Week 78: Posadas, Argentina

Sorry mom, but I don't really have a lot of time to write and i'm pretty exhausted and can't really even remember anything really excited that happened this past week... just transfers and running all over the place doing stuff. Thanks for the email, update, and for getting a bunch of ties for me. I'm sure the people here will appreicate them. Thanks!! love you!!

Elder Roberts

Week 77: Posadas, Argentina

Hmm, about the BYU housing, i guess you can go ahead and start looking into it. But i was talking to the Sister in my zone and she told me that off campus is definitely better than on campus. And that at BYU there are some good housing places. She said Belmont was good, but it was like 15 minutes from campus and that King Henry was good as well. I guess you could start looking into it and the prices and stuff and what looks good, and next week you can let me know what you find and we can make a decision. 

That´s really cool about the guy that is going to get baptized Saturday. We are teaching a guy right now named Carmelo that is pretty interested and has gone to church twice, and he is really good friends with a member. So we´ll see what happens with him in the next few weeks. We are still in the process of finding a few more people to teach.  We have a few references, but it's really hard to find them and teach them with our schedule and their schedule. But everything is going pretty well.

The other day we took the member list of all the members that live in our area, and there are a lot.  We were praying to see which people we could go visit.  There was a partial member family that we had visited before and  had talked to their oldest son who said he works on Sundays.  He also had said that neither his brother nor his mom got baptized just because they didn't really want to. But this time we found the dad sitting outside by himself and he invited us in to talk.  He´s been a member for about 23 years and said that he hasn´t been to church for 20 years and he said that his life wasn´t going too great.  He said that the economic situation was pretty tough and that he had put a goal to get a little closer to God this year and start to change, but that since New Year´s he hasn´t been able to that-there was something that was always holding him back. And Wednesday morning he said he got up really early to pray and think about life and what was going on and he said he was praying to find the way to change and to get a little closer to God.  That same day we drove by their house looking and we said, "Ahh but we already visited them," but we said, "Well let's go see if they´re interested and if they´ve changed."  We had a super good lesson talking to the dad, and i think he liked it a lot. We read in Enos 1:4-5 and i think that really got to him and he applied it to his life. So that was a pretty cool experience.

But this week i actually did get a new companion, but he wasn´t really that new.  The four secretaries all live together and the Material's Secretary is one of them; he just got here about a month and a half ago.   What happened is is that he got changed from Material's Secretary to President's Secretary, so now he is my companion... haha. So i already know him really well. He´s Elder Collins from Saint George, Utah, and he's pretty cool. We get along pretty well, so it should be fun. But there are changes next week, so it´s time to get really busy.  Changes are at the end of the month which makes my job really crazy because i have to change the whole system before the month ends to make sure all the money gets to the right people in their new areas. So it should be fun. 

That is true though that a lot of people like to ask the weird questions about the church and always want to know about polygamy or other controversial things. That happens a lot here.  We went to a store to buy soda for lunch and they guy was reading a Bible, which was really surprising because that doesn't happen a lot.  But we started talking to him and he immediately started to try to argue with us. He started talking about a lot of weird false doctrine and said that we go around and teach people false doctrines.  We kinda just walked away and left him be. Usually we find people that know too much and have interpreted the Bible the way they want to, or we find people that don´t know anything at all about the Bible. One lady told us, "My parents taught me not to read the Bible too much because it makes you go crazy…" Haha. All kinds of interesting people. Anyway, thanks for the update and have a great week!!

Love, Elder Roberts

Week 76: Posadas, Argentina

Helloooo, first of all, happy birthday to Nathan before i forget.. what did you guys do for his birthday? Tell him I'll have to give him a present when i get home. 

That's cool that grandad is getting really into genealogy.  I think here a few people are catching on to the family history thing. I guess its really hard if you don't have a computer at home, but my companion who is the only member in his family did quite a bit of work by himself before his mission. I´m still not too sure how to do it, but I'll have to have grand mom teach me this summer. It would nice to learn. Is there still a lot to do on dad's side? Well i guess there is always a lot to do, but i feel like grand mom and grandad got pretty far on it. 

