The Life and Times of Warren Hansen

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 […]

I’ve just been getting into the groove of life here in Argentina. Elder Gibbs and I are getting settled into this area and are starting to be able to use our days more effectively than at first. A normal day in my mission is as follows: It’s a pretty exhausting schedule, but we get a lot of work done and have a lot of fun while doing it. Thank you for all of  your love and support. Have a great week and know that Jesus loves you. – Elder Hansen

It was a full week of working. We’ve been busy making relationships with members and trying to help a lot of inactive families come back. The temple in the providencal capital of Salta is going to be completed soon, so we have been able to get a lot of families excited about the blessing of temples and eternal families. There were a couple hard/sad things this week. First, several of the people that both we and the missionaries before us have taught for many months have all but stopped coming to church. It’s hard to get so invested in someone’s life and well-being, then have them choose instant gratification instead of long-lasting and eternal joy […]

I made it! After an immensly long series of flights, layovers, and van-rides, I’m now in the town of Tartagal. On Friday, we landed at the airport in Salta, where the Mission President and his wife picked us up. We went to the mission office for a couple hours to meet our trainers and eat some food, then embarked on the final leg of our respective trips to the areas that we will live in for the next couple of months. My van ride was 7 hours through the Argentine countryside to Tartagal, ~30 miles south of the border with Bolivia. My companion is Elder Gibbs from Grace, Idaho. He’s been on his mission for […]