The Life and Times of Warren Hansen

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:

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 […]

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 […]

We went on an awesome little hike this morning to a small waterfall. It’s the only interesting thing to see in the entire area, but I wasn’t super motivated to go see it, which is why it took 5 months for it to happen. We walked through the jungle on an unmarked trail, scaring away tropical birds and trying not to get bitten by too many insects when the waterfall just appeared out of nowhere. We were the only people there so we got to take some decent pictures. Then we went back to our apartment and made French toast for breakfast. It was fun to change up our P-day schedule for the day. Our […]

It was a long week, and it’s still incredible hot, but we are finally getting water delivered again. The work has been frustratingly slow and Carnaval has literally been leading people to choose devil worship over the Lord. Tomorrow I’ll have been on the mission for 6 months. My Spanish has improved so much. I’m very far from being fluent and my accent is a weird mix of gringo and Argentine, but I can pretty comfortably do the things that I need and want to. I think the best part about it is being able to understand who people are. I am living with my American companion, a Peruvian, and an Ecuadorian and the conversations […]

My new companion and I worked like crazy this week. His name, Elder Barney, is easy for people to pronounce because they all know the children’s TV show about the purple dinosaur. He’s from California and has been on his mission a month and a half longer than I have. We’re both pretty new, which is putting our Spanish knowledge to the test. It’s Carnaval, which is basically just a big festival to celebrate the things of the world and get as drunk as possible. It’s not had a huge impact on us, just that we’ve had to steer clear of the main road where all of the partying is happening.  Thanks for your love […]

There’s a big change in Tartagal! Elder Gibbs left this morning to go work in a different area. My new companion, Elder Barney, gets here this evening. We’ll be here together until at least the end of March. The heat continues. A couple of days this week, it was so hot that we had to stop walking every couple of blocks and drink water in the shade so our heart rates could go down. There are a lot of problems with the water in the region I am in right now. The water supply gets cut to whole neighborhoods during most of the day because there just isn’t water to keep it running. The family […]

This week we had more excitement in the sketchy drug neighborhood. Saturday afternoon, the guy who we’re pretty sure is the main drug dealer told us that if we ever wanted to go into the most dangerous part of the neighborhood, that he would be happy to go with us to keep us safe. It’s super interesting to watch the superstition that even people who are only casually religious have about “the Jesus people ”. The next day we were passing by the houses of a couple of friends to help them get to church. We were waiting outside of one house and saw a guy buy cocaine from the house next door that we […]

This was a pretty normal week. We worked a lot with other missionaries. The elders who we report to came to spend the day with us on Wednesday. During one lesson in a sketchy drug neighborhood, we watched a guy snort a line of cocaine off of the table in his front yard. Later, that same guy tried sneaking up on us through the chest-high bushes, presumably to try and rob us. Because he was high out of his mind, I just turned around and watched him trying to hide while my companion finished the lesson. The next day, we went to visit the elders in the town south of us. During lunch, we had […]

The promised excitement from last week is that we got to travel to the provincial capital of Salta to do my residency paperwork. We got on a bus early on Monday morning, waited in line at a government building, signed some papers, and had the rest of the day to roam around in Salta and play tourists. We had a great lunch at McDonald’s. My mind was blown that while we’re up here in almost Bolivia without clean drinking water, there are missionaries who can just go to McDonald’s for lunch every week. The next day, we got up early again and waited in a migration office for 4 hours to sign 3 papers and […]