Day 131

¡Hola Familia!
¿Cómo andan? mama- i was very impressed with your castellano. how did you learn? i don´t like ´´che´´ and its not very common but i encourage you to keep learning! when i step off the plane in two years i am going to have lots of problems speaking english so you could help me a lot. a few days ago we had divisions with the zonies and one of my zone leaders asked me to pray in english. after the prayer he told me that i pray like a four year old child because i used a lot of spanglish and it was a little slow. it was funny though. writing in english is way better.
transfers today!!!! 21 missionaries are going home honorably today and we are losing many from my zone. i´m glad to say that i have another 6 weeks with elder suarez and things are looking bright for this next month. i can see our first baptism coming very soon! my companion has lots of connections with the mission office and we obtain lots of juicy information from the elders there, in neuquen, so lots of missionaries call us. a few days ago, elder suarez told one missionary that i knew in comodoro (un kpo elder leyton) that we was leaving comodoro in this transfer but he didn´t really know anything. elder leyton said goodbye to everyone, packed his bags, and the members were giving him a barbeque when his zone leaders called him and said he was going to stay another 6 weeks. he was a little upset with my companion for a while but i think things will be ok now. it was really funny to get a phone call from him though...but usually in the nights, we have conference calls with other zones and we talk about the stuff we are doing in our areas. its pretty fun but i don´t think its the best thing to be doing.
the weather this week has been a lot better and it has been really hot again. i think i prefer the cold but the sunny days are nice. i don´t think it will get too cold this winter but we are going to see. pablo is still alive!!! he was just in neuquen but he never answered his flippin´ phone. aaagh! but its ok though because he finally made the decision to start coming to church. he attended a different ward this week and our zonies told us that he was there and he had a nice big smile the whole time. smells like wet baptismal clothes! yay! with brian, we met with his parents and his 12 year old sister is listening to us too. the mom is against it and doesn´t want brian to be baptized for another few years but we had a nice discussion with her and we are hoping to baptize him a lot sooner than that. brian comes to church every week and is sister is attending too. our other fecha is for april 2 with a woman named alicia and i just hope everything goes well. i´m so excited for the general conference too! we have our sessions a little later and i think that i will be able to watch it in english with one of my zone leaders, elder rozier from california. we are the only gringo mormons in all of zapala! today we went to pick up elder rozier at 4 in the morning because his companion just finished the mission and we are going to stay together until the other zone leader comes tomorrow afternoon. i don´t mind having three of us and today is going to be awesome.
elder rozier helped us clean our little apartment and it was really intense because we haven´t cleaned it very good in a while but now it is nice and fresh. everything is in order and we feel like new missionaries! im getting kind of hungry now so im thinkin´ this email will be a little shorter this week... here everything is going well but the finding is a little slow. the members aren´t very dependable and its hard to get them to come for lessons, or bring friends for the family home evening lessons. we ask for references every time we are with them but they never have anybody so we are going to work on animating the members for missionary work. maybe the baptism of pablo will spark the ward missionary flame! this is my fourth transfer on the mission and i´m so excited for it. i will have 6 months on the mission and i will have watched my first general conference in argentina. i think i will buy a bunch of facturas for the event. facturas are like mini donuts with cream, 12 for 10 pesos en la anónima but i think i might be able to find cheaper in one of the kioscos in the street. have i mentioned the siestas here in argentina? nobody is outside around 2-4 o´clock and people get ticked if you interrupt their naptime. i heard people get killed for that in spain but maybe that´s just a rumor. thankfully, i don´t think we will get killed here so we are going to keep contacting throughout the naptime but we don´t find anything in that time. in comodoro, elder escobar and i went to the pension for the hour of study that we are allowed to have after lunch, but elder suarez is not the best reader and he doesn´t like to study very much. speaking of studying, i finally finished the new testament and i have about 150 pages left in the old testament. it has been an awesome experience reading all of the scriptures and it has helped me to gain a greater appreciation for them, and for the church. there´s nothing in the scriptures that contradict anything that we believe and i´m glad for the opportunity to defend the church with the scriptures. i love when people use scriptures to try and prove that we are wrong because i have almost always been able to show them why we are correct. i have only been left confounded 2 times, and that was with an adventista pastor (that studies in the university for years) and with a jehovah´s witness (that sits and studies the bible all day, every day) because they presented new stuff that i have never thought of before. being on the mission has helped me grow a lot in my understanding of the gospel and to grow a lot personally as well and i hope to continue progressing everyday. it has been a wonderful opportunity and i have a strong testimony of the truth of this gospel. i´ve had a few trials the last few months but i´ve slowly been overcoming them and i feel so much better here in argentina. by the way, my walk is not strange! i have a swagger, no más. the package in the box will be fine. i haven´t seen anybody have to pay anything for their packages in boxes and it will arrive ok. packages are always welcome here :D
thanks for all the support and i love you guys a lot!
con una sonrisa gigante y optimista,
elder summers

