Hola (from misiones this time) — July 26, 2007

So I know you are all probably really excited to hear from me. Sorry I wasn´t able to write yesterday. We had a zone conference. Luckily we get pday still because it has been 3 weeks since my last real pday because we had interviews, then transfers and now this zone conference. Of course the zone conference was an excellent spiritual lift like always. It was a little different now that i am in misiones though. We were pretty close to the capilla so we took the colectivo and got there in a half hour or so.

I must say that I am quite overwhelmed right now. My arrival to my new area was a shocker in many ways. First of all, I got there at night (we traveled from 5 until 2 in the morning and really couldn´t see much of anything. We went to the pension (which was not very impressive looking and we went to sleep. When we woke up in the morning I looked outside and the forst thing I noticed was all the color. There is green here! And the dirt is an awesome red color just like everyone says. Probably not good for the clothes. Also, there are hills here! I can stretch my legs in new ways. So the change of scenary was really nice.

Unfortunately, me and my companion (Elder Perez from Bolivia) have two areas to take care of right now. They took out the other two areas and so now we have double the number of investigators to take care of and we don´t know how to visit them all. They are on completely different ends pretty much and our area is gigantic. It is overwhelming because we are in a huge city and I have little idea on how to get around as of right now. But the city really is huge. We went to a supermarket called the libertad and it is the size of a walmart. I can find real food (ironic because I will probably get your package in a month or two)! There are a lot of really tall buildings too (more for centro which is not our area) and it is really impressive. There is a river and across is Paraguay (I have only got a brief look from colectivo). Such a drastic change!

Our rama shares the church building with a barrio and we have about 70 people that were in church this week. They have someone to play the piano so I got to sit like a normal person during the meeting (apart from being called to bear my testimony). We have a mission leader to help us out and the rama just functions really well without the missionaries. Excellent!

My companion is the district leader, but we don´t really have a district now that they took out the other two elders. We have the zone leaders and us and then there is another district with 8 elders and hermanas (we have 4 hermanas).

So for p day today we met with a bunch of elders and played soccer. There are two zones here really close, posadas 1 and 2, and apparently they always do stuff together. Soccer was really fun though and we played on an indoor like field that was actually outdoors. After soccer we went to the really huge supermarket which was incredible and got a few things to make tacos. Me and my comp went to the pension of two mexican elders and we had spicy tacos. The first really spicy thing I have had in Argentina. I am not huge on spicy things, but it was such a great change.

Anyway, I have a lot to think about in this new area and am a bit stressed out. I still am finding that I have problems actually wanting to talk to people. We all know I am not the biggest talker in large groups of people, especially strangers. I am finding that I can communicate just fine with my companion though, still I wish I could speak more fluently and say everything exactly how I want to say it.

Anyway, I think that is about it for this week.

Love you all

Elder Aaron McDonald