e-mail of Jan. 24th.

Dear Dad and Mom, This past week was really good. We had some miracles happen and also some not so good things happen. I will start off with the bad news, we had an Elder go home this past week and it was an Elder that was in my last district in Acailandia. I don't know why he was sent home but I knew him really well and he was a good friend.
Tomorrow one of my zone leaders and my other friend that is also living with us is going home. He completed his mission and will leave tomorrow, Elder Piacenti. So this next week we will be in a triplet with our other zone leader, Elder Romero.
This week was really a miracle. We had 4 baptisms and 3 of the 4 were the wife, son and daughter of a man who was less active and is now returning to the church and wants to seal his family in the temple. It was really a special experience to see the joy that it brought to this family. This man was and still is having a little bit of trouble with drinking and smoking but we are helping him with this and he has a strong desire to quit.
We had quite the experience on Saturday with our other baptism. So here's what happened. We had a baptism on Saturday and one on Sunday because President was traveling and he had to do our interview and could only do it on Sunday. But on Saturday we went to the church to clean out the baptismal font and the pump isn't working so we had to call the Elders from a ward close by. To get to their chapel you have to climb up two huge hills, so we called someone to give us and our investigators a ride. So everything went well until about an hour before the baptism. It started to rain, and it rained a lot. When the man came to give us a ride he showed up in a pickup truck to haul everybody up there. We were already late so we piled everyone in the back of the pickup and headed out from our chapel. When we got there everybody was already soaked and we had the baptism. Then on Sunday President did our interview and we decided to do the other baptisms in our chapel. So after church we went to lunch then came back to the chapel and my comp and I cleaned out the water with buckets and dumped the water in the toilet of the men's bathroom. We had a wonderful baptism. It was really amazing even though all of those things happened.
But I have learned one thing here in the mission is that nothing comes without a little bit of sacrifice and suffering but the miracles come. ,br>Well that was about all for my week and today we are actually going to go to the zoo. I hopeso. We got canceled on by everybody last week. So I love you all very much and will talk to you next week. Love your son, Elder Crittenden