October 31, 2011

Happy Halloween? They don't celebrate that here. Sad.

Thank you all for the letters!!  Thanks for the emails from Tanner too! He still is Tanner and still terrible at writing letters. Hahaha. You can send me the rest too that'd be cool. All the others manage to write me though so no worries.

This week was cool. We did divisons within my district with the focus of finding new investigators. Our district leader wanted us to all stay in divisions until every companionship had found a new investigator.. My district is all the office elders and the assistants. So I was with Elder Acosta from Mendoza, Argentina. He is the new assistant to President because the other one, Elder Bills, finished his mission. Elder Acosta is really cool. He is a fantastic missionary and super obedient. And super Argentine haha. The way he speaks is awesome; his accent is very Italian sounding. I liked working with him because he's smart and he helped me a lot with ideas for my area, ideas for becoming better personally, and is a great example. I do like being in the office a lot because I get to know a lot of the missionaries like that and I get to be around a lot of leaders which is fantastic. Tomorrow, all the leaders in the mission come in for their monthly conference with President and the Assistants. It's going to be another hectic week in the office.

Our investigator Rodolfo is awesome though. He reminds me of Martin who was baptized in Balcarce. He is rather timid and struggles to express himself a little. But he understands everything and always retains the information (unlike most people that we teach). I think he is very prepared. The only problem is his girlfriend, Romina. She has a tight hold on him and she is very catholic. They don't live together (BIG surprise in Argentina) but she seems to be around a lot. I'm worried that she might continue holding him back. He didn't come to church again this Sunday and when we passed by to see if we could acompany him, guess who answered the door? Her. Ugh. Pray for Rodolfo if you could. It's going to be tough.

Other than that, we don't have very many people to work with. The area has been beaten to death by other missionaries and the members are colder than ice to us. Not sure why. But we're trying our best to show our love for them and to motivate them to get involved! In Balcarce, the members asked US when they could go out with us to teach investigators! I had no idea back then that that was a huge blessing.

Well, that's all I’ve got. Thanks for all the support! Send more pictures, though!

As Tanner said hahaha, chau vagos!

-Elder Ryan Garrison