The Life and Times of Warren Hansen

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 […]

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 […]