11-21-2011

Hola familia!

Dang! I am so sad the email from last week didn´t work! I spent FOREVER typing it out and it was filled with awesome stories! I don´t have a whole lot of time to write today so I´m gonna make it short:

Stories from last week:

• waking up at 3am with a cockroach on my face. not. kidding.
• having a rat enter into our pension from underneath our closed door (don´t forget we´re in Argentina).  We spent an hour trying to chase it out.  It was in our oven and then ran into our room and climbed up our curtain and hid on the top of our window (it´s really ghetto and is covered by this wood thing so we couldn´t see it).  So we spent forreveerrrr searching our room for it, standing on our beds and hitting things with our broom and mop waiting for it to jump out hahah.  Finally we moved everything out of the room and built a barricade in the kitchen so it couldn´t go in the oven again.  I finally hit the wood slab about the window and it jumped down and of course we freaked out and were screaming and jumping and it ran in the kitchen, through the barricade, and into the oven again!  Finally we got it out and got it to run outside.  It was quite the adventure!
• we were in relief society and the counselor was talking and she was looking right at me and then she stopped and just looked at me so I thought she asked me a question.  I heard the word ´visitantes´ so I went on to introduce our visitors for that week... Mabel and Ramona, both of which have been in RS like 5 times before.  She looked really confused and my companion starts laughing and there was an awkward pause, and she went on talking.   Turns out she was asking who did their visiting teaching this month..... bahaha.  It´s ok, someday I will learn to understand Spanish....
• the baptism de Lorena!! So awesome. My first baptism!  She is 16 and it was a miracle that her ¨dad¨ was there... he has been pretty cold with us and doesn´t want to get married to her mom, but we had a family night with him for the first time and he just broke down and started crying and told us that he knew he needed to change but he felt so low.  He told us he just couldn´t enter into a church.  Anyway... we invited him to the baptism but he had to work and was going to try and get off early.  It was 7 and we were all waiting around and then at 7:30 he walked in!  It was so awesome and the baptism was great.  We have 3 more this week but we´re waiting on marriage documents so we´re hoping and praying they will happen!

This week

AWKWARDS, INCOMODOS, Y CHISTOSOS

• people trying to pronounce my last name. Hahaha. NO ONE can say it.  Sometimes it´s oont, art, hart, haunt, aun, haun, and who knows what else! 
• all of the names they call people here... all of the sweet ladies use ´mi reina, mi cielo, mi amor´ etc. (my queen, my heaven, my love) and the best is the husbands and wives when they yell to each other ´gordita!´ or ´viejo!´ which means fat and old... hahahah. People are just so darn honest here.

AWESOMES

• the 3 people we have getting baptized this week are awesome!  Miguel has been smoking for 12 years I think and has known the church for 13 and has been through many sets of missionaries, and now he feels like he is finally ready to change and be baptized.  Within a couple of weeks he went from smoking 40 cigarettes a day to smoking none!  Mabel and Augustina are also getting baptized this week.  I got to take pictures of their family the other day and they are adorable! I´ll try and send a few
• Just a thought for the week!  We´re always using different stories and analogies and such to help people understand the principals of the gospel.  One we have been using lately is how living the gospel is like having kids (not that either of us have experience or anything!).  But yes it´s a big decision, and it´s hard.  It´s constant work and lots of ups and downs, but it is always worth it.  I am learning so much that anything in life that is worth anything takes work.  It is work... but that´s what we´re here to do, is work and change ourselves to be like Christ.  And it´s hard, it´s not easy... but the joy and deep happiness that we recieve from it is ALWAYS worth it, because it´s everlasting.

That´s all for this week!  My companion goes home in a week and I will get a new companion and most likely stay in my same area.  Too bad you didn´t get my email from last week because my stories were so much better :) you would have all been laughing your heads off if you knew all of the little details hahah but hopefully the ones I wrote today will explain enough the pictures I sent last week.  They don´t celebrate Thanksgiving here but my comp. and I will probably do something small for it since she´s from Utah.  We almost forgot it was this week!  But have a great week and a fabulous thanksgiving!! :) besitos! ciao!

--Hermana Hunt

Cockroach on my face when I woke up!

1st Baptism

MTC Districk

Mauro, Facundo, Fernanda