Monday, September 16, 2013

Primero yo contestaré las preguntas de mama. (First I will answer mom’s questions)Your Spanish makes sense! But then again if it is wrong I probably wouldn’t be able to tell because that is how I would say it! A lady in the Ward washes our clothes for free! So that is nice. For food, I always eat cereal in the morning, a member always feeds us for lunch and then we either go without dinner or just have a snack. Don’t worry about me and food the people here are worse food pushers than Grandpa so I’m more worried about me engordando (gaining weight) than anything else. I actually did weigh myself and I am 109 kilos, not bad huh. We get mail every three weeks and I didn’t get your package, there is probably about a 70 percent chance that mail sent arrives I would figure, but no worries. The only thing I really would need would be some flash drives to back up my camera with in case it gets stolen, but maybe I can just buy those here with my debit card. (I asked if it was ok for people to e-mail him or if they should write letters and send to the mission home. Here is his response.) They can email me, but I won’t have much time to respond personally, write the mission home. Like I said they bring us the mail from there every three weeks I think. This morning we did insanity (which is a kind of work out), and it was insane, I got pretty tired from it, but then again I am just a fat old missionary. It reminded me of Matthew and how he would do insanity con (with) Johnny. Tell Matthew to find out how Johnny, Prescott, and Mike are doing. Tell them that I love em and to keep up the good work. Cultural notes: The weather has been wacko. I got here and it was pretty much perfect, maybe a bit cold. Then it rained all day one day and was freezing. Then it was super hot the next day and really humid. Then it started up with the raining and freezing again, it has been raining the past couple of days, and I don’t think I’ve seen the sun for a few days, due to the cloud cover. But my cold and water stuff work really well so no worries. Oh and about the keyboard; the computers are Spanish so when I write in English everything has a red line under it like it is spelled wrong, so if my spelling is bad in English blame it on that haha. In the train, which we take once a week at least for meetings, there are always people selling stuff. They will walk into your car, Yell out their little spiel and then put whatever they are selling in front of every passenger and then move on to the next car. The stuff they sell is sometimes weird, too. Like a man was selling sewing kits the other day, que raro (how strange). They will also sometimes do it on the colectivos (buses) from the main station in Lanus. They give their spiel, sell a few and then hop off and go back to the station. It can be Handy if you are hungry and they are selling snacks. The autos acá (cars here? I didn’t understand this) really like to talk but their language is really fowl so it is always bleeped out. Todos las casas tienen reyas,(All the houses have bars or gates or fences) and then have bars on their windows. So if we ever knock doors we do a lot of talking through windows. Elder Aldana and I came up with the joke for the people that don’t even open their windows; they just part their blinds and then shake their fingers at us. When those people are knocking on the gates of heaven Jesus will just part the curtain and shake his finger at them. We had a good laugh but maybe that is a bit sacreligious and I hope those people will find their way to this gospel whether in this life or the next. People for heat will just turn their ovens on. All the ovens are gas so there is just a flame or two on the stove. I kind of wondered “shouldn’t there be a pot or something on that" the first time I saw it but then I figured out what it was for. The people here think that English people speak English much better than Americans psssh what do they know haha. Also if someone here ever needed to just quickly build a house or something they wouldn’t even have to drive to a local home depot, there are plenty of supplies for building houses just in the sidewalk! Just piles of bricks and junks who knows why haha. The ghetto of Argentina it’s where I’m at. Today was fun, we went bowling with some of the elders in my zone and I bowled a 92! I still don’t have it! We had a lot of fun doing that though. No cleaning today, I told the other elders it was their turn but we just didn’t, it is pretty clean anyway. It has been a week of ups and downs. The rain and grayness make it hard to stay motivated if you are just walking around in it all day, which seems to happen to us often. All our baptismal dates fell through because people didn’t come to church. It’s tiempo para bajar la caña (It's time to drop the cane. This means to chasten or rebuke) We had what I thought was a really good day. It was rough in the rain, but we found an old lady named León who is a less active member, for some reason I felt like she was who we needed to find that day, and I had been praying to find just one person who needed us, as I often do when we are just knocking and knocking and knocking doors. We have a cita (appointment) with her tomorrow and we will see how it goes. That same night we had an impromptu lección con Odulio one of our investigadores and he told us how he feels good and the gospel was changing his life, the spirit was real strong and little did I know that what I had studied that morning in personal study I used in the lesson! The Lord definitely has me in his mind, I know that much. We were very excited for him, but then he didn’t come to church and he wasn’t there when we went by later that day for a cita we had with him. It was odd and we are going to have to see what’s up, and maybe chew him out in a loving Christ like sort of way. With the member missionary thing if you all could read preach my gospel pages 160 161 for family home evening tonight and discuss it that would be awesome. Also a quote from President Thomas S Monson "The challenge is to be more profitable servants in the Lords vineyard. This applies to all of us, whatever our age and not alone to those who are preparing to serve as full-time missionaries, for to each of us comes the mandate to share the gospel of Christ ” We had an awesome meeting with President Thurgood and the assistants with our zone. It was motivating and led me to study more about repentance, and I made a list of the steps of repentance and am going to start using that with our investigators. The gospel of Jesus Christ is really just faith and repentance. The rest of the things like baptism and enduring to the end are just results of continued faith and repentance. So we have a new focus and hopefully a better week ahead. This is hard, but we did have success with some of an inactive family coming to church. I love you all. Also here they say the days that are hard and we work all day our wife gets more beautiful, and if we don’t wash our dishes our wife gains a kilo. Entonces (Therefore) Levi must have been a really hard working missionary, but forgot to wash his dishes a few times haha. I love you all and I was just kidding about the dishes Brenda


Elder Andrew