Week 87: Posadas, Argentina

Holllla.

This week has gone by pretty fast. Elder Johnson is doing really well learning everything, so far so good. He reminds me of me when i was in his spot haha but he is cool. With two of us we have been able to get out to work more, so that has been fun. This week has been really chill though, nothing crazy going on and we have been able to focus a lot of learning the responsibilities and the financial things. 

The conference with Elder Oaks was pretty cool though. It was interesting. I was expecting him to talk about missionary work and to get out and work hard and do a bunch of stuff to help the church grow, but it was more about the sabbath day and also about receiving revelation. Obviously it was tied into to missionary work, but it was a little different than what i was expecting. He said that they as the apostles and the prophet had prayed about what they needed to do, or what we could do as people to resist all the bad things happening in the world and the answer they got was keep the sabbath day holy. Interesting. I figured i was keeping the sabbath pretty holy, but i guess there are always better ways we could. It made me think a little. 

Anyway, i am excited to leave the office in two weeks and spend the last 6 weeks in the field. I would love to go to Paraguay, but we shall see. 

We had our activity for the ward on Saturday, i think it's the third one we have done and it didn't really go as well as the other ones haha. It was fun, but it could have been better. 

What was good about this week was that we found some pretty cool people. We kinda got lost last night, but ended up running into some people from Uruguay who were really cool. We were talking to them and gave them a pass a long card and then they said... so you people are Mormons right... there is that one book that that one guy from New York wrote when he had the dream about the Indian and the Indian led him to a hill where he found the book... haha it was funny, but after we explained to him the Book of Mormon and the concept of it, they were super interested and his wife said, "Oh man, I've always wanted to read that book! Can we have one…?" that was the first time anyone ever said that too me.... But it was pretty cool, unfortunately they don't live in our area, but hopefully they can progress. We also found some other cool people contacting and we´ve actually gotten a few references that we haven't been able to find, but we are still looking. Things are starting to pick up a little which is good. 

We´ve also been teaching the youth Sunday school class because there isn't a teacher and its been pretty fun to get to know the youth.  Also, we started inviting a few more to come back and the youth have been doing well, and there has been a big change. There are also new presidents of the Young Men and Woman, but we went from having about 3 or 4 in the class to 13 last Sunday. And 8 of them went with us and the seminary teacher to go visit some of the people that weren't coming to seminary or church and that went really well. 

Tomorrow is holiday here, the day of the worker... so no one has work haha, but the tradition is to make something called locro. Its like a big corn soup they cook in huge pot with corn, vegetables and meat, and they like to use weird meat like cow intestines and pig feet.... so I'm hoping they let us serve ourselves so we can avoid the weird stuff. They are making at the church tomorrow as a ward. 

Anyway, i keep doing and saying really weird stuff at night while I'm sleeping. The other night i was sleeping on the bottom bunk, the top bunk is supported by about 6 skinny wooden boards, and i think i had a dream that the top bunk was falling on me.  So while i was sleeping I kicked up really hard, probably trying to stop the bed that was supposedly falling on me, and i broke one of the boards and almost kicked my companion off the top bunk.  So we decided it was best i sleep on the floor because if i sleep on the top bunk I might fall off, as I've fallen off 3 times in my mission. 

Anyway, the time keeps going by pretty fast, i cant believe tomorrow is May. In Argentina the April showers bring may flowers thing doesn't really exist-it's more like April showers bring more may showers... and June showers. So I'm getting my raincoat and Underarmour out for these last two months. Thanks!!!

Have a great week!!!!

Love, elder Roberts

Week 86: Posadas, Argentina

Are you watching TED talks? I watched a few the summer before i left, i thought some of them were really interesting. I´m not sure if the spirit gives you the desire to learn, i think so, because i really like learning about random stuff now and i want to read books.... it's kind of weird, haha but maybe i just have a different mindset now. I think i like learning more than i did before. I talked to President a little about school in my interview and that was good, and then to Hermana LaPierre about what some of her kids and children in law do. President told me that i should find someone that studied economics or computer science and talk to them and see what they have to say on it. I feel like the more i think about it the harder it gets to decide. President also told me to try to take a little bit of everything my first semester so that i can really see what i like and maybe try to pick up on something. I´m not really even sure what classes are available, but that is good that the sign ups aren't until June. 

