasn't quite ready and she set a goal for her baptism on April 16th. The next two weeks we have General Conference, and then Stake Conference the week after, so we won't be able to have our next baptismal service until April 16th.

My companion right now ranks right up there with the best ones I have had on my mission so far. We get along great, and he is awesome and works hard. Today we played soccer against the other Elders in the Zone and we lost, so we had to buy them pizza. Plus, I got very sunburnt!

Unwelcome visitor --
I found this guy crawling next to my desk and I had
to take a picture of him next to my hand to show
you how big he is.

That is crazy about the terrorist attack in Belgium -- sketchy -- but I am not too worried here in Nicaragua. Besides, there is only one international airport and it's like 5 hours away from me. I appreciate some of the sports updates. A lot of the people here talk about Steph Curry, and every once in a while I even see a BYU T-shirt. Well, that's about it for this week. Not a whole lot exciting coming up next week, so just gonna be going back to work. Have a great week everyone!