Easter Week

We visited the Espinoza family this week. While we were out of town they had a couple of catastrophes. The first week their apartment flooded and the second week they had a fire. Victoria the teenage daughter had all of her clothes burn up. So we stopped by to visit them. They are still living in their apartment with no electricity, which means no hot water, no cooking facilities and no refrigerator. When we arrived they had the front door open to get light into the apartment. We helped them out with some new clothes for Victoria and dinner a couple of times. It's so hard to watch these people who live in poverty and see them struggle so much. One of the great things that happened, is that Brother Espinoza was ordained to be an Elder. This is the first family we've seen that has accepted the gospel and is still attending. 

We went to the Baton Rouge Temple on Wednesday with the departing missionaries. We were planning to get some family work done, but the temple computer froze up while trying to print our stuff. They were able to get it to print about an hour later, so we will do these family names next time we go. We did get to meet Elder Homer's parents and that was pretty cool. We also said goodbye to Elder Andrade.  We have not seen another missionary work so hard, even up until the last minute. He had investigators waiting for him outside the Temple his last night in the mission field. Amazing!!

On Easter, the Bishop invited all of the missionaries over to his house for dinner.  It was nice to be with their family and the other missionaries.  Sister Garcia is a great cook and we enjoyed visiting with everyone. They had their grandchildren there and did an Easter egg hunt for them. 

We are now seeing a lot of baby ducks. In our apartment complex we have lakes and their are always ducks, egrets and seagulls around. This past week, we started seeing the ducklings. One mother duck had twelve ducklings. Honest, I got out of the car and counted. Spring is in the air here in New Orleans. We frequently comment about how similar the weather is to Hawaii, but instead of a beach we got a swamp!