Stoked to be soaked in my own sweat!

Mamerson,

    Hey, thanks for the new year saludos! I sure hope it´s a great one too for all of you! about your questions- yes, the president did tell us how long we could talk on the phone and he said  one hour. I broke that rule by 17 minutes, i will be sure to try harder next time, sorry. and yes, he actually said that we could use skype! it´s just that we could not find a member with a computer who would let us use skype on it.

        This week right now is transfers and usually we have p-day on the third day of the week for transfers, but some business was going down with the new year and all that so we just had a normal p-day right now on monday. i´m not so sure about all the reasons. but this last week was good. it was short! really really short. I got to do divisions with an elder named elder sands this week over in his area. He is from virginia and he has been a jew his whole life, but he got baptized when he was nineteen and left on his mission a year later. He has one of the strongest testimonies i have ever seen in a missionary so i learned a ton being with him for a day. He is just the type of person that´s a born leader. He only has a few more months than me in the mission and already his spanish is perfect! He´s the kind of missionary that just motivates other missionaries by his example. But i had the opportunity to pass by a less active member with him who had told one of the other members that she wanted to start coming back to church and get reactivated. We talked to her and found out that it ahd been like 20 years since she had gone to church or had anything to do with the church because her parents were strictly against it, but that her mom had died a while back ( because they were old already, the lady we talked with was at least 55) and she didn´t want to go and make a fool of her mom as if she was just waiting for her to die, but that she couldn´t deny the testimony she had about the church. The best part was when we asked if she had a book of mormon still and she just laughed and said no way. When Elder Sands pulled a book of mormon out of his backpack you could just see her eyes start to well up with tears and when he gave it to her she just hugged it and thanked us like a million times. That was probably my coolest experience of the week. I love helping those less actives who want to return come back because they already have testimonies and just seeing those old testimonies come to life and light up their being is just as cool as teaching someone new about the restoration.

          My companion and i are doing a fast right now for our area because we are really lacking a lot of success that we could be having, but the fast we did isn´t a fast of food and water, but a fast from all the things that hold us down as missionaries such as not completing with the schedule or having bad attitudes. we´re doing it for a week where we just try our very hardest to focus on those things we need to work on an i´m really excited to see the results of it!

         Beside that, i´m doing great down here in Argentina, the people tell me that summer has just begun so i´m stoked to be soaked in my own sweat all the time and be super stinky now that i´ve officially ran out of all my american deodorant haha. Send the family my love and please send Mathew a put down for not sending me an email like he said he would! haha kidding.            Luvs, Elder Emett

Christmas was so awesome!

Dear the mamz,
       What a time! This christmas was honestly sooo awesome. For Christmas eve we went to the stake center with our whole zone and watched a christmas carol, polar express, the grinch and the work and the glory. then that night we ate with people and just had a nice, relaxing time. Here in Argentina everyone celebrates christmas, but it´s not like back in the states, it´s more of just a time to relax from work for few days and spend time with family and friends. The presents aren´t like a huge deal here and there´s actually some things that i like a ton more than our christmas back home. Santa is kind of new here, so they don´t ask about what santa brought to the kids, they ask about what the baby Jesus brought. I´m not sure how it all works out, but it seems like they keep Christ a lot more in Christmas. As we were watching those christmas movies on monday i realized how well all the movies in our day take christ right out of christmas!
        At midnight they all light off fireworks and i was way excited about that, but then i found out that pretty much all the fireworks here are just bombs so from 12 until like 1:30 you kind of just feel like you´re in the middle of a war, but it was still really neat to experience! Then on chrismas morning we had a district meeting so we just turned it into kind of a testimony meeting about christ and what christmas means to us. We also exchanged ties a little and took pictures down by the coast. It was just a way relaxing day in the morning. Then at night we called the families!! And i´m so sorry how that ended haha tell kolby i´m sorry, it gave me no warning about when it was going to end, it just told me i was out of credit and cut off haha, but no worries, i get to call again in just a few months and plus i can still send emails like this! It was so awesome to talk to all the family and hear everyone´s voices! Except i think it was a lot more... emotional for my companion than it was for me. It kind of just felt like i was talking to a peruvian the whole time haha i cannot wait to get back and talk with kolby in our secret language, except Matt probably understands just fine. After we talked with our families we just went home and had some extra time to do laundry and write in our journals and get ready to get focused back on the work for today.
         We just barely all talked on the phone so i don´t really know if there´s much more to say here haha. just so you know those pictures with the penguin pithcer are because a sister let us borrow it and we thought it was hilarious so we had to get some pictures with it. Send the family my love, i´m super happy that you all had a great christmas!              Love, Elder Emett