Day 124

¡Hola Familia!
this week has been a little frustrating... we searched for everybody on our lists and none of those people wanted to talk to us. we clapped tons of doors and still nobody. pablo hasnt called us back in a week but we have been calling him everyday and now we are really worried about him. we pass by his house sometimes and we dont get an answer so thats a little sad. we did find one woman, mariana, that is interested and we are trying to get her family more involved. she is 21 with a 1 year old kid and she´s is about to have another baby in may. all of our other investigators, we have decided to back off and just find news. marcelo has been an investigator for a long time. he is a doctor and he has read the book of mormon, jesus the christ, day of defense, and many other books but he is afraid to ask God if the church is true. very frustrating this week because we have stopped visiting other families because they don´t want to listen to us anymore. i don´t understand how we aren´t having that much success when we have a huge area full of people but nobody is listening... this week should be better.
my companion is peruano and brazilian tambien and he has been teaching me some portugues! awesome. i can now speak spanish with a portuguese accent, how cool is that? i still haven´t mastered the castellano accent because their words are more slurred together and its a little lazy. i speak very well and it´s awesome to have conversations in the street and be able to walk away knowing that i just understood every word that they said.
in argentina, every day they have siestas from 12-4. a siesta is a nap and during the afternoon, nobody is in the street and all of the stores are closed. when we clap doors, the people get ticked with us because they are sleeping and i don´t know how we can use those precious hours to find more people. we eat our lunch at 1 everyday but afterwards we have lots of time until the people emerge from their houses. aaaugh!!! fa.
i am now in charge of sharing the scripture with families during the lunches everyday because i really enjoy doing it. i share a scripture that really stood out to me during my morning study and it leads to awesome discussions in our lunches to build up the members. im going to take a picture of my agenda with all of the scriptures i found. one that stood out to me for the week was 1 corinthians 15:10. it is the apostle paul writing to the corinthians and he is talking about his missionary work and it says-
´´but by the grace of God i am what i am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but i laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not i, but the grace of God which was with me.´´ he is talking about how he wasn´t worthy to be an apostle because of his persecution of the church before but now he is working very hard to make up for those things but we all have the grace of God with us through the Atonement. we can show our gratitude through our hard work, and that is my purpose to be able to show how grateful that I am here in Argentina.
hey! that´s awesome that you found where i live. do you like it? it´s a lot like colorado but the mountains are further away. the chapel is on trannack and zeballos about 10 blocks away, mas o menos...
Dad! Happy Birthday! i bought you a cake to celebrate, and we sang feliz cumpleaños too. it was awesome so i took a picture of your cake. it´s too bad that you had to celebrate on a fast sunday... yesterday it was really rainy so we just ended our day watching the rain from our house and we ate the cake. great day. its really cool that you found so many family names to bring to the temple and i am so jealous because i can´t go with you guys. you´ll just have to find some more for me to come along in twenty months. ¿listo?
my clothes are doing fine but i have a few more rips. not a big deal. my shoes are lasting but the inplants are getting ripped up. we had to walk tons this week and now i have huge blisters on my toes but everything is ok right now. i have been wearing my glasses everyday because it is faster and easier but i wore my contacts today for the first time in 3 months and the world seems clearer. interesting how different it feels. my comp is sick right now but we are still working really hard and things are going very well. its interesting with my comp because he has 14 weeks left on his mission so it´s cool to ask him for advice with things, to see how he teaches certain principles and concepts, and how he interacts with people. elder suarez is my ´´padrastro´´ (step dad) and i´m learning lots of cool stuff. sorry jamie- you told me not to do the whole dad-son trainer thing on my mission but i think that it is funny. we have a goal to break the mission record in contacting people in a week. the record is 702 in a week but we are going for 1000. that´s like 150 everyday when our normal number is about 35. right now in the ciber, some people are filming a movie and it´s very interesting. they have asked us to be silent and they have lots of cool equipment but i have a feeling that it won´t be a blockbuster...
i weighed myself in a farmacia and i weigh 67.7 kilograms, i´m not too sure how much that is but i think it is about 140 right? life is good, i´m eating a lot, but we are also walking tons too. ok, i think that is sufficient for the day and i will start sending some pictures too. i love you guys! enjoy this week and keep me in your prayers to find new people!
con una sonrisa grande y mucho amor y ánimo,
elder summers