'My amazing letter!!!' (3/7/11)

Hello family!

Wow, another amazing week gone by. As always, I´m tired. But happy. We just finished up playing a bunch of soccer and dodge ball. I managed not to get hurt in any way, that was really nice. Now we are going to worry about getting some lunch and then maybe getting some ice cream and stuff like that. We´ll see, I´m not to sure how the afternoon is going to go. Hopefully fun!!

First question that you asked, the weather! It got hot again this week, but not as hot as it was during the middle of the summer. It appears that I have managed to survive the worst of the heat that I will have to deal with in the mission. As long as some massive heat wave doesn´t come crashing down on us here in the next couple of weeks, I should be good. We actually end our summer schedule here at the end of the transfer. That will also be nice. I´m not too big a fan of studying after lunch, it´s hard, you get really tired. And it´s really hot. So, I look forward to going back to studying in the morning.

Don´t worry, my toe is fine now. We went in for the check up appointment and she took out a few more pieces and again told us that we need to take better care of our toes, so I should be good now, just have to watch a little more carefully. :) Otherwise I am perfectly healthy! No problems!

This has been another week where we have had to deal with lots of mini missionary problems. I love it. A mini wanted to go home really badly, so we had to send him, so I - already being in divisions - had to be in a trio while we waited to get Elder Rodriguez a new companion. Then, one of the sisters´ companions had to go home for an emergency, so yesterday we got to go to the terminal and send her off and do a whole bunch of stuff. I´m kind of tired of going back and forth to the terminal, it eats a lot of time and makes our working day kind of difficult. But that´s OK, it´s part of the job I guess. :) A funny story that happened while we were waiting for the bus to take us home from the terminal. We were just sitting there talking and then heard a whole bunch of banging and crashing sounds. Then from around the corner appears a destroyed car, with both front tires flat. The driver got out a little dazed and I´d assume drunk...A couple of people yelled at him, and then he got back in the car, and drove right in front of us to a kind of parking stall, then got out and was just looking at the car. Then our bus came, so we left. :) Don´t worry, it wasn´t close to hitting us. :)

So Elder Palmer and I are teaching this family of Aborigines. They are amazing people, the Dad stopped smoking and all kinds of stuff and they love going to church. We were at their house the other day and they offered us homemade bread. They really don´t have anything at all to eat on weekends - ever. They were still willing to share with us. It was really cool to see people do that. I have to say, that bread was amazing as well. They will be getting baptized the 19th of this month if everything goes according to plan. :) Another funny thing happened while we were at their house, our mission leader again told us that he would take care of inviting them to church. He told us to not get on his turf. :) It made us laugh pretty hard, he´s such an amazing man.

I went on divisions this week. I was with Elder Day. He is an elder from Chubut, Argentina. Although the emergency transfers made things a little interesting, we had a good day of divisions. We found a new family - that´s already married, something that isn´t too common to find. Both of them are studying to become art teachers and outside their house they painted this huge wall of an African savanna, I´ll have to take a picture of it sometime. They had been having lots of doubts as to whether or not God was really there, because her Mom had recently passed away. They promised to read and pray, so we will see what happens from there. :)

The zone and the stake are all really excited about the missionary work these days. The ward is really trying to help us out, and that´s really nice. I don´t know what more I can say than that things are going really well! I´m loving it here. We have a training from President next week, and I think that´s the last major thing for the transfer. Work work work. :)

I love you all!! Miss everyone!
- Matthew