This week was a pretty good week except the health part. I got really sun burnt and starting peeling... and then I got another ingrown toenail and then got a really bad flu and felt like throwing up.  It started the other night and in the morning i went and did some paperwork in the migrations office and went to the zone meeting.  Then after that i was feeling really bad and went to bed and slept in the office so that my companion could do his job.  After that I went home and slept for like 30 hours... and didn't eat anything for 2 days. But now i feel a lot better. I think it was just like a 48 stomach virus, also I think the water made me sick because i drank some sketchy water the other evening. But i feel totally fine now, i actually feel better than before, i think the resting helped a lot. 

But the reason I got sun burnt is because we had our open house car wash at the chapel which was interesting. We had a few youth go out to the streets and hold signs while we were on the basketball court washing cars and while we washed the cars we invited people to go inside the church and see what it was about.  A few members and the Sisters were there giving a tour and explaining to them what we believe.  In 3 hours i think we washed about 20 cars and about 15 of them stayed and talked and went to the church, while others kinda just came and dropped their car off and then walked away to the supermarket in front of the church to buy stuff.... i guess they didn't want to see the church, ha ha, but it was still fun. But i kinda forgot to put sunscreen on. But it was fun, it was a different way to try and do things and we got a few addresses to go visit people even though none of them lived in our area... but it still worked pretty well I think. I think my new companion is coming this Sunday so that should be exciting, and all the possibilities are missionaries that i know that i get along with really well so I'm excited. It sometimes is hard to find a replacement in the office due to needing a missionary that speaks Spanish well and that has at least 8 months or more left in the mission so that they can serve a reasonable amount of time in the office and still leave at the end to finish their missions normally. 

I´ve come to learn that February is definitely the hottest month of the year, but luckily it's the shortest. Hopefully its not too cold up there. I hope everyone has a great week and that Nathan has a great birthday!

Love, Elder Roberts

Week 75:Posadas, Argentina

I feel like i always start of my letters saying, "Well this week was good," but every week seems to be pretty good. We have been pretty busy planning and having the leader conference.  Everything went pretty well and turned out well, so it was pretty fun. It's nice though when it ends so that we can kinda relax and have a little break. The next two weeks should hopefully be pretty chill, obviously with stuff to do, but not as much until transfers again. I should be getting a new companion sometime this week or maybe the next, we´ll see. I like Elder Meniz, but after 6 months sometimes ya gotta change it up a little. Weeks where we have conferences are tough sometimes because we don't have time to go to our area, but there really isn't much we can do about it. 

Our new Bishop is pretty cool, he doesn't work too much, so he has a lot of time to go out and teach with us and asked us when we wanted him to go and teach with him. But i think it's more necessary because he gets a lot of weight on his back. I think the weight of the ward isn't as spread out onto the leaders of the organizations as it is the States, and sometimes that weighs the bishops down a lot. But he is really nice and pretty excited about missionary work, and i think we are going to have our first Ward council meeting this Sunday, which should hopefully help out a lot and get the ward moving again. 

We went and cut down some trees at a ladies' house last Saturday which was pretty fun because they were banana trees and there were big bushels of bananas that fell down. The trees were weird because with just one swipe of the machete it just cut right through, but they were super heavy. The trunk was full of watery gushy stuff, it was weird, but pretty cool. 

But this week i felt like i wasn't having much luck, a few bad things happened... but then this morning i lost my wallet and i was pretty upset because it had quite a bit of money in it and my license.  I figured that it's Argentina, that if someone finds it that they'll definitely take all the money and probably not return it. So i was pretty upset, and i was like, well if I've been working pretty hard and doing what I'm supposed to why does bad stuff like this happen to me?   But then God was like, "Well, don't get too upset about it."  Then we got a call from a guy who saw another guy pick up my wallet that was in the street. And the guy that picked it up in the street was super cool and he decided to keep it because he wanted to make sure it got into the right hands. It turns out the guy that saw him pick it up looked at my license and was like, "He's from the States, i bet he's a missionary." It turns out that his nephew is a member and served a mission as well.  So the guy called his nephew, who called the missionaries from his ward, who called us, and then we called the nephew who gave us the number of his uncle.  We went to his house and he called the guy that found my wallet so that he could come to his house.  Then he came and gave me my wallet that had everything in it, even the money.  It was super cool, and we gave him a Book of Mormon. And that's how i got my wallet back, ha ha. So pretty cool story. 

