Happy Mahashivaratri!

 us with an  investigator family, the Charles family

 "All India Parmit."  (They mean to say permit.  E. Poleboina and I had a good laugh about that haha, there's a good number of funny spelling errors here in India, but they do their best)

 OH MY GOSH.  I don't know if I've mentioned this but there's been this mega-rat living in our apartment and we had a guy come destroy his kingdom in our kitchen (he lives under/behind the cabinets in our kitchen).  The guy removed the baseboards and there was a pile of trash built up over the years so this is the pile of trash that was the make-up of the mega-rat's nest

 we stopped and played cricket with some cute little kids the other day, it was a lot of fun.

  one of my favorite things about India: the beautiful, brightly colored buildings!

 one of our primary children LOVES Spiderman.  He wanted to take a selfie so we did haha.

a cricket ground in our area

HAPPY MAHASHIVARATRI EVERYONE (pronounced: maha-sheeva-rah-tree)!  Shivaratri was this past weekend and it was pretty crazy.  There were drums and dancing and people marching all day and through the night.  I took some videos so I will try to send those.

We had some good experiences this past week, I will just talk about a couple:

You may recall a couple weeks ago I shared an experience about helping a sister in a situation where we had no idea what to say or do.  We met with her again this past week and, she's been doing so much better.  As we were discussing faith in Jesus Christ, she cuts us off and says, "I really want to be baptized, I just want my two children to be baptized with me."  We were stoked.  So later in the week we met with her and her two sons, ages fourteen and sixteen, and they are just as faithful as their mother.  Updates on this family's progress will come shortly!

To determine the progress of our investigators, we often ask, "What is the evidence that their faith in Christ is increasing?" and "What is the evidence the investigator is repenting?"  So, again, you may recall that last week or the week before, I mentioned a story about a mother who was very concerned about her son's spiritual welfare and future, who came running when she heard the missionaries were helping her son.  This past week we met with this family and what do we see when we arrive at the appointment?  Sachin, the young man, was washing the dishes outside his home.  For a teenage boy, that was a pretty big sign to us that his faith in Christ is increasing: he's helping his mom around the house!  We were so happy.

That's really all for this week but I will attach some photos and videos I took!  I'm getting better at this documenting my mission through photos thing.

I hope you all have a great week!  Don't do anything too crazy for Shivaratri.

Keep the faith,

Elder Tuscano