Power of the Fast

dear mother,

      I´m doing great, thank you very much :) it´s good to hear that things are going great over there in North America. Of course Kjirsten is going to have another girl haha. about my calling christmas day, i really have no idea how that all works, but i just barely talked with my comp and he said that i´ll probably be calling around 2 in the afternoon. In our mission we can use the computers to call, but we can´t use the camera so it would be just like a phone call anyway so i´m pretty sure i´m just going to use a phone at our church. And about how amanda asked how i´m emailing you- there is a place called a cyber where you just go and pay to use the internet. it has like 12 computers and i´ts pretty cheap, like roughly 2.50 dollars for an hour of internet use. There is pretty much one of them on every street.

       No, i don´t have the package yet, but there is a christmas conference coming up on wednesday and a lot of times that´s when we get packages so there is still hope, but if it doesn´t happen it´s totally fine! I won´t be mad, it´ll eventually get here.
       So this week was straight awesome. I gained a huge testimony about the power of the fast. So my companion has been here in this area for like 4 months and he has never had an investigator go to church. never. So we decided to fast for one of our investigators that we have right now so that she could be able to go. The last time we met with her before sunday she just straight told us that she probably will not go because she works night shift at the bakery and if she´s not working she´s studies all night, but that she really truly does want to go. We shared 1 nephi 3:7 with her and talked about how God always prepares a way if we give it our best effort.

        On saturday we started our fast and saturday was just a straight blazing hot day. At night i couldn´t go to sleep at all. My body was just really hot and it was just some of the greatest suffering i have ever done, but the whole time i was thinking about how she would be working or studying and how hard it would be in the morning for her to get to church. I won´t put times in here, but i did eventually fall asleep for a little bit. The next day when we got to church she was there!!! church started at 9 and she was there waiting at 8:30! She was the first person there, the building wasn´t even open yet! but it turns out that her boss had given her the weekend off and she said that has never happened before. She stayed up all night studying anyways, but was just so excited to get to church that she went way early and waited happily! It was a huge testimony builder for me and she loved sacrament meeting and became great friends with tons of members because they were all so excited to have a new person there because it´s been so long since that happened.

          Later that afternoon we had a storm like the one from the movie ´The Testaments´. The whole city was just trashed and there were trees completely up-rooted all over the place, it was nuts. We had left the door open to our apartment because if we don´t it gets way hot and it turns out that the wind or something had closed the door before the storm really started! it was pretty neat, there are angels here in argentina.

          Happy Christmas family! Happy birthday Dad! I sent you a letter, i hope it gets there in time! I hope you all have great fun with the calender events that i´m super jealous of. love you all, see you tomorrow.         love, Ben

Santa Fe

Studying up on how to give better talks!!!

Ok, that´s it with the pictures. i´m all out of time pretty much. Great work Amanda and Kjirsten!!! Amanda´s going to be an awesome missionary and Moscow is crazyyyyy! i´m so stoked for her :D Did you hear that Charity Suttner got called on a mission too? she´s going to Armenia!  And i have a better idea with the finding out about Kjirsten´s baby. You could send the letter to me then when i call you on christmas i´ll tell you!!! nah, just kidding. there is no way that would ever work haha mail takes like 8 months, the baby would be listening by then too. Which one of the ladies is kolby talking with? i´m so curious!!! i really have no idea, but how you are guessing if i´ve gotten fatter in the mission it´s definately sure that i have! i won´t even deny it, it´s crazy. i walk a lot and all, but it´s just not something that i´m super duper worried about right now tehe. woops.
         This week has been a good one! We had a zone conference and elder viñas from the seventy came to speak to us. Usually they say that the seventies just tell us how bad we´re doing, but he didn´t do that at all! He said we´re doing good and the work is going forward, just that there is always room to improve. In my mission right now we are working a ton with retention because like thousands of people joined the church like 30 years ago, but none of them stayed active so a lot of what we do is just finding less-active members and helping them come back. A lot of places in my mission have like a thousand members for every hundred that are active.
          An old stake president lives in my ward and he is just like the fount of all knowledge for the whole ward and he was assigned to give a talk this last sunday, but his wife is sick and he wasn´t able to do it. so there was this chunk of time in the sacrament meeting the didn´t have filled so what did they do? went to the missionaries!! and since i´m the newer of the missionaries in the area it fell upon my head to fill the 35 minutes that he was going to take which is not that bad, but there is a twist to it. They told me saturday afternoon and i was to give the talk sunday morning haha it turned out.. neat. but it was an awesome experience! so that is something that i´m studying a ton right now- is how to give better talks haha. Thank you for the support and the love from everyone! i´m definately taking you up on that 50 dollars at walmart, thank you so much! i´ll see you all next week.      love, Elder Emett

