Hey family:)!

Hello everyone! :)

Well, it´s been a long and busy week for me. :) Also, a tiring one, but I´ve come to the realization that I think the rest of my life is going to be in a somewhat tired state, so I am just going to have to get used to it. But yeah anyway. On to the fun stuff that has happened this past week. Normally, I start off talking about what we did on Pday, but seeing as Pday didn´t really exist this last week, it will be kind of difficult to talk about. Pday was taken up almost completely by Zone Conference with the exception of some time to write the families and buy food, and cut my hair. Haha. Out of the 4 provinces in the mission, they chose ours to have the Zone Conference on Pday.

Anyway, stuff that happened last week. On Tuesday we brought the whole zone together to have a training meeting. We even got to use cake in the analogy. :) We had cake in front of all the missionaries and then took it away. Then put it back, then took it away in a number of forms and a number of ways. We did finally end up giving them the cake, but the point was to show that some times we do the same thing as missionaries with the gospel and our investigators. It worked out pretty well. That was the highlight from Tuesday. The rest of Tuesday was spent working and preparing for our trip to Resistencia which we had on Wednesday.

So, Wednesday, we had Zone Leader´s Council. As usual when we go to that we get on a bus that leaves at 5 am, and then get back fairly late at night. It was a really good day of meetings. We learned a lot about some new teaching techniques that they are going to be putting in practice in the mission. We also had a good lesson on what it means to follow the prophet and the significance of having a modern day prophet. The we had a dinner of steak and baked potatoes. It was amazing. Then, thinking about it, I don´t think ever in my life before now, I would have decided that baked potatoes were amazing. Haha. Then we all had ice cream. I got to talk to Elder Dumenes (my first son) for a while and then it was off to the bus for the return trip.

Thursday... we had a normal day, as well as Friday. We just went out and went to our appointments and clapped houses, and tried to convince people to listen to us. It was quite exciting. Come to think of it, Saturday was kind of like that as well. It was pretty hot during those three days. I´ve decided that I´m either going to come home with a tan or looking like a tomato. Sunscreen just doesn´t do it. Sister del Castillo is telling all of the missionaries that maybe wearing a sombrero is a good idea. I think I´ll hold off on the sombrero though, wait til December and January when it is hottest here. It´s ironic, I went my whole mission telling myself that my goal was to avoid Formosa in summer... and that´s exactly where I ended up.

Sunday. Sunday was a good day. My companion and I had to teach an impromptu priesthood lesson because the bishop got called to go deal with an emergency at his work. We had to practice different ordinances of the priesthood. It was kind of fun. The funniest moment came during Sunday School. An inactive member from Paraguay came to church. Normally one would consider it a really good thing that someone who had been inactive came to church... the problem was that he came drunk. I thought he had been acting a little bit strange during Sacrament meeting and then when he came up to talk to us afterward, we could smell the alcohol on his breath. So when we were in Sunday school the Sister missionaries were teaching the class and periodically he would quote what he imagined were scriptures from the Bible, or comment on things he said he read in the manual. Things that I didn´t have in my manual, and if they had been there it would have been even more impressive because he was holding it upside down. The sisters didn´t really seem to know how to handle him, there were other investigators in the class and he was kind of interrupting. So we enlisted the help of the ward secretary who came and asked him to go with him to ´talk over a couple of things´. It made me laugh. Then Sunday afternoon with all of the appointments and ward council scheduled, we desperately needed a miracle to get at least close to our goal of new investigators for the week. So we left to go to a neighborhood we usually don´t go. Strangely we had been there this week already, the first time a drunk guy bothered us so we left. And this was our second attempt. The very first house we clapped, a huge family let us in and we taught all of them and were able to accomplish our goal for the week. :) It was awesome. The only other thing from Sunday was that we had ward council where the ward gave us a new set of less active families that they want us to be visiting.

Now, moving on to yesterday!!! I had the pleasure of being in the church for 12 hours! We got to the chapel at 6 am to start setting up for zone conference. Then we were there late afterwards cleaning it all up. I got a huge headache during the middle of it, but I survived. :) The conference was a really, really good one. We practiced lots of teaching situations. One of the new senior missionary couples in the mission now talked to us about preparing for the people were are going to be after the mission. Elder Diaz - of the Seventy - was in Formosa anyway and decided to come and talk to us about faith and obedience for a half hour. Something awesome that no other zone conference gets. :) Then the zone leaders had to do a practice on obedience, in which we managed to include, Reeses, cockroaches, water, and knives. :) It was fun. All in all it was a great conference; it was all of the Elders in the province of Formosa. :) At the end of the conference president gave a great long class about the scattering and gathering of Israel and it´s purpose. I really really enjoyed it.

So that sums up my week. To answer a couple of questions:
-The lunch of hamburgers and such, its Argentine hamburgers, not what you would normally consider, like the photo I sent. :)
-We couldn´t clap on Census day because the only people allowed to be out clapping houses were the people doing the Census. We got counted, our neighbors gave them our names. So I got counted as part of the foreign population of Argentina. Haha.
-Transfers are next Wednesday
-If all goes well, if the couple gets married we have a baptism this week. I sure hope so...

Well, I think that´s all for now,
I love you all!!! I keep you in my prayers!!
- Matthew