This week has gone pretty well. It's been kind of crazy because there was like a mini transfer with a few people having to go home early, two new secretaries coming in to be trained, and two problems with some legal work, so there are quite a few missionaries that have to be moved around starting tonight because tomorrow we have the the opportunity to listen to Elder Oaks!!! He is going to be in Resistencia, which is the next closest mission, and we are going to watch it live on a screen as it is broad casted from Resistencia. So i am pretty excited about that. Tomorrow should be a good day, but after that all the missionaries are moving around, so we are busy helping president organize all that. 

We did get to go out and teach this week and we did another activity with the young single adults where we left with them and visited some less actives. It went really well, like 13 young single adults showed up, so we split up into two big groups and went and visited some people and it went really well, hopefully we can keep doing it and helping them. We also found a lady that had left her church and she said she had been praying to try to see what she should do and we were the first people to show up at her door, so that was also a really cool experience. We haven't been able to visit her again, but we will be going today or tomorrow. Also, last night we taught a really cool family, we were kind of talking in the doorway of their little wooden house for 10 minutes and they finally decided to let us in and we taught the parents and their seven kids and it went really well and they were really interested. Unfortunately they are moving to the sisters area tomorrow, but hopefully we can see them in church sometime. 

Pday was really cool today as well, we went to the biggest hill/mountain here in the province of Misiones where there is a big cross that they built as a tourist attraction. It was really cool, kind of reminded me of High 

Rock, the view, but it was cool to see. The European immigrants really had a strong influence in Catholicism and seemed to plant the Catholic church really strongly here in Argentina. There is also a butterfly room, so it was fun  to go and see that. Then we came back and Hermana LaPierre taught us how to make apple pie and we ate it.... and it was really good. 

Anyway my new companion comes tonight at about 9:00.  His name is Elder Johnson and he is from Idaho.  He is pretty new in the mission, i think he has about 5 or 6 months, but he is really cool. I´ve talked to him a few times and he is a solid, nice, smart kid, so i am excited to be with him. I'll be here till the change, May 19th, and then i'll get to spend my last transfer somewhere in the field... hopefully Paraguay!! But anyway, i hope everyone is doing well. Have a great week!!!

Week 85: Posadas, Argentina

This week has been pretty busy as well. We had the zone leader/sister training leader conference, then cleaning up from everything, and also helping President plan interviews with everyone and talking about who is going to replace me… haha.  My new companion hasn't come yet. I´m thinking he may come next week. I hope so, because I'm kind of excited to start doing something new, training him.  And i think the time here in the office will go by faster. I can't believe April is already halfway over, but i guess that is the mission and life. 

Our Bishop is really cool here in our ward.  We stopped by last night and talked to him about some of the stuff we were doing in our area and a lot of the members that were on the list and that had moved or passed away. We are going to help him clean up the member list a little. He is really nice though, and supportive. I think he is just genuinely nice and ready to help, he kind of reminds me of dad. 

Anyway, i believe i only have 5 weeks left here in the office, I have to send my passport to Buenos Aires to get more pages added to it because mine is too full from crossing the border too many times to take out money and do other stuff. 

It is kind of scary to think that i need to start studying so that i can get a job that i could do for the rest of my life. But President Monson said that our future is as bright as our faith... so i guess i just gotta have faith that everything will work out

It was cool in the council meeting we had on Tuesday with President, he talked a little bit about an example of an airplane, kinda sounds like Uctdorf, though President was an airplane engineer. But he was talking about how there was a plane that had crashed and it was because on the motor, the metal hadn't gone under some kind of chemical inspection.  There was a tiny little air bubble.  But as time passed, the pressure made the air bubble bigger and bigger and after a few years the plane crashed on one of its flights and killed over 100 people. It really goes to show that the small simple things are sometimes the most important. President LaPierre is pretty cool, he is just really wise and can pretty much teach you anything at anytime in anyplace. The kind of guy that always has something to say that just sticks with you. The other day he was talking about being prepared and being on time and that in his career those two things helped him a lot, Sometimes he would get little projects to do and he would be busy so he would say, "In 10 days i'll have it done. And he would finish his stuff and kind of take his time and by the 10th day he would have it ready and sent, and the person would always been happy because he would always have it done by when he said he would. Anyway, there are a lot of little things like that that I've learned here that i think will help me a lot afterwards in school and working. 

