Saturday, April 25, 1970

To be a disciple of Jesus Christ one must the servant of all. A mission is a great trust and is irrevocably associated in all its facets with service. To be great, teaches the Savior, one must be a faithful and a just servant.

Yesterday rain drenched the city of Maceió and filled the streets with little lakes, and sometimes bigger lakes, and many houses (such as ours) with water. Our tile roof is fairly waterproof, but with so much rain the roof started leaking, dripping here and there. I sleep on the top bunk bed, which was one of the places it chose to drip. In the kitchen and to the back of the house, water was about four inches deep.

We spent the morning studying. We ventured out in the afternoon and evening. It stopped for quite a while in the evening, and we used the time to check out addresses. While doing that on one street (most of the streets in the area we are working are unpaved and ungraded), we came to a big puddle that covered the entire road for 75 or 100 yards. Down the street a Jeep slowly entered the water and pushed right on through to the side we were on. It stopped at the house next to where we were clapping. Just then another Jeep drove up on our side of the lake, pulling clear up to the water’s edge. Timidly it backed to where we were standing and asked if it could make it through the water. Elder Prisbrey responded, “Sure, that Jeep there [pointing to the other Jeep] just now came through.”

Then the Jeep took off, a bit faster than it should have, and plunged into the water. About three-fourths of the way through, its motor coughed, sputtered, and died (in that order). After a few moments, one of the two men in the vehicle crawled out, without pants, into the waist-deep water and pushed the Jeep to the other side. They hollered something back to us, but we could no longer hear them.