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 […]