20 APR 10 letter

Dear Family,

Greetings from Visak! Things here are going well and we are having a good time in the sun. Apparently some of the families here will take vacation to the Andaman Islands, it sounds like paradise. The islands are actually part of India, and that was news to me. Anyway Visak is just heating up and were excited about the miracles that are happening here.

I wanted to tell you about a member we are working with. His name is Manoj and he has been a member just over 3 years. He was perhaps the strongest member in this branch. He was always helping at church and just had a solid testimony. For most of his adult life he has faced a lot of problems. They are primarily financial but there are also legal problems that have caused his a lot of stress. He is divorced and getting a divorce here is a lengthy and difficult process. So he has been facing these problems but putting his faith in God and getting through them. A few months ago he met a guy named Bablu. He is actually an unknown distant relative to Manoj and is also a Buddhist. This man started to give financial help to Manoj and caused him to put his trust in him and not in God. Well at least not Heavenly Father. All the while he had been teaching him and coercing him into believing Buddhism. So we had no idea about any of this until we were able to find his new house (he moved) and visited him last week. He was a mess! His life had completely fallen apart. He told us that he felt he lost his agency. As we sat there and taught I discovered how right he was. He was living under the command of this Bablu character. I am still not sure why Mr. Bablu felt that he needed to force Manoj into these beliefs but it has, for the time, ruined his life. So we are trying our best to rebuild him, we started with the book of mormon. But his situation just seemed so consistent with the teaching and examples we find in the Book of Mormon. With Laman, Lemuel, Korihor, or Sherem it is apparent that the devil will not support you in the end. Manoj is experiencing that right now, and we just hope that we will be able to pull him out.

We met a brother yesterday named Mahesh. I was on exchange with my buddy Elder Schellenberg and we talked with this guy on the street. He is Hindu and he worships a god named Sai Baba. Sai Baba is very popular here, actually his story is similar to that of Jesus Christ… Anyway I wont go into detail, you can ask me about it later. This guy was very intelligent and seemed like he was interested in what we had to say. But there was one point which he couldn't seem to grasp. He told us that he thought all Gods were same, which is the basic Hindu belief in Visak. Then he stated that he prayed to Sai Baba and he got what he wanted from him. He told us that he was happy. He could not understand why we wanted him to pray to Heavenly Father. We told him that there was a difference and that he could receive so much more from Heavenly Father because he is the only true god. But he just was not satisfied. There's no lack of teaching to do...

Love you all!
Elder Tuscano