Last E-mail Before Christmas! - December 19th

Family,

I guess I should start out by saying that I do have the phone card information so you don’t have to worry, I will definitely be calling home Christmas morning to talk with everyone. By the way we are not allowed to leave Christmas morning except to do calls home to our family so I will definitely be calling between 9 and 4 argentine time. I guess that would be about 6 and 1 your time. Probably closer to the afternoon, late morning because Elder Gustafson´s family is almost in the same time zone as us.

So I don’t really know what I should talk about as we will be talking pretty soon anyway. This last week for us was pretty hectic and I am sure you are wondering about if we moved or not. We did! Thank goodness for that too because we were pretty tired of looking for a place to live. The pension that we have now is really nice and makes us feel like we are in a hotel. It is above a futbol field though and we tend to have more noise than I would like at night. Luckily we sleep in the only room that drowns out almost all the sound and we sleep soundly, but still. We will survive though. Other than that we are very pleased with the place. It is so clean! It just makes me feel so good. We got a few more desks that were already at the pench and another oven so we have two ovens now. We really lucked out on this one.

To answer your questions about how we moved now. We spent the whole entire day this last Friday parking and cleaning our old pension. 7 years of missionaries living their was not easy to clean. I decided that most Elders are slobs. Maybe one of my only purposes of coming to Argentina on a mission was to save people from their own self-destruction. More and more I am finding that to be true. Anyways, we wanted to make the pension really good because we had been having problems with our snaky owner. We were afraid he would try to get every little thing he could from us. He was the whole reason we had to move in the first place. Still we got everything in ship shape and he was pretty good about the whole inspection of the pench thing. We are finished dealing with him now.

On Saturday we finally moved to our other pension. We had everything ready to go and the branch president here, Ptde. Gonzalez came by with an inactive member that happens to own a huge truck. We are talking semi truck huge. He helped us out a bunch and we did the whole thing in one trip. One short hour and we were done (besides the organizing we had to do over the next couple of days).

We have been pretty excited to get going on a normal schedule again after all this chaos with the penches. Sunday I was a bit frustrated because we had to teach all three hours again. It is not that the branch doesn’t have members to do things. We are trying to organize it so other members can help out at least with sacrament meeting. We taught a lesson to them in Sunday school on how to prepare a talk and now we are going to talk with ptde. Gonzalez so that he can ask others to give talks now. It will be a good growing experience for everyone I think. One day this week we were talking to an old investigator that had told us not to stop by anymore and we turned around and there was a random 3 or 4 year old waiting to shake our hands. He had run away from his mom in the street to shake our hands. So we shook his hand of course. After that he ran back to his mom and they left. We were left to think about that one for a bit.

We also talked with an hermana, hna. Aquino, that is an eternal investigador here. She has been going to church for ever and never misses church but hasn´t been able to get baptized because she hasn’t been able to divorce her husband. It is messier than just that but I will leave it at that. Anyways, she is really starting to take the steps to divorcing her husband. I won’t even bother explaining the whole mess because I don’t understand it myself. She is really on fire though with her testimony. She has a lot of faith and really wants to be baptized. She told us like three times that we were like angels and that when we came by we always brought a certain air with us. I guess we don’t really realize the effect that we have on people sometimes. There really is power in our calling as missionaries.

I think that me and Elder Gustafson must have eaten some bad yogurt the other day because we have both been a bit sick these last few days. Luckily it didn’t seem to effect me much, but my comp was pretty sick for awhile and we didn’t leave yesterday morning in the morning. I think we are good now though are stomachs are still recuperating back to normal. We have been kind of scared to try the yogurt again though which has made it difficult to find food to eat in the mornings due to the fact that cereal and yogurt are a really quick fix. Also we didn´t have any food for awhile because the mission office took awhile to give me my money back that I had to pay for all the pench business. We are all good though and I do have money from home if I ever have to use it. I try not to though if I can help it.

Pday has been kind of fun today. We started out in Jardin America and I got a haircut and we did a few necessary things there. Now we are in Posadas since we have a district meeting in Candelaria after pday is over today. Over the next 3 days I will be traveling all over the place because we have these divisions and then we have interviews on Friday in another place just outside of posadas. I guess it will be all right though. Maybe I will be able to make good use of all my colectivo time.

Man I must be pretty boring to listen too because I just never know what to write to do my week justice. Anyway, I will be able to talk to you all on Tuesday. I am looking forward to it.

Elder Aaron McDonald

P.S. I am way excited that Andrew has finally left for his mission. It should be such a great thing for him. I just hope he doesn´t really come back weighing 300 pounds and talking like a hick. We will see.