Hey,
We had a great week this week and Sunday we ended it all with an amazing baptism! Pop was baptized by my Greenie companion!! He was able to have the same experience that I had when I was a greenie. At first we were planning on having a member baptize him because it's always better to have a member do it but a problem had occurred the day before the baptism. As we were teaching Pop, we used a member to help teach that had just moved down here to Bangna about a month ago. He didn't know anyone so we introduced him to Pop to try and start a friendship and as we taught, they became friends! We saw it help both of them come to church and come to activities because they knew they had a friend there. At the end when we asked Pop who he wanted to baptize him, he said Mike! (that's the member's name that helped) We gave Mike a call to ask him if he would do it and he was more then happy to! Everything was all good to go until Saturday night...As we were at the church, cleaning the font, the Bishop came and asked us if we could talk to him for a little bit. We said of coarse and we stepped into his office. He went over the baptism to make sure everything was good to go and then he told us that Mike wasn't able to baptize Pop. I said OK and didn't ask to much about it because I just figured he might have worthiness issues but then the Bishop said, because he's not a member here and our Ward doesn't have his membership records, he would have to interview him, call the Branch President at his home Branch and have to do a lot of stuff before he was going to be able to baptize him and there just wasn't enough time to do everything. He asked if we could just go ahead and be the ones to do the baptism instead. We tried to work around it but we just didn't have enough time so we agreed to do it. Now I have personally baptized 3 people already on my mission and I don't feel to big of a need to be the one to baptize anybody else but my companion, Elder Mitchell, just got into the country about a month ago and has never baptized someone. I remember when I was a Greenie. My trainer got me to baptize one of our investigators in my first area and I thought it was really cool to be able to do it in my first area so I figured I'd give my Greenie that same experience. So I asked him if he would feel OK doing it and he said yeah! I told him the baptismal pray that he had to memorize in Thai and he went at it, working on memorizing it! Throughout all of church the next day, he said he just went over it in his head, making sure he had it down. I remember when I was getting ready for my first baptism. I studied that pray for about a week before I felt ready to give it and Elder Mitchell only have 1 day! When the time came to give the baptism, he said the prayer like a pro and made no mistakes! I was pretty impressed. Our investigator was so excited to be baptized and didn't really mind that Mike wasn't able to baptize him. He was just grateful to finally be baptized!
Also these other pictures are from yesterday when we went to some waterfalls and a floating market just outside of Bangkok. It was way fun and way pretty so I thought I would share some of the pictures with you guys!
I love you guys and I hope you are having an awesome holiday season!!

Love,
Elder Stephen Olsen

(Sorry, no pictures came with this e-mail, Lori)