Our area is going pretty well though, the members are helping, and the young single adults are really working as well.  They have a lot of activities and cool stuff going on and are trying to reactivate a lot of people. There are three young adults preparing for missions, and actually today there is a kid from Tacuari that is leaving on his mission that was reactivated not too long ago. When i was there the other elders were working with him a lot and helped him start coming back to church; now he´s headed off to Columbia. It's fun to see progression even though there isn't a whole ton of it, everything i think is growing little by little. We also went and sang at a retirement home last week which was nice, doing service is always a nice change, and something that is usually fun to do. 

Anyway, thanks for the update and i hope everyone has a great week!!

Love, Elder Roberts

Week 84: Posadas, Argentina

Work sounds interesting with kids that don´t speak English at all. People always think it´s funny when i tell them that both my parents do the exact same occupation. Well that is pretty cool that a lot of people have looked at my blog. I didn´t think i was that interesting, but they also could be views mostly from you checking it or reading it to make sure it went through haha.

This week was pretty crazy as always, lots of preparation and trying to follow through with all the plans, even though there are always things that don´t go as planned. We had ordered from this Mexican place for lunch for all the new missionaries and their trainers and they didn't come on time, so we drove over to see if they were there and it looked like the place was closed.  So then we ordered pizza really quickly from this big pizza place and then the quesadillas came at the same time the pizza did..... so we sent the missionaries with dinner as well while they left to go to their new area. There were lots of funny things that happened and lots of things that just didn't go so well... I accidentally ran over a cone at the airport and also in the bus terminal, i was walking around trying to send all the missionaries off to their areas and buy their tickets and the envelope i had all the money in opened and all my money fell out onto the floor, and one of my companions in the office decided it would be a good idea to put a piece of bread in the microwave and put 3 minutes instead of 30 seconds so after about 2 minutes the whole office was filled with smoke and it still kind of smells like smoke. Also we were up till like 12:00 that night and apparently we left everything kind of messy.  It just so happens that the inspection people from Buenos Aires came the very next morning.............. oops, but luckily they were pretty understanding.  It went by really fast and all in all it was fun but extremely tiring. There were a lot of new missionaries, so it was fun meeting them and talking to them, but it's over and now it's time to keep working. I think my new companion will be coming in about a week or two and I'm not really sure who it is going to be yet but I'm trying to clean everything up so that when he comes he has a clean slate. There are just a lot of things that i can only fix because i know what happened and if he were try to figure it out it would take a while. Sounds like Easter went well and that everyone is probably getting excited that it's spring and the nicer weather is coming. 

Conference was pretty awesome though. It was nice to sit down and listen and learn a little. I was pretty tired  even though i tried to a get a good nights sleep the night before; i still may have fallen asleep during a few of the talks... It is pretty tough with air conditioning and the lights off. It was great though, i really liked President Eyring and Elder Uchtdorf´s talks and a few of the Seventies gave really good ones as well. I took out from it that we need to be tolerant of people and love people and help others as much as we can. We aren´t here to be better than other people, but to help them progress as we progress as well. Also, keep doing the basic things and always strive to be better or do better than what we are doing now. It was interesting that there were a few people that didn´t sustain the prophet and apostles.  I guess I'm kind of out of the loop, i didn't hear why or who they were, but it was kinda weird how it happened. 

Thanks for the letter and i hope everyone has a great week!!

Love, Elder Roberts 

Week 83: Posadas, Argentina

The weeks do seem to go by pretty quickly. This week we are getting ready for transfers.  I´m not sure how or why there is so much stuff to do and remember but there is, and we are trying to get it all done today so that we can watch conference this weekend. I´m pretty excited for conference, it´s always fun, and this is my third one in Posadas and we get to watch it in English and there is air conditioning haha. So i can´t complain. There are pensions (apartments) and areas we need to open and to close which involves looking for new pensions, new phones, new furniture, moving furniture, cleaning old pensions, re painting old pensions, talking to land lords and then all the other fun stuff about transfers. People are going to Paraguay that need to change their money and then people traveling need money and it's kind of a stressful time, but i think in the office i have learned to manage stress a lot. To lighten things up we did do a few April fools jokes yesterday... we threw flour on one of the elders from the office while he was showering, and then i pretended that i broke my ankle because it got run over by the truck and Hermana LaPierre fell for it.  Then i went to my zone meeting on crutches and almost all of them fell for it. That was probably the only April fools joke that I've done that actually worked. But the Latin missionaries were kind of confused, apparently they celebrate in December.

