A bit of everything

Oh man, this week was really busy. It was a bit stressful because a ton of things were happening but sometimes you just have weeks like that.

This week I have mostly been working on getting binders ready for all the newbies that come tomorrow. When they get here we give them a binder with some talks in it and information on health and safety and finances and just stuff like that. Up until now we´ve gone through each individual document and printed it off x many times depending on how many missionaries we have. Then we have to go through and sort all of the different documents we print out and sort them into x amount of piles. Since we have like 20 something missionaries coming this transfer I´d started saving all of the documents as PDF files and then putting all of the PDF files together in order so that I only need to sort out when all of the documents from a binder end, instead of doing that for every single file we use...if that makes sense. Anyways, it was a bit of a project because on top of that we updated the emergency paper we have in the binders and the health guide we put in as well. At the same time I had to do stuff like send reports out to all of the stakes about how many baptisms they had last month, enter in/renew a few temple recommends for missionaries leaving or branches that still pertain to the mission instead of to a stake and send this updated electronic record for people to enter in the information I have to send to Buenos Aires.

AND on top of that, we were trying to leave at 1:30 every day to go by Matias and see if he could keep his baptismal date for this past Saturday. That always takes a giant chunk of time out of our day because of waiting for a bus and actually getting to our area but it´s definitely worth it. On Tuesday we went by and taught him all of the Commandments and he accepted them without any doubt. He had already stopped smoking a few months ago when he met his girlfriend and he is just so prepared. The good news about him is that the whole deal with his sister wanting him to be a Padrino has been settled and there aren´t any problems there. We were trying to keep his fecha for this past saturday but he had to go to the doctor on wednesday and on thursday when we called to verify our appointment he said he´s been up until 1:30 at work and that we´d have to wait for tomorrow. That one missed day made it really hard to help him feel prepared for still getting baptised that Saturday and we tried getting him there but in the end he just didn´t feel ready enough. But, he came to our ward for the first time totally by himself and after church went to a baptism that the other ward was having so we´re feeling really good about him. I think it´s almost a positive that he´ll get baptised this saturday. But, I got transferred to a different area. I´m still in the offices but I´m going to be with a different companion and am going to wash the area where the asistants (who are both leaving) were working. I´m a little bumbed because it would have been nice to work with him right up until his baptism and help plan it and everything but I´m for sure still going to go to it so it´ll still be a cool experience. But still, four areas in four transfers is a little crazy.

Welp, that´s about all I got for this week

With all the love of a bag of sugar,

Elder Lounsbury

OH, hey P.S. apparently starting today (kinda) our P-days in the offices are going to change to Saturday. So we´re taking like part of today as P-day and then part of Saturday (for this week only) and then after that I think I´m going to start just writing on Saturdays. Sooooo....yeah. heads up with that.

Manos Mormonas que ayudan

Hey family!!!

I hope you are all doing scrumptious. I sure know I am. Mendoza is starting to heat up a little bit and I´ve broken out the short sleeve shirts from the depths of my luggage and have crammed those long sleeved ones back in. Spring is just the best.

This week we´ve mostly been focused in on one of our investigators named Matias. I think I might have mentioned him to you all before (he´s the one with the girl friend who is a member) but he is just too legit to quit. Like seriously, he is the most prepared person I´ve seen in my life. He understands everything and is praying and reading the book of mormon every night. We have a baptismal date for him this Saturday but we gotta work out a couple things if it´s going to come through. The only tiny problem we have right now is that he sister asked him to be the Padrino (I think that means god father in english but I really don´t know) for her child. And he doesn´t want to let the family down but it would mean getting the communion and waiting until November to get baptised. Sooo, we had a good lesson with him and just committed him to ask God if the Book of Mormon is true and then to ask to see if this Saturday is the day he should get baptised. We´re going to go by tomorrow so we´ll see how it goes from there. The good thing is he wants to get baptised, we just gotta figure out a way so that he can and still be there for his family. The wayyyy cool thing about his story is that the missionaries went by his house like a year ago and he didn´t want to listen to much. My comp even knocked on his door more recently and he still didn´t want to listen. The whole reason this kid (he´s like twenty or so) wants to get baptised and is so open and prepared is because a member started sharing the gospel with him. So share the gospel with your people, alright!?

