October 19th, Monday 2009

¡Hola mi familia!

Things have really started to get better this week. I think im getting used to it here and am finally settled in. The weather warmed up thankfully alot more too. Except last night... I dont know what happened. We were out knocking in short sleeve shirts and it just like dropped 20 degrees in an hour! But it seems good today. If the weather stays nice we are going to go see some waterfalls somewhere, don´t really know because I still don´t understand alot and I don´t want my companion to speak english to me. But I am learning caste llano much faster here and getting much better at understanding it. I am starting to lose my English so I apologize now for weird stuff I might say.

Yesterday at church (we are over the Frutillar branch which has about 30-40 active members and many in-active members) I was asked to give a surpirse testimony to start the meeting. I think it was ok, my companion told me I did say "I buy these things with you in the name of..." instead of "I share these things with you in the name of..." in spanish its Yo carparto and I said Yo compro. I hope thats all I messed up. O also in Sacrament they asked my companion to lead the music and we don´t have anyone to play piano. So my companion starts us off on the sacrament hymn and we were singing the words to a different tune so It didn´t really match up. It was pretty funny but I was trying not to laugh because not a whole lot of other people noticed. But I saw a few grins. Haha but it worked out because we just had to do the tune twice to every verse to sing all the words. Church is so fun here :) Oh but this Friday they are having a talent show and asked me to play my song on piano (one of the couselors in the bishopric heard me playing it one day, no bueno...) Oh and also me and my companion have to talk next week. We will see how that goes, might end up being a "the other side of heaven" story.

This week has also been better with finding people. When I first got here we didn´t really have any investigators. Just one with a baptisimal date on halloween. So because of that we had to do a lot of tracking. I was really starting to hate tracking. The people reject you just as much as the states, if not more, and they can also be rude. Haha my companion told me some of them think we are like spies or goverment workers that are going to try and steal their fresh water. But I have only heard one man say he thought we were government workers so I don´t know. So I hadn´t really even get to participate or even hear any lessons with real investigators till Tuesday. I was getting really tired of being a missionary and walking all day! Finally, someone let us in. His name was Nicolas and he listened through the whole first lesson. I was so happy! So we set up another time to come back. Then like just around the corner someone else actually listened to us. Her name was Yazmin (have to pronouce it in caste llano:) and she in 18 and has a 2 and 3 year old. She lives in a house no bigger than my bedroom. Pretty crazy. But we taught her to. I don´t really know how either of them are doing though because we can never catch them to teach them more. Then the next day on Wednesday we found a really amazing Investigator. Her name is Hilda (silent H) and she is probably about 40 and has a 24 and 22 year old sons living in Buenos Aires. But she is awesome. We have already taught her the first and second lesson and she came to church on Sunday and all the members welcomed her and she participated in the lesson and everything. She is doing great! I hope we will be able to find more people like her here.

Im out of time. Thanks for your e-mails and updates. I really really do appreciate them. They help me out a ton. The computer isn´t reacognizing my camera so maybe next week you will get some pictures... And to answer your question mom, that is the only address I am suppose to recieve letters. My companion tells me its faster that way. They send it straight from there out here in a bid bulsa with stuff for everyone in our zone in Bariloche. Oh Bariloche is the name of our zone. Our area is called Frutillar. Love ya muchisimo!!

Elder Tryon