That sounds fun though having the German exchange students. Probably pretty busy, but it's always fun. 

This week was interesting though, it's been pretty good.  We have actually gotten a lot done in the office and we are getting out every day to work in our area, though there still isn't too much going on... we have met some pretty interesting people, but there are a few less actives that we are having some success with. We talked to a guy yesterday that explained to us how Bush was behind the twin towers and that government and organized religion is all corrupt and that they hide everything from the public.  He also said that there are UFOs and aliens. Then he explained to us how Jesus, after he was resurrected, was beamed up into a UFO and that is how he left the earth and went to another world that they call heaven... yeah we have a bunch of weird people in our area. But we are trying to work in a new part that we are kind of sharing with the sisters that is a little nicer and there are more normal people. We´ve talked to a few cool people but most of them are pretty involved in their own religion or already have pretty strong beliefs. 

I got to go to Paraguay with Elder Magdaleno, who got to the mission the same time i did and is the assistant, because the other assistant sent his passport to Buenos Aires to get more pages added to it.  So we went and helped with an activity in Encarnacion, across the river, with the Becuasehelives video where the missionaries set up a TV in the plaza down town and invited everyone walking by to go watch it. We mostly helped with getting the tables and the TVs there and then handed out cards to people.  It was pretty fun.  It was a good idea and there were a few people that stopped to watch the video.  I think they are doing it again today and tomorrow so it would be nice to see some results from it. Anyway its a pretty cool video…. 

 http://www.mormon.org/easter?cid=HP_FR_3-27-2015_dMIS_fMRMN_xLIDyL1-A_ 

Anyway thank you for writing me, i hope everyone has a great weekend. 

Love, Elder Roberts

Week 82: Posadas, Argentina

Yeah i was just realizing today that I'll have had a third of my mission in the office. I´m not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing... but its been pretty good up until now. It's just a really different experience and there are ups and downs. But I´m enjoying it. Hopefully I´ll survive till May. I think once my replacement comes and I´ll have to be showing him how everything works and how to do everything things will pick up and it´ll be fun. 

But dang.... I´m missing March madness. That is kind of a bummer, but i guess there will be a lot more in the future to watch. And BYU already lost... It is always hard when we go to the Migrations Office because they always have soccer on, on a TV on the wall, or this one less active family when we go to their house they always have soccer playing on their TV... I always said that i would never start thinking about what i'll do after the mission until i get to my last day, but its actually harder than i thought it would be haha. I´m still pretty focused and I'm continuing to try to stay focused, but i think I'm going to be watching and playing a lot of soccer this summer.

These past few weeks we have been trying to use the member list to look for less actives that are willing to come back to church and also for investigators to be able to teach. There are a lot of people that have moved away.. so we are actually helping the ward update their list a little bit because we have found a lot of people that don´t live here anymore. It's funny because we went and looked for a house and we found it, but the lady there said she had never heard of the family that we were looking for.  So we asked her if we could teach her instead and she was actually pretty cool, and we had a good lesson. But there are also other people that aren't so cool. We were looking for this one lady and we went and asked at the house if she lived there and she said no and then we asked her neighbor if he knew the lady we were looking for and he said that it was the lady that told us no..... so i guess she might have had a bad experience in the past. 

Also, something cool that happened was on Sunday.  We took all the young single adults from the ward and decided to go out and visit the other young adults that aren't active.  So we did divisones with them and there were actually quite a few that came and we visited quite a few people, we only had 2 hours, but we got a lot in and almost everyone that we planned on visiting was home-that was really good, and i think all the young adults had a really good experience.  And now they are pretty excited to go out and do it again and help all the 110 young single adults that are on the list come back to church.... But it was pretty fun, and sometimes it is fun to work with people that are more your age and interact with them. One of the less actives that is now coming back to church since January received the Melchizedek Priesthood last Sunday, that was cool and he is pretty excited about the church and everything. Also, Pepe the one kid that we have been working with, and the members are doing most of the work with him, is our ward mission leader and he is getting ready to send his papers in to go on the mission. He is pretty excited as well and he´s just a really cool guy all around. 