In other news, we did a service project on Saturday celebrating the 75th anniversary of...something. I think it was the anniversary of the church welfare program. Anyways, I painted this giant wall like a boss and got a sweet yellow apron thing (the kind you get when your a kid at Home Depot) with the whole Mormon Helping Hands dealio. We just painted and helped fix up this sports complex thing I guess you could call it. It was cool to see a lot of people from the stake there helping out and it was good for the community to see us as missionaries helping too.

Once again back to my nerdy side. This week I made (I was going to say developed but that´s just too much geek for me) this program that automatically updates where all of the missionaries are in the mission and there address and telephone numbers. We used have to do it manually and print it off for everyone so if President or anyone needs to call a missionary they know where they are and what number to call ect. But, updating it manually was a pain, and we found out a lot of the phone numbers were wrong so it really didn´t work that well. But, instead of doing all of that all I have to do is download an excel sheet from online and click a button and it fills everything out. I had some sick nasty code in there, you all would have been proud of me haha. But yeah...that´s about it for the offices.

One lasttttt thing. I am now a district leader. I basically have no idea what I´m doing haha and I feel pretty weird because three or maybe even four of the missionaries here go home in the next two transfers so it´s like, what can I tell you that you don´t already know? But I know I´m gonna learn a lot and figure out how to do everything...eventually. haha

With all the love of my newly ripped jeans,

Elder Lounsbury

Milagros!

hey everyone,

This week has been really cool. We´ve found some cool people which always gives us more ánimo. Last monday after p-day ended we went to a barrio to have a FHE with a less active family. Unfortunately the mom wasn´t home because she got stuck at the school of one of her kids doing something. So, instead we starting passing by old investigators and looking for new ones. We talked to this one girl watering the ground (to keep the dust down pretty much everyone does that) and she was open and really nice and even said she´d thought about getting baptised again now that´s she´s older and understands what she´s doing (because almost everyone here is baptised into the Catholic church when they´re kids). Anyways, after we talked for a while we found out that her brother had actually gone to seminary before with some of the neighbours who are members. Unfortunately, as we found out later, the dad is anti-mormon and wouldn´t even let his kid hang out with those neighbours anymore. It sounded pretty intense, he actually threw the book of mormon out into the street once....BUT, the good news (I think it´s good news at least...) is that no one has seen him lately and so we think he doesn´t live there anymore. We talked to the girl again and she seemed a bit less interested but we still have hope and we really want to meet this kids. Then we crossed the street and talked to the grandma of a recent convert who apparently never listens to the missionaries so that was kinda cool (even though later we found out she´s already baptised haha).

We were walking down from that barrio and just barely missed the bus. We saw it from a distance and took off running but didn´t get there in time, BUT a car pulled over like that very second and opened up the door.. He was a member from another ward and he drove us past the bus to a different stop so that we could get on. On the bus I was thinking, "what else could happen today? We´ve found two way cool people, one who´s been to seminary before and when we missed the bus this guy picked us up and saved us." And then this girl came up from the back seat and sat behind us and starting talking to us. She gave us a CD she wanted us to look at (I think it´s somekinda bible study) but then we just talked about God and her beliefs and she is way cool. She believes in the same marriage standards as we do, which is almost unheard of here, and has actually talked to the missionaries before and read part of the book of mormon. She was a little confused about something she read when she was studying the topical guide, but we tried explaining it to her and recommitted her to reading the book of mormon. She just had such an open and sincere desire to find God that it was way cool talking to her. We actually missed our stop to get off just so we could talk to her longer and then it turned out she got off at the same one so we spent a good half hour in the street talking. And none of that would have happened if that memeber wasn´t there at the perfect time and hadn´t have helped us catch the bus. Pretty cool right? We´re going to pass by her later today so hopefully that goes well.

This week I also got to work on a Mac which was just like being in heaven. I´ve missed those things haha. Hermana Packer (one of the senior couples who is the mission nurse) was having trouble backing up her computer so I got to help her on that. She also was going to download the new operating system that apparently is out but is going to wait because there´s a couple bugs in it right now haha. That´s about all that I did this week...

Welp, I hope you all are just having a blast. And loving school.

With all the love of the public bus system,

Elder Lounsbury