Celebrations!

I thought I would begin this week with a picture of my hero. 

Cute, huh?  

Since I was sick for the better part of the week, Ed was the "go to" guy and spent the days alone in the room at HSP scanning his heart out.  We have a self-imposed deadline to complete this one phase of the project we are working on by the end this month and it looks like my absence has only slowed that by a little bit.  

Way to go sweetheart!  We will be celebrating this week!

Mother's Day was celebrated with flowers from Ed and Ashley and Aubree sent a big Edible Arrangement which I didn't get a photo of but which we ate!!  We also got well wishes from Autumn and Edison and Malvin.  I especially loved hearing Edison sing "Mother, I love you" with his mom's help.  

Another highlight (before I got sick) was a wedding and baptism in our South Philly Branch.  Our Branch is awesome and very diverse.  We have a young missionary who is from the Congo and he saw some people on the street where they live and thought they looked like where he was from so he went and started talking with them! Well, they got married on Saturday 

and on Sunday (Mother's Day) they got baptized!  

We were able to help with the wedding little bit and then we got to watch how they celebrate weddings in their culture.  It was great fun. Even our new friend Todd, who is handicapped got into it.  

He was out there on the floor dancing away.  He had a great time dancing with family and friends of the bride and groom. I had fun taking care of the babies.  I don't know this little girls, name, and she didn't speak much English, but she wanted to make sure this baby was taken care of.  She didn't let me have him for very long. It was hilarious how he, the baby, would look around and then look at my face and be very puzzled.  I'm sure he couldn't figure out why I looked so different from his mother! 

Most of these folks, friends and family of Alimasi and Apolina, have only been in the US for less than 6 months.  They are refugees from Congo, having just escaped from civil wars and strife in the DRC.  They really have nothing.  I was so happy to participate with other ward members who provided food, decorations, a wedding dress and flowers and love to this cute couple. Sadly their
English is not great, but there are a few people who can speak French!

Today there was another baptism.  Miguel has been studying with the missionaries for several months now and he was excited to be baptised today. 

Alimasi and Apolina were excited to be at the baptism also.  They dressed in their fun traditional clothing for the occasion. 

To close I want to show you the book I had finished just before I got sick.  I called it "the killer book" because it is so big and it was difficult to scan.  It weighs about 20 lbs, is 5+ inches thick and we couldn't get it apart.  It would have been so easy had it come apart the way it should have, but the mechanism was frozen and no one could get it to release so I had to hoist the book onto the bed of the scanner and try to get each page and all the little notes that the researcher had put inside the pages.  It was difficult, but it is done and I think it will probably be the last of the big books like this that I will have to do.   Here is a picture of it on the scanner.

I asked Ed to take a picture of me after I finished the book.  I was so happy to have completed the task and be able to make the information available to a family.  There is so much information in these records we are doing.  I am so happy to be here and to be able to work quickly and get make these records available to reserach.  I hope that people who are searching will be patient and look through the material because even though there is a lot of little insignificant stuff, if you keep looking you will all of a sudden come upon some information that will open up a whole lot of family lines.  

These are people who are still waiting to be found so that they can belong to or rather be connected to their family.  Once connected, they can be together forever.