But thanks for the email and for everything! Love and miss you, have a great week!!

Elder Roberts

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Week 74: Posadas, Argentina

Hmm, I don´t think it's true that all financial secretaries are good at math. I think i lost a lot of it. But it´s more just organizing and keeping track of everything rather than being good at math. It´s mostly adding and subtracting, so it doesn´t get too tough. For example, this week i went to Asuncion with Elder Choez, the paperwork and making everyone legal secretary, to help him and to organize and pay for all the travels for all the missionaries coming from like four different cities in Paraguay. But it was cool to go to Paraguay again, i think i like it a lot better than Argentina... so im hoping i'll get to go back before I finish. I may be leaving to go back to the field in mid May... which would give me 6 weeks in the field, or possibly in the beginning of April, which would give me 3 months. But Asuncion was fun, got to see the temple again and eat some really good Arabic food, a place that we always go to that´s across from the temple. We got back last night at 1200ish, but it was actually nice because i got to sleep on the bus. I miss Paraguay a lot.

But the Superbowl really is this Sunday? I totally forgot about the Superbowl. That's cool though. I don't feel like i'm missing too much though.. I think just missing the World Cup was tough. 

But yeah, they are making two new missions in Argentina, pretty crazy. I guess it´s growing a lot down there near Buenos Aires. Maybe the people here will catch the drift soon.. haha.  We actually are getting a little bit more help from the members now and they are getting a little bit more involved. We had our famous dessert night and actually a lot of people came, like 90 i think, and we had lots of dessert but they ate it all. But two of the young single adults shared a message, we played a game, kinda like If You Love Your Neighbor, and then ate, it went really well. Next Saturday we are having an open house at the chapel and a free car wash. While we are washing peoples' cars, we are going to invite them to see the open house for a few minutes... so hopefully it doesn't rain and that the members bring car washing supplies. We also did service last Saturday where we cleaned some more old diapers up, but also threw out a bunch of trash, old freezers, washing machines and driers that didn't work.  We also chopped some trees down and cut some grass.  Saw some tarantuals, a ton of small black frogs that jump super high, and I got attacked by a million red ants that got into my shoes and socks, but luckily i got them off pretty quickly, only got bit a little bit. But it's fun because the members are getting a little more active. There really aren't a lot of activties and things to do so usually when people get together they have a lot of fun, they just don't really know how to plan activities and stuff. So we try to plan them haha, and they usually turn out well. The people are getting a little more unified as we go, so it's fun to see. This Saturday we are going to help a lady put a roof on the back part of her house. 

Love, Elder Roberts

 

Week 73: Posadas, Argentina

Secretarying was pretty good this week. Had a few knew things that i hadn't done before that i needed to figure out. President LaPierre went to the hospital this week for a lung issue he had before the mission and was operated on today.  He's fine now, everything went well, but had to organize some money for that one. I was trying to figure out how to make electronic payments, or bank transfers, but never really got to it.  But it's going well, i think I'm actually caught up on almost everything and all the big projects i had are finished now. I just have to keep going and hope nothing else crazy comes up. But its fun, i like it.  I think my new companion will come in a week or two. I'll have been with my current companion for 6 months, which is quite a long time. My companion is from Peru, and i think he is going to study afterwards.  He was studying to be a dentist, but i think he's going to change. 