Sometimes in the office there really isn´t a whole lot to write about because i mean i could say that i went to the bank yesterday and today and made a deposit, and took out some money, and then i was trying to get everything ready for next months rent payments, and making sure everything was in line, and then i went to Paraguay to take out some guarnies to be able to reimburse people that come from Paraguay, and lots of exciting stuff like that, but it really isn´t all that exciting. I actually do have to drive the truck a lot, mostly just to the bank and to do office stuff, buy stuff, pay for things, and then drive to our area and then back home.  I think I´ve got the stick shift down now, haha, i don´t really ever stall it anymore, so that's a pretty big improvement. But i am pretty excited for conference next week and then there are transfers, so should be fun.  Anyway, thanks for everything and thanks for writing meee. Have a great week everyone!!

I included a picture of my best friend: the calculator.

love, Elder Roberts

Week 81: Posadas, Argentina

Sounds like everything is pretty well back home.  I guess it's a fun time of year when everyone is starting to feel the spring weather and school is coming to an end. Here it's still pretty hot, but i can kind of feel a little bit of a temperature drop.  It's not as bad as it used to be, I think in April it´ll start getting nicer. 

Anyway i´m pretty sure i´m going to be here in the office until mid May and then i'll be able to leave for my last transfer into the field, so i still have a little more time here in the office. It's cool to be here, but after a while i feel like it's more my job and sometimes it's hard to feel like a missionary.  I realize i really need to make an effort to get things done in the office, and also do missionary work whenever i can- in the bank, on the train and everywhere, or else the missionary spirit kind of goes away. My companion and everyone else in the office are really cool though, and we all get along pretty well which helps a lot. I think the time definitely goes by a lot faster  that way. I've been in the office 6 months, and by the time i leave i'll have been here for almost 8 and a half... which is a lot, but I'm happy i'll get a little time in the field. 

We had our zone conference this week which was pretty good, we are still talking a lot about how the area presidency wants us to be doing missionary work and the new plan they have to hasten the work. We talked about goals, which was really cool actually.  President was saying that sometimes we have accomplishments and we are pretty happy about them, so the next week or the next month we look and we say, "Well we had this many charlas (discussions), lets say 10, and so this week we are going to have 13!"  But that is basically just taking a number out of the air. We have two focuses, number of baptisms and the number of attendance at church. He told us to have goals that are reasonable and that are reachable, but not just based on past goals or accomplishments. Also, to set a goal to have a certain number of attendance at church, like 100. That's pretty much impossible for us to control due to the weather and because there are always people that come infrequently, and there are lots of obstacles. But instead, we can take the average attendance from the last month, maybe 90, and put it up to 95, and then our goal is 5.  We can pick 5 less actives, or 3 less actives, and two people that are going to get baptized, and they are our contribution to the attendance. If the rest of the people, or less or more, come that's fine, but we need to focus on bringing our part of the goal as a whole in.  I don't know if i explained that really well, but it was really good.

My companion and i were also talking about if there is such thing as coincidence, or if everything is planned and everything is influenced by God. I think most things are planned out by Heavenly Father.  For a person like a  medic driving as a car who helps a person that crashed near by is probably divine influence, not just a coincidence, because it has the purpose of saving that person's life.  But if someone else and I come to the office with the same tie on, that doesn't really have any influence on anything, so it's more just a coincidence. But that was just something interesting that i was thinking about this week. 

Anyway there weren't really too many exciting things this week because i was sick again Monday and Tuesday, but I'm all better now.  And yesterday was our zone conference. There is a new family in Lavalle from Spain that seem super awesome.  We helped them move today to their new house; they had been renting here for about a month.  They are cool, and they invited us to eat asado next week for helping them move, which I'm pretty excited for. 

Anyway, thanks for everything and the for the letter, hope everything is going well back home and that everyone has a great week!

Love, Elder Roberts