Monday, March 17, 2014 10:06 AM
I love you Argentina

I hope you all enjoy St. Patrick’s Day and watch that one movie with the creepy grim reaper and the leprechauns. i will have to change my tie when I get back to the pench (apartment). This week went well, I seem to still struggle giving good district meetings but this time we did some practices that I think helped the district, I know they helped me to learn from them some new ways of teaching. And the hermanas told me that justo(?) they used something we talked about in district meeting that day afterwards, so maybe I am not the worst district leader haha. It was funny last Monday because we did the activity where we ate tacos and then at night we had a noche de hogar (family home evening) and the hermana gave us..... Tacos! They were nothing like Mexican tacos but she said they were. It makes me wonder about all the "Italian" and "Chinese" food that we supposedly eat in the states and how different it probably actually is. Then we found a new family that knew a bit about the church already and was very nice. We found them because we were walking by and Elder Dahl said hi to a guy and we kept on walking. Then, down the street he said no, we should go talk to them. So we went back knocked on the guy’s door and set up a cita (an appointment) to teach them later on. Oddly enough they were there, and they listened! Elder Dahl has a lot of courage like that to go back and talk to people or just to talk to people if he feels like he should. I feel like I need to do a better job on that so I will try to this week. Then on Friday it rained and all of our citas fell through and we just walked around wet most of the day. At least we can hold to the promised that every time we are out in the rain our wife is reading her scriptures and getting more beautiful. Then on Saturday we had the baptism! We thought we had planned everything, but that doesn’t stop things from going wrong! We went in the morning to start filling up the font and it took us a while to figure out the pump because we wanted to pump out some dirty water that we found in the font. Once we got that figured out we filled it up most of the way and then left for lunch to come back and finish later. We were going to use the sacrament meeting room for the service but when we got back to fill up the font the other ward that shares our building was having a huge birthday party thing in the cultural hall. They had music, food and even a blow up slide thing (I am pretty sure whatever it was it wasn’t exactly an activity that was appropriate to be held in the church) and then all the leaders from the ward were going to have a meeting and then go to the baptism later but the meeting started late because of some other meeting that the stake had for the young women. I thought "how many things can you schedule for one Saturday!" so we had Magdalena who got there early just waiting for a while. We moved the service to where the baptismal font is so that we wouldn’t be affected by the party and had to mix up a few things because the hermano (brother) that we asked to prepare a talk on baptism prepared it for the Holy Ghost. All in all it was a huge relief when we were finally seated and could start the program. The program itself went really well and I felt very happy, relaxed and could feel the spirit. (Maybe because I didn’t have to worry about doing the baptism) the hermano that did the baptism is a recent convert of about 6 months and did it super well. Afterwards we talked with the family of Magdalena and the boyfriend of her granddaughter said he was interested in knowing more, so we will start teaching him soon. All in all it was a very good experience and I will send a few pictures next week because I gave my memory card to a kid in our ward so he could print off some pictures of the baptism at his work. Keep going strong! This work and life may be tough but it is so worth it. Good luck with your Book of Mormon marathon. I want to read more and an hour just doesn’t seem like enough so sometimes I will read at night before bed too.

Love you all very much,

Elder Andrew