(Liam made chipas for his International Club presentation on Argentina, he sent Ben a picture of them.)  Hahahahahah Liam's chipas..... that's pretty funny. Chipa is a pretty popular thing here, there are a lot of chipas. There're people that have chipa stands, there're people that ride around on bikes and sell chipa, there're people that ride around in cars and sell chipa, there're people that walk with big baskets selling chipa, and then there're the bakeries that sell lots of chipas. They're pretty good, but there's chipa with ham and cheese which is delicious. We were trying to teach a lesson the other day and this guy comes walking by with a basket full of chipa yelling CHIPPPAAA, CHIPPPA CALIENTE, VENGA A COMPRAR CHIPA CALIENTE!!! Super loud. So that was kind of distracting. He should have made empanadas though, or mandioca, hahaha. 

But yeah, the crossing the border sitauation is pretty tough.  There are lots of problems with paper work and being legal, and lots of money to spend making sure it's all done. But yeah, we are trying to strengthen the branches here. I think the church is growing, maybe not very drastically like Peru, Brazil and Mexico, but it's definetely not declining. Here it's just really inconsistent. It's pretty up and down in a lot of the branches and even in some wards. The temple is kind of far away and sometimes there just isn't enough man power to push the church along, but it's doing well. 

But the teaching is going pretttty welll. We have a few investigators, two couples that are pretty interested, but not really becuase they are Catholic, even though they haven't gone to church in like 10 years. But they are liking what they are learning and we are hoping they can go to the activity tomorrow and meet some of the members and get a feel of what the church is like. 

We are having a lot of success with less actives though. The ones we were visiting before are now pretty active and we found a few others last week. We were trying to use the MLS, the member list, and look for peoples' houses and we couldn't find anyone on the list, but then contacting we found this lady who was kinda waiting for someone to say, "hey, go back to church!" So we had some good lessons with her and she went last week and then we were headed to her house to teach her and this guy stops us in the street and says, "hey… I've been wanting to talk to you guys, it's been about 5 years since I've gone to church and I need to go back." So we taught him the next day after he got home from work and he told us how his wife left him and took all his kids and he doesn't really know how they are doing and he's kind of lost. And then there is another guy where he is the only member of his family, his wife is super evangelical but really nice.  He was having a tough time too, not really feeling lots of support, and his dad died and he and the other guy are both elders.  They both had callings in the quorom when they were active, so they know quite a bit and i think with a  little bit of help and support from the members they'll be good. But i think the trick is visiting the less actives with the members becuase they don't really do their visits unless you go with them and basically do it with them.  So we did, and it went really well and i feel like the ward is catching on a little bit and is progressing, getting a little bit more excited about missionary work. 

But thanks for everything!! Thanks for the letter and the support and i hope everyone has a great week!!!

Love, Elder Roberts

Week 72: Posadas, Argentina

My week wassssss great! And really busy, but good. I´m realizing that the office is pretty cool, it's helping me a lot to organize my time and things i have to do. I really can actually feel myself getting better at stress management, like knowing i have a lot to do and little time to do it.  But it's weird, i don't really get too stressed out now. 

I´ve stopped drinking soda and eating so much unhealthy stuff and eating at night and now I'm trying to eat more fruit, and omelets for breakfast... and i'm going to try and start doing more exercises. It would be nice to run in the morning, but no one wants to run, haha. 

But woahh that's awesome that you saw Presdient Eyring... kinda jealous. Do you know if the temple is going to be closed again this summer? 

But congrats for your observation that went well mom!! That's always a relief. Also, pretty fun that there are lots of activites in the church. We are trying to start ward night types of thing, but sometimes it's hard because lots of members don't have a mode of transporation and buses are getting kind of expensive. They play soccer here at the church every Tuesdays and Thursdays we are having a dessert night.

Happy Martin Luther king day! haha yeah i dont think anyone here knows about that… I think they only know about September 11th; it's weird, people ask me sometimes, "Oooh, woah in  your country those planes knocked over those buildings right…?"

I think I'm grateful to be in a warmer mission than a cold mission. The heat stinks, but i can at least move and function, I think the cold would be tough. (Ben's cousin Josh is in Vermont where it was -35 degrees with the wind chill this week.)

Sorry my emails aren't too exciting these days, i'll try to think of more cool stuff that happened.  I just always run out of time or can't remember want happened this past week... But I'll try to get better, haha. Well have a great week and enjoy the long weekend.

love, Elder Roberts