Monday, August 11, 2014

1st Full Week in Argentina

Monday, August 11, 2014

My first full week in Argentina! To be honest, I don't know if the newness and excitement wore off a little bit but this week was kind of slow. Not a whole lot happened this week. We taught two investigator families consistently during the week but other than that it´s just contacting less actives and trying to find new investigators. 

One family is doing awesome. They´re pretty much already members. I´m not worried about them at all. They have such strong testimonies. The paperwork to get married should be coming this week and then they´ll travel to Buenos Aires to get married! So right now we have a baptismal date set for August 29th with them!! 

The other family, though, it's been kind of tough. They´re an awesome family and they have testimonies but they don´t seem to be progressing much. We meet with them every Tuesday and Thursday night.  Last Tuesday we had a good lesson.  They never prayed to know if this is true so we invited the wife to pray after the lesson.  The Spirit was strong and she said she felt good. It was awesome. The husband said he prayed for help to stop smoking and he's stopped since then, but the wife is having a harder time and is still smoking. Thursday we had another good lesson with them and asked again if they wanted to be baptized.  They said yes but they just aren't taking the steps necessary. The wife is still smoking, they haven´t started the paperwork for marriage, and they haven´t showed up to church the past two weeks, so we aren't quite sure what to do with them. I feel like we´re doing all we can and at this point it's just kind of up to them to take those steps that are necessary. We´ll continue to meet with them this week and pray for them and hope something happens. 

This week was also a little tough because we got stood up a couple times by investigators and members. The new investigator that showed up to church last week, didn't show up at the chapel for our appointment with him and he didn't come to church yesterday so I´m a little afraid we might not see him again. Then a couple times during the week we had meetings with members and they either didn't show up or were like 45 minutes late so it was a little frustrating feeling like we wasted a bunch of time. Also a lot of people here don't have phones and so we can't confirm our appointment with them beforehand and then we´ll show up at their home and they won't be there, so I'm learning to be patient haha. Most days we visit different inactives or less active members or try to meet with people we contact on the street so we never tract or at least haven't so far.  So work was a little slow this week.  We need to find new investigators to teach. Church attendance last week was like 65 and this week was 76 but we were hoping like 10 more people would show up that didn't. 

The members that are active and strong in the Gospel are super awesome though. Just super friendly and treat you like family and we get fed by the members everyday at lunch and then occasionally at dinner too. The past three days I've eaten so much food haha. The people here feed us so much its ridiculous. The other day I had a whole pizza to myself and then at a different meal I had at least 13 empanadas haha so the members are great. I love them. We just need to be better about maybe getting members to come with us to our appointments and strengthening the ward as a whole.

(Answering questions from home.)  We haven't been to ward council yet. We have a sister in our ward that washes our clothes except for our garments so that's nice. The pension is actually pretty good. It has hot water, a stove & microwave. It doesn't have heating but it never gets that cold in the apartment so we have a little portable heater that's enough to warm it up in the mornings, so during the day it's pretty comfortable inside the pension. I haven´t bought a pillow yet so I've been using my laundry bag as a pillow haha but I think I´ll buy one today. There's a Walmart a couple blocks from the pension and there's a little store in there that has computers so that's where we email from and do some occasional shopping.  Last week p-day was alright. We emailed and then played soccer with a couple other missionaries and some kids so it was alright but it really wasn't that fun. Later in the night we had a couple appointments that were good but I´m hoping today's p-day is better. We were supposed to have a zone activity but that got put off until the 25th so I think today we might just go play soccer at the stake center with missionaries so hopefully it´ll be more fun today. Also today we need to buy some more food and I´ll probably buy some stuff like the pillow and colored pencils.  I did get the emails from last week, those were awesome. Thank you. I didn't get an email from Scott this week or last, but last week I got an email from Wip (Erika) telling me about Wendell (who Scott baptized in Utah) so that's super sick. 

I hope everyone is doing well. I hope it's been fun having Scott back and I hope the next couple days with them are fun.  I think that's it for this week. Hopefully this next week we find some new investigators and get a little more work going. Oh also I don't know the address of the pension.  You can't send things directly to me. They have to go to the mission home but I could get the address next week if you're curious. It's super close to the chapel though.  I´ll talk (write) to you next week.  Love you!!

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