My weekly letter! (12/6/10)

Hello family!!

Well, here I am again! Another week has gone by pretty quickly. It´s been a full week. It got really really hot on Wednesday and Thursday. Thursday it was about 110 with an incredible amount of humidity. The nice thing is that on Thursday night it started to rain and hasn´t really let up since. I think everyone, especially the missionaries, was really grateful to have the rain. It was killer to be out in the street on Thursday. The sad part is that everyone tells me that´s how all of January and February are supposed to be; so, I guess I should be getting myself prepared to just deal with all of the heat. But, for the time being I am going to enjoy the cooler weather. The rain has made lots of mud, but that´s bearable.

The rain really only caused us one big problem - yesterday in Church. There were very few people in church (members) in the whole zone; it had been raining pretty much all night, and nobody really wanted to make the effort to come in the rain. We were only able to get one investigator in the Church. But the cool part was that her and our recent converts were willing to go to the church with us in the rain. There were only 20 people in the church from our ward. We had a really cool testimony meeting though, pretty much everyone who was there had the opportunity to give their testimony. I then had to teach a Sunday School class to all of the people there about the second coming. It was a good class, just that I learned that there are a lot of different ideas about what exactly is supposed to happen when Christ comes again.

Another random tidbit. We changed schedules this week. We are now in summer schedule, which means that we are in the apartment a fair amount of time during the afternoon to keep us out of the heat a little bit. I´m not sure exaclty how much difference it makes... as of 10 or so it´s already really, really hot and stays that way til like 6 at night... but, I guess every little bit helps.

I´m just going to start with the fun news of the week. First and foremost, we ate the Armadillo; it was actually really, really good. She made it and put it into empanadas. She said that she took the armour off just by cutting around it and pretty much just ripping it off. It was amazing, I´m not sure exactly if it tastes like chicken... but either way good. She said that she is going to try and get another one and cook it differently. The other interesting thing that we ate this week was cow stomach. The cow stomach on the other hand, wasn´t really good at all. Let´s just say that definitely satisfied my desire for strange food for a while. I´m content to just go back to my normal Argentine food.

Hmm. Well, around here people are starting to get ready for Christmas. All of the food prices have gone up. And there are some signs around with big Christmas deals. The seaon doesn´t start here nearly as early as it does back home in the states. We are going to begin planning on with which member we are going to be spending our Christmas. I´m excited. So we can plan a little bit, is there a specific time that you will need me to call home? We will be able to call on the 25th. As far as I know we are still going to be having a baptism on that day. But, there is also a chance that we are going to change it for a couple days before to make life easier for the person getting baptized.

Speaking of the work...We are finding some really good investigators, we are trying to use the members more and contact the references they are giving us. We found this guy yesterday who had talked with the missionaries before, taught him the first lesson again and he accepted a baptismal date! It was awesome. We have lots of promising investigators, we just have to make sure that we do our best to keep them going and to try and get them to come to church! I love it.

Coming up this week!!!: I turn 18 months in the mission. I really weird mark for me. It feels like I´ve been here forever, but also that I´m never going home. But, that´s ok, I love being out here on the mission. We should also have a baptism this week. What else... that´s about it. We have some divisions with our missionaries this week. :) That I´m excited about. And... that´s about everything!!
I gotta run!
I love you all, enjoy this week!
- Matthew