Finally got his Halloween package!!

Dear Mom,

       Wudda week! Shoot. i took pictures of my small adorable pench, but this computer doesn´t want to send them for me. other day then!

 So it´s killing all the boys that i have a walmart? well get this- i went there today for p-day just like it was regular and bought all my groceries. SOOOOO WEEIIIRRRDDD!!! Of course it wasn´t the exact same, they really only had argentine stuff (and the american brands that they did have were all really made in argentina), but it was set up just like a real wal mart!  WE BOUGHT DONUTS! and my companion bought peanut butter, but i kinda just went, ´´ ooh, yuck. don´t touch that with your hands.´´ but it made him happy somehow. It was weird because walmart really is a lot cheaper even here in argentina, but there were like absolutely no people there! I feel like it´s because they had a lot of security there and some people don´t always like to buy all the groceries.

       Kolby, I want a latino companion too! But that really doesn´t happen a whole lot in our mission unless they´re zone leaders- in which case it´s pretty much always a yankee with a latin. Trust me though, i´d love to have one. I´ve been praying to have one ever since i realized that all spanish from the americans sucks and i´m never really going to learn a ton of spanish if i don´t have one.

       This week i got my halloween package!!! and you knew exactly what i meant when i said the orange taffys! They don´t do that good at staying in the wrapper for 2 months of traveling, but they taste the exact same! haha. This last week we found a new hobby of running on the beach in the mornings because it´s so super close to our apartment. we can get up at 6:30, get ready, and make it to the beach by 6:40 so we have plenty of time to run before 7. Today we went running and we just had to stop because the clouds were toying with the water and making the best sunrise ever so we were just too amazed and we had to stand there and stare at them. 

         Our ward here is really neat, there are a ton of members in this area and like 50 active members. the bishop is just a boss and he is always way stoked to work with us when he doesn´t have to go to his work. there is kind of a huge theme throughout all of argentina that there are a lot of inactives so we spend a lot of time visiting them and seeing what the deal is. That is my weakness as a missionary. I have the hardest time being nice to the less actives. Not all of them, but there are some of them who are just so prideful about the reasons they aren´t going to church, wether it be because one of the other members said something mean or that they got offended somehow and it bugs me because they all say the same thing!! they say that they know it´s the true church and that the church is perfect, just that they don´t want to go and then they want to prove to us that their reason for not going to the church is valid so they start to bash with us as if to prove that if they can prove their point to us they shouldn´t have to go. and obviously they can´t prove that they shouldn´t be going to church, that´s just ridiculous, but it´s just soooo hard for me to sympathize with those people. I´ts way harder than teaching rich people. The active members are awesome though! 
           We are seeing a lot of success though! we were on divisions so i was in another area, but my companion took another missionary out for breakfast in the morning right after working out just to buy facturas. they didn´t even have their placks on, but the girl that worked there recognized them as mormon missionaries because our accents are horrible. she told them that her grandma is a mormon and that she used to listen to the missionaries, but she didn´t get baptized earlier because her mom didn´t allow it, but she´s all grown up now!  she already knows the book of mormon is true and everything and is getting baptized the saturday after christmas. It was really just a miracle from God, we didn´t even do anything, she was already searching for the truth.

          Just so you know i downloaded some of the songs from forgotten carols onto my ipod so i won´t even be missing that here on my mission! But have so much fun with all your christmas time events and all the christmas cheer! I´ll be there for the one right after the next one. I love you! ¡nos vemos mañana!