Week 8 - Argentina MTC April 15, 2010

Hey all,,

It's good to hear from you. Email is one of the most exciting things of the week, so this is fun. We just had some computer problems, so we just spent 15 minutes fixing them. I love being in a small CCM where there's 6 computers and we take part when they need to be fixed.

Anyways, I did get the package with the other shoe. Muchas gracias. The package that got stuck at customs is still there and there's a small chance i'll be able to get it. I'll have to pay a penalty for waiting so long, but oh well. Elder Lancaster is letting me keep his shoes because he doesn't want to pack them, so if the package in customs is shoes, then I'll have three pairs of shoes. Así es la vida.

I just got Emily, Sydney, and Brook's letter. Thanks, guys! I loved your pictures. Thanks to everyone else who sent photos too. They were fun to see.

Sounds like everything is pretty exciting there at home with moving and people getting engaged and such. Time right now is kinda suspended. Everything points forward to next Tuesday early in the morning when we wake up and get on the plane to Montevideo. It's about an hour flight, much better than the 10-hour one I took 8 weeks ago.

Hope all the flying and moving and driving from Nevada to Washington is going well. I don't know if it's all finished or what, but I wish i could be there to help. I never thought I'd say it, but I'd like to do some manual labor right about now. It feels a lot like a boarding school here sometimes. We live in our school. When we think of ¨leaving the apartment¨ we mean walking upstairs to our classroom or downstairs to the dining room (Calling it a dining room feels weird. more of a cafeteria, i guess. We call it the Comedor though, so Dining room felt right.)

Re: Milanesas. I think i've had them, but I don't really remember what stuff is called. We eat a lot of stuff I've never had before about 80% is really good, so I think I'll do fine in Uruguay. I'm getting better at eating vegetables. I think I've actually lost a little weight here, so that's exciting....and unexpected since a few minutes each day of proseletismo is dedicated to buying and trying new kinds of alfajores. It's part of the culture here in the CCM. If any local hears how many alfajores the Élderes in the CCM buy, they'd think it was weird, but when you're in the CCM, that's how your mind works.

Re: Ice cream. Yes, we did try the ice cream when we met our contact at the Ice Cream shop. I had some of the most amazing ice cream I've ever had actually. Frutilla(strawberry) and Dulce de Leche ice cream. It was pretty amazing.

Sorry to hear about Grandpa's surgery, but I'm glad he's doing well.

This week for proseletismo was much better than the last. We were in a new area, Atalaya, and we met a lot of really cool people. And some other people too. One guy was set on telling us that 9\11 was an inside job and didn't believe in Al-qaeda and didn't believe there were any good people in the world other than his family. At that point, all we could do was testify and walk away. The next lady talked on and on about her many jobs she'd had over the many years of her life and...something about devils in her kitchen that she had to cook for. I'm not sure if that's figurative or if diablos could mean something else. She mumbled a lot, and was impossible to understand, so we couldn't really pursue the conversation much further.

We met our first members on Saturday. The non-member head of the house stopped us on the street and told us to come over and visit his family and talk to his wife, so we did. We thought he was a member and maybe his wife wasn't, so we started talking to her and found out that she was a member and he wasn't. She gave us lunch and torta to go, so that was pretty sweet.

There was one street that we had planned to go to for half an hour, but it ended up dead-ending and we were going to turn around but noticed it continued as a dirt road. We went even though the houses immediately got more rundown and the sidewalk got (even more) uneven but we kept going, despite Elder Pike's doubts. We found our best contact of the day there. Rodolfo is probably in his 60's and has cancer. We taught him about the Book of Mormon and promised that if he took the time to read it, he would be blessed and immediately, "I would love that. I need blessings in my life. I have suffered so much and I'm looking for something." That was a really amazing experience. We're going back to teach him Saturday, but that's our last time here, so we'll refer him on to the missionaries here.

Talk to you all Monday. We get one last email time here before we leave on Tuesday morning. Hopefully I'll be able to upload fotos then, but I'm not sure.

Quiero que tengan una buena semana, familia y amigos. Mucho amor.