Elder Aidukatis

This week has been pretty busy because we´ve been getting ready for a visit from Elder Aidukatis who is in our Area Presidency. It´s going to be pretty intense... Tomorrow the office staff has a short meeting with him for 30 minutes. Then afterwards all of the Zone and District leaders have a meeting with him so I´ll have another two and a half hour meeting. And THEN we have our zone conference, also with Elder Aidukatis. So, basically tomorrow I will have 7 hours straight of meetings with a general authority. It is going to be one crazy day...

This week I got a lot done. I finished making the cards for everyone in the mission that we´re going to start using with this program so that when people come to buy stuff we´ll just scan their cards (which have a bar code on it that corresponds to their Missionary ID) and then scan whatever they´re buying and then we´ll be set. We have almost two hundred missionaries in the mission right now so as you can imagine it was quite the project. I also finished and sent out to everyone an updated program of what missionaries fill out when they´ve had a baptism. It just a couple new things like the numbers of the wards and stakes automatically get filled in and there´s 6 sheets on the bottom to fill out more than one baptism and small stuff like that. I had to make two different versions because some stuff I had in there won´t work on the older versions of excel. Anyways, it was nice finally sending those off because it´s something I´ve slowly been working on ever since I got here. I also finished a search program that we can use to easily find where missionaries are or what their number is etc. It´s really nice because you can type in the initials of a zone and see easily who all is in that zone or type in ZL and easily copy all of the email address to the zone leaders in the mission. Closed projects are always the best. I also had to do aguas de cuyo this week (the mission newsletter thing we have) because zone conferences are this week. Presidente wrote like a two page message so I had to change the whole format and print it out on bigger paper that can be folded like a brochure to fit everything in. Haha.

While I was do augas de cuyo I was checking where all of the newbies are and who they´re with because that´s something we put on the newsletter. I was looking up a missionary who had an arrival date this month but it turns out he´s working in the states waiting for his visa to come through. And he´s comps with Austin Paptriz in Wisconsin right now. I KNOW RIGHT!?!?!!??! Oh man. I flipped out. Such a small world. I realized that this morning I sent out an email to him (because I sent one to the whole mission and even if he´s not here he still gets included) and how crazy would it be if Austin looked over at the computer screen at just the right time and saw this email with my name at the bottom of it. haha. I´m excited to talk to him when he finally gets here.

Other excited news this week is that I did my first baptismal interview! I was a little nervous but in the end it was a way cool experience. In the beginning I asked her how she met the missionaries and just kinda asked her to tell me her story. I always love hear conversion stories. Sometimes the people are like afraid of/hide from the missionaries until one day something changes so the can be kinda funny but at the same time really spiritual because they recognize how God guided them to the truth. The girl who I interviewed had a rough life growing up and for a while didn´t believe in God/was angry at him for stuff that had happened. But she went to school with this mormon girl and she told me her friend would talk to her about the church while waiting for the bus and that her friend just seemed to always be so happy and she wanted to know why. And so her curiosity led her to learn more and more and then talk with the missionaries and now she´s baptised. It was a pretty cool experience to hear it all from her. I wish I could have videotaped it because it was just like those testimonies you see on mormon.org, especially since they don´t have very many in spanish haha.

Also, this really common grocery store down here called "vea" now carries Snickers and I am in heaven. The first time I saw them in there I seriously bought 25 because usually you can only find them in walmart or the Argentine version on walmart called Carrefour. So....I guess that was the best part of my week.

With all the love of the public bus system,

Elder Lounsbury