The Life and Times of Warren Hansen

It’s been another exciting week of dealing with extremely inconvenient problems. The best one this week has to do with our drinking water. The water in Northern Salta is super unhealthy. When I first got here, we had to buy 8-liter jugs of water and carry them back to the house a couple of time a week. Then, the mission office set up a water delivery every week with a water company. Even with the water deliveries, there were still a lot of problems. The worst part of all of this unfolded on Thursday when we found mosquito larvae swimming in the jug that we’d all been drinking from. We got sick for about a […]

First, the obligatory: Happy New Year!  I had a great New Year’s Eve. We had a pretty regular Sunday with our main meetings in the morning and 4 hours of planning visits and lessons for the week in the afternoon. In the evening we went to the house of the district president, the person in charge of several of the local congregations. We enjoyed our extended curfew and had a nice dinner of traditional New Year’s food. I don’t know what it was, but it tasted good. It’s also a tradition to wear white on New Year’s Eve, so we were conveniently well dressed in our white shirts. We got to baptize our friend Milton! […]

¡Feliz Navidad! It’s very hot here and there is no snow, although from what I hear, it’s hot and there is also no snow in Idaho, so I’m not missing much. Here, Christmas is celebrated the night of Christmas Eve with a large party that typically starts around 11 or so. Our curfew got extended until 10 last night so that we could “party” a little bit. We were at a member’s house just long enough for me to eat some pizza and break a glass. When I went to bed around 11, the neighbors were just starting their party. When I woke up at 7, they were still partying. Normally we don’t eat lunch […]

Time is flying by. I can’t believe that Christmas is next week. My disbelief is probably being aided by the extreme heat. Most of my mission is in the desert, but the northern finger that we are in is the fringes of the Bolivian jungle. The heat is bad, but the humidity is what really magnifies the damage to my white shirts. Last night the power of all of Northern Argentina went out. Trying to sleep reminded me of when I lived in a room without power for a week last year during Basic Training. The feeling of falling asleep dripping sweat is far from one of my favorites. There are a lot of things […]

I’m currently in a van, on my way back to Tartagal after a Christmas party with a third of my mission. We got picked up at 5 this morning, listened to President Janzen talk about Christmas for a bit, ate lunch, had a gift exchange, and left. It was fun to get to chat with other missionaries who used to work nearby. We went to Salvador Massa again this week. Elder Adaos and I were visiting one of their friends who is deciding if she wants to be baptized or not. We spent 45 minutes doing our best to put out the fires of her doubts. We’d reached a critical point when a guy walked […]

It’s been incredibly hot. Most afternoons this week were over 113 degrees. I did my laundry one morning and hung my soaking wet clothes outside to dry at 8. They were dry by 10:30 when we left our house for the day. That’s pretty hot.  Summer is also the rainy season here. The rule of thumb is that the hotter the day is, the more it’s going to rain at night. Friday night, we were about 30 minutes from our house when it started dumping rain. We were already completely soaked, so we weren’t in a huge rush to make it back to our house. We ended up having a great lesson about the blessings […]

I realize that I’ve not talked very much about what I’m doing when I refer to doing “work”. It can be summed up as sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with people and helping them strengthen their relationship with God. We have 4 different topics that we teach people interested in joining the church, each focused on a different aspect of church doctrine. The topics are: the restoration of Christ’s authority, God’s plan for us, the steps we need to take to follow Christ, and the commandments that God has for us. We have a lot of liberty in how and what we teach, but it all follows those general guidelines. A large part of […]

Sorry for not writing a message last week. A member had a bunch of us over to have an asado with his family, and we were there all afternoon. An asado is just beef, but the cuts are all different from the US. They are usually pretty fatty, especially the good ones. The rule of thumb for the gringos (North Americans) is that the better the asado tastes, the worse your stomach is going to feel the next day. It was an incredibly enjoyable meal, therefore my stomach was absolutely churning the next day. Then I got food poisoning the day after, so the first half of the week was pretty fun. Water is another thing […]

On Thursday Elder Gibbs and I were visiting the elders in another town when the elders we live with called to tell us that our house had been broken into during the day. Someone had climbed over our house, into the interior courtyard, bent the metal bars over the window, and slid the window open. From there, they picked through our stuff, taking a lot of valuable things like money and electronics, and a lot of pretty worthless stuff like flip-flops and one of the other elder’s pajama pants. They were a pretty lousy robber though because they missed wallets, one elder’s airpods and bluetooth keyboard, and a lot of other things that were sitting in […]

Once again, it was a very full week. We got rejected by the majority of the people we were teaching this week, which is always tough. We had a couple fun travel days this week though, which makes up for some of the suck. Because Elder Gibbs is the district leader, we go spend the day with another set of elders once a week. This week, we went to visit the elders who live 3 blocks from the Bolivian border. It was fun, but relatively uneventful. However, the next morning on the bus ride back to Tartagal, we almost got detained by the Argentine border patrol who thought we were smuggling drugs from Bolivia. There […]