This week we were supposed to have a series of meetings throughout the mission with a visiting General Authority Seventy (my mission President’s boss). However, both the high-profile visit and our weeks of careful planning went out the window when several non-American missionaries tested positive for Tuberculosis. There were a couple of frantic days as we scrambled to cancel travel plans and reservations while simultaneously isolating and testing the missionaries who had potentially been exposed. So far we are looking good as most everyone has very fortunately been testing negative. It has been very stressful and frankly a little bit scary this past week, but the Lord’s counsel to the prophet Joseph Smith has been […]
Not Really Sleeping
This week has left me exhausted. We’ve had a lot going on this week early in the morning and late at night, which unfortunately means that we just lose sleep because we have to work in the office during the day. On Tuesday, we waited at the bus terminal until after midnight for a couple of missionaries because the bus they were traveling on was 2+ hours delayed. Then we got up at 4:30am to take them to the airport🫠 We also have a missionary who is in the hospital right now. We have all been taking turns accompanying him so that he doesn’t have to be alone. For a variety of reasons, we were […]
Transfers, Cafayate, & the Airport
The past two weeks have been incredibly busy. Elder Speirs left the office and so I have now become the senior assistant. The day that he left, I felt the very real weight of responsibility for the mission shift onto my shoulders. Last week, we worked on transfers all day, everyday. Transfers are when assignments to teaching areas and companions are changed, and it requires a lot of forward planning to make sure that people and things such as house keys and cell phone chips don’t get lost in the process. President Janzen sent us the list of where he wanted everyone to end up and we worked from 10am until 10pm coordinating everything for […]
Visiting Jujuy & Being in a Trio
We traveled with President and Sister Janzen to go visit the missionaries in Jujuy this week. While they were interviewing missionaries for 3 days, we got to go out and do visits with the zone leaders there. That meant that I got to go back to Ciudad de Nieva and visit a bunch of the people that I knew and helped to join the church. It was so fun but also really cold🥶 Elder Speirs is going home next month so we are in a trio right now with the guy who will be my companion once he leaves. His name is Elder Shirley and he’s from south Dallas, Texas. He’s an awesome missionary and […]
Super Busy
I’ve been running a lot of errands and eating a lot of fast food. Also, we got to go to the temple which was awesome! Here are some pictures.
The Airport and Other Things
This past week a group of 14 missionaries finished their missions andwent home. Starting at around 6pm on Sunday evening, we were picking them all up from the travel bus station and taking them and all of their stuff to the mission office. Some of the buses were super delayed, so we didn’t get home until 3am… Tuesday morning we woke up at 5am to help take all of their stuff to the airport in our truck. Needless to say, it was a little bit of a struggle to stay awake working on Excel spreadsheets in the office the next day. On Sunday the new temple in Salta was dedicated by Elder Christofferson, one of […]
An Office Job
This week I started working in the mission office in the capital of Salta. The missionaries who are assigned to the office work from 9am until 5pm managing the housing, finances, medical, travel, and technology stuff in the mission, then go do normal missionary work in their teaching areas until 9pm. My companion and I are the assistants to the mission president. That means that we deal with everything that isn’t a normal occurrence, such as planning for and presenting at meetings with other missionaries, helping missionaries arrive to and leave from the mission, and planning which missionaries will get moved to new teaching areas. This past week, we received 19 new missionaries. My companion […]
Dog Bites & Going to Church
I got bit by a dog this week. Normally it’s really easy to tell which dogs want to bite you because they bark a ton but the second you bend down to pick up a rock they run away. The dog that bit me was walking down the road, minding its own business. Then it bit me in the thigh and just continued on its way. Fortunately, it didn’t break the skin, he just punched a hole in my pants and bruised my leg. So fun. Yesterday we had three of the people we are teaching come to church and they all loved it! It’s always so interesting that despite all of our worrying about […]
Focus on Loving the Lord
The 25 of May is a patriotic holiday in Argentina. Everyone eats a soup called Locro to commemorate what the Army that liberated them from Spain ate. Locro is a soup comprised of 5 parts pumpkin, 3 parts beans, and 1 part meat scrapes. Everyone gets together with their extended family and makes a giant cauldron of it to piece at during the weekend. As a side note, Locro does eactly what you’d expect to your stomach from a soup overwhelmingly comprised of fibrous vegetables😬 All week our weather app has been describing the weather as “freezing drizzle”. We’ve spent the week drinking hot mate while bundled up in jackets. I also bought an artisenal […]
Purmamarca
Today we went on an adventure to the north of Jujuy. It’s a super touristy spot that looks a lot like Southern Utah. We went on a little hike to admire the famed “Seven-color Hill”. I thought it was pretty underwhelming, but fortunately there was an awesome old church from 1642 nearby that was way cooler. It was about 40 degrees this week, which isn’t terribly cold, but when you’re outside walking around in it for 6 hours, your face gets pretty numb. Despite the cold, the Lord has been blessing us for our efforts. We have been able to find so many awesome people to teach about the Gospel of Jesus Christ and help […]
I Love to See the Temple
This week we got to go to the open-house of the new temple in Salta. We got on a van early in the morning, and then spent the morning on the temple grounds, greeting visitors and enjoying the atmosphere. Here’s a link to a church article with pictures of the inside of the temple. Elder Eyre explains temples to the people who we are teaching with a simple story: A king has an especially fancy pearl. He made a really nice box to hold the pearl and to help show it off. However, no matter how nice the box is, its purpose is still to bring attention to the pearl. The temple’s purpose, despite being […]
