Thanksgiving!

Man, I can´t believe another week has gone by. Do you all realize we´re almost in December? That is blowing my little mind. This week was pretty great. On Tuesday some of the zone and district leaders had a training meeting and I absolutely loved it. It was so great. President is an incredible teacher. He talked a lot about the responsibilities of a district leader and basically just all of the things we need to do. I learned a lot about the importance of the small things we sometimes don´t pay very much attention too. They also introduced a new retention program that comes from the area 70 so we´re excited to get that going because there are sooo many inactive members. When Elder Aidukatis came he mentioned helping the church actually grow, not just increase our numbers. This retention program is focused on the missionaries teaching the new converts the lessons again, after their baptism. So hopefully that´s going to start making a difference of the people who get baptised and stay active in the church. They also introduced a 5-5-5 program where the ward focuses on 15 families who are inactive and tries to help them by asking them if they´ll listen to the missionaries. If they say yes, we go by and start teaching them everything all over again and try to get references from them. And once they´re active we move our focus to another family. Elder Ostler and I are working really hard to get the ward to have ward council because apparently (and this happens with various wards) they haven´t had it for months, if not a whole year. We´ve got an awesome bishop though and we´re excited to start making a bigger change in the ward. It seems like there are not very many people who do their home teaching, which puts a lot of work on us because we have to find new people who want to listen and try getting less active members to come. But, we´re excited to change some stuff.

Soooo one of the things I´m grateful for this week is that we got to eat at an American´s house with american food. It´s a super odd story but this guy named Leo who is from Argentina, lived for a long time in the states. He met this girl but then got deported. She followed him down here, and they got married. He got baptised like a year ago. Now they´re kinda stuck here waiting for a bunch of paper work because they want to live in the states. Anyway, she made us tacos, complete with way awesome state seasoning and ranch dressing. For dessert we had chocolate chip cookies and milk. Of the course the milk still tasted kinda weird but the cookies were like gold, if you could eat gold and it tasted good.

Carmen has been doing great. On Monday and Tuesday we went by her house and helped her daughter Florencia study for English test. We also started teaching Carmen lesson 5 (which you teach after baptism) and she said she really wants to be a visiting teacher and bring all the inactives back to church. I wish all members could have that kind of enthusiasm. She´s just awesome. We haven´t had a ton of time to teach Florencia very much but she committed to read part of the book of mormon. We tried going by yesterday but neither of them were there. She should be done with tests though so we´re hoping to find more time to teach her. The only thing preventing her from coming to church is her work schedule so we´re going to talk to her about trying to always get Sundays off so she can go.

Adriana is doing alright. She says she doesn´t want to change religions but at the same time has told us that she thinks that Book of Mormon is true and that Joseph Smith was a prophet, but we think she´s saying more logically than spiritually and we´re trying to get her focused on reading the book of mormon and asking for an answer. We think she´s pretty afraid of the change and she´s not very social to begin with so it would be a lot new things in her life but we explained to her that everything depends on if the book of mormon is from god or isn´t.

Oh! Last of all, we celebrated Thanksgiving today!! You won´t believe this, Sister Packer cooked a turkey for us. And stuffing. Oh. My. Papercup. It was incredible. We walked into the offices and the most delicious smell of cooked turkey loomed into my nostrils. I can´t believe how lucky I got to be here during thanksgiving. Especially since turkeys are hard to find, I highly doubt any other group of missionaries celebrated like that. Did I mention she made pumpkin pie too? I am currently experiencing that wonderfully horrible sensation that comes after eating more delicious food than my stomach has space to hold. However, I didn´t get my yearly dose of American Football in....so I guess I´ll just have to wait til next year..when I´ll beat dad..

Welp, I think that about wraps it up for me!

With all the love of Columbus,

Elder Lounsbury