Malargue

Helloooooooooooooo. ¿Cómo están todos? I´m doing just as dandy as a dandelion. This week I got the change to travel to Marlargüe to do splits with the Elders over there. Marlargüe is another big tourist site but it´s a lot bigger than Uspallata where I went last week. It´s actually pretty huge. On Monday at about 2 Elder Ostler and I left on a bus and we got there about 9. It is the furthest area from the mission offices haha. 7 hours is a long time to be in a bus. It makes for a great time to ponder life however. Doing splits with them was way cool, one of the missionaries there only has about 6 months in the mission and I´ve never really gotten to work with very many missionaries who have that much time, I think pretty much all of my companions have had more time than me. Doing splits is great because you don´t know any of the people and it´s super easy to go in and get to them and figure out what they need and try to help them. I really enjoyed myself.

The only great news that I have for our area is that the ward is getting a lot more pressure from the stake (who´s getting a lot more pressure from the area) to have ward counsel and to do this program called 5-5-5. It´s basically a giant push to help inactives get re-activated. A lot of the time families like that also have kids or husbands etc. that aren´t members and so it helps us as missionaries find people too. When I had my first transfer here we got our bishop to have ward counsel but only about two of the auxiliary leaders came and when we tried to talk about 5-5-5 they didn´t really catch the same enthusiasm that we had. So this last ward counsel was a HUGE improvement. Hopefully we can do a lot with that now and show them that it really works and help them get even more excited to do it.

Last week the primary president asked my companion to play the piano for a new song they were practising. I went it, obviously, because he´s my companion and that´s just how it works. Anyway, he was silently practising the fingering to the song because he´d never played it before and we were both just kinda listen to the lesson that the teachers were giving. (P.S. at least in our ward there´s only about 5-7 kids in primary so they have one combined primary instead of different classes for each age group). The teachers were talking about being nice to others and being an example. They had all of this different situations like, "What should you do if you see a classmate sitting alone or looking sad?" etc. and the kids were supposed to answer what they would do to help. It was hilarious because no matter what the situation was, this one kid would enthusiastically answer, "¡Le daría una piña!" or "I´d punch them!" haha. Elder Ostler and I were just cracking up. The teacher was mostly trying to ignore him but she finally confronted him and kindly asked, "Would Nephi punch someone?" to which the kid responded, "No, but Nephi killed a dude!" hahah. I was just dying laughing. At least the kid knows his scriptures stories, right?

Also, last week we played some of the kids in our ward at soccer and they demolished us. It was super weird because we had played them a while back and had won pretty easily. Anyway, we played them again today and triumphantly took game three to go ahead in the series. haha. Our defence was the soccer equivalent of Moroni defending all of his Nephifite cities haha, Which is saying a lot because these are some of the best kids I´ve played against. One of them is seriously the best kid I´ve seen here, he just dances with the ball so beautifully. But we still won.

Welp, I hope you all have a great week with the flood!

With all the love of Noah and his little animal friends,

Elder Lounsbury