Cold Scenery & The Temple
It’s autumn here and it has been really cold, at least for me. I’ve gained a new found appreciation for insulation in housing from how chilly it has been inside of our apartment. One afternoon this week we went to visit people who live a little bit further away from where we normally work. We had questionable success, but we were able to see some of the cool scenery that Jujuy is famous for. The Salta, Argentina temple was announced in 2018 and recently finished construction. The church is having an open house for the next couple of weeks and we’ve been inviting everyone we talk to to go and see it. It has been […]
Zone Conference and Baptism
This week was very busy for a lot of different reasons. The first was that we had a big conference with my zone and 3 others, comprising a total of around 80 missionaries. Over the past several weeks, Elder Eyre and I have been conducting interviews with the missionaries in our zone to prepare a presentation on the things we need to improve on and our plans to do so. Despite mixed responses to some of our brilliant plans, I learned a lot about working efficiently on big projects and about presenting to groups. On Sunday our friend Cecilia got baptized! We have been helping her learn about the gospel for the past month or […]
Being Changed
I didn’t come on the mission for the right reasons. I came for good reasons, but they weren’t the right ones. I thought it would be cool to go learn another language, live in another country for two years, and to share the gospel, although my desire to share the gospel was a little bit lower than it should have been. As I have given up my will to the Lord’s will, and put my whole heart, might, mind, and soul into serving, I have been changed. Before my mission, God was important to me, but I wasn’t living in the way I needed to or giving the importance that I needed to to my […]
Getting Robbed (Again) & Hobbit Meals
I got robbed again this week! At least it was in person this time… We were teaching a lesson at someone’s door and a very drunk dude who was walking up the street stopped and stood by us. We were continuing with our lesson when the drunk guy grabbed my water bottle out of my bag and then stumbled off. It wasn’t worth getting into a fight with drunk guy over a cheap water bottle so we just went on teaching our lesson🤷 On the broad spectrum of encounters with drunk people, I would consider this experience a win. The traditional meal times are really interesting. It’s like the meal schedule that the hobbits follow […]
Lots of Adventures and Not a Lot of Work
So much happened this week, and so little of it was working in our area like we needed to. On Tuesday we helped the 30 missionaries in our zone get vaccinated against rabies and the flu. We had to leave that early to go help another missionary with Dengue Fever navigate the hospital system. On Wednesday we went back to the hospital with the same missionary, then we waited most of the day to have interviews with the Mission President. We visited with other missionaries and leaders throughout the day. Elder Eyre and I then had a 3-hour bus ride to the mission offices in Salta for a series of leadership meetings. Thursday we attended […]
Remembering Christ & Scenic Views
We’ve been working our tails off this week. Our area includes the main downtown, but almost all of our work is done on a lower shelf, closer to the banks of the river that runs through San Salvador. It makes a very abrupt distinction between the wealthier people and the poorer people. You can look up from the lower neighborhoods where we are working and see the nice buildings downtown. It’s a really weird mix. There are also a lot of awesome views of the mountains because San Salvador is situated in foothills of the Andes Mountains. Some of them even have snow caps right now! It was awesome to be able to share so […]
Crazy Week in Jujuy
This week was super crazy. I started off in Tartagal, finishing of my time with Elder Barney before getting on a bus to San Salvador, the capital of Jujuy province. I arrived and started learning how to be a zone leader with my companion Elder Eyre in Palpalá. Being zone leaders means that we are responsible for our teaching area and those of the 14 other companionships in the province. It feels like we basically just go to a couple of extra meetings during the week and make some slideshows. On Thursday we got a surprise phone call saying that we needed to switch apartments and teaching areas with some sister missionaries by that afternoon. […]
I’m Leaving
After just shy of 6 months in Tartagal, I’m leaving to go work in another area. I’m about to hop on a bus to Jujuy province where I’ll work in an area called Palpalá, which is a suburb of the main city, San Salvador. It is still hot in Tartagal and is going to be for another couple of months, so going to the cooler climate in Jujuy is like escaping the death sentence. Here are some photos of me with some of the members here:
On Weeding Onion Patches and Mate with Monster
After five and a half months of working in a relatively slow area of the mission, at least numbers wise, it has been pretty easy to get a little discouraged. When it’s 95 degrees outside with 90 percent humidity, it’s easy to think of all of the other areas in the mission that I could be in that have nicer climates and that baptize all the time. I was listening to a BYU devotional from President Eyring this week that helped me change and refocus my perspective. He tells the story of his dad helping with a ward assignment to weed a church onion field and having to drag himself along the ground due to […]
Not Too Much To Say
Nothing super noticeable happened this week, just more of trying not to die in the oppressive heat/humidity or dengue. I’ve come to the realization this week that I know Spanish now. I know that I’m very far from having a perfect knowledge of Spanish and my pronunciation still sucks, but I understand enough to just do stuff in Spanish. In the evenings I’ve been reading the book Saints in Spanish and have only had to look up some of the more obscure words. It’s a big moments when you live in a country that only speaks Spanish. I focused my personal study this week on the nature of the Godhead. I gained such a deeper […]