February 1, 2010

Hey Family,

Well that was a pretty interesting story about president lindahls son. I guess he know how to find some good orange juice. Does he live in Arizona? I didn’t know that. I just wrote that to president lindahl and we will see what he says next week. Oh and president lindahl I guess what he did for work was he buys hospitals and either sells them again or keeps them or something I am not really sure but I know he has a lot of hospitals in his name. all I know it that he has a lot of money. That is cool that my picture is on the blog. So in the blog of the missionary that we were training, they stole him from us. There was a missinary that needed a companion and so they took elder williams. I miss elder williams. He was a good companion, really inmature still but really fun. He was our inside scoop on the really world, becusue he just came out of the real world. Oh well he is gone I am here with elder deuel still that is done with the mission in two weeks. He is doing pretty well, he is still working unlike other elders that just get lazy and don’t do anything on their last couple of weeks. So we will keep on working hard. He is buying all of his suveniers( or something like that) so I am seeing what I want to buy too. Today I had to buy a new memory card. I had 6 gigabytes of pictures already. I bought one today and I think I have like 170 pesos left on my card. I had to use a lot of my own money last month. With all the traveling I had to do and a new elder dealing with the money I just gave up and started using my own money. I think I used like close to 300 pesos in traveling so I had no money for food. So I used my money for food. But I am going to start buying suveniers with elder deuel with the money that I have. I figured if he is going to be in the stores I might as well just buy them right now. If you could put a little money in my account for stuff like that it would be nice. Also, I know you don’t know any argentine stuff but if you want anything from down here for me to take home I can get it to. Like ask emily and jenna and bryce.

That is really cool that you have such a big class of laurels. I think here there are like 4-7 young women in total. The church is so different here. When I tell people the amoun of members is our ward they go nuts. The church is getting bigger in Argentina. Just really slowly. Hopefully it will pick up and get bigger faster. We actually have a pretty big ward. We had 82 people in church yesterday. Also emily, we don’t have 16 kids in the ward in total. You have 16 seven and eight year olds. That is so crazy for me. I guess I don’t remember what a big ward feels like. There is a cd that a missionary from the mission uraguay made. It talks about the diffenece from the church in the states and in south america. It is so funny. I will have the cd for when I get home.

There are two senior couple missionaries here in the mission. They came here to Villa Mercedes to fix things in the houses and see what we need. They came and fixed the lights and all the plugs and tried to fix our shower but it is just a lost cause. It is terrible. But we were in the car with them going to buy a power strip and they talked to me about the rain that arizona is getting. They said it was just getting dumped on. You need to go up to the cabin and take advantage of it. I love the senior missionaries that we have. They help us out so much.

This week we had a really good weekend weather wise. The first part of the week was just really hot. It was about 105 Monday through Friday and then Friday night it got better. We have been sleeping on the roof because the house is just too hot. I havent been able to sleep it is so hot in the house. It is because everything is made out of bricks and bricks or like an oven. It gets hot during the day and stays hot during the night. So we just throw our mattresses over the top of the house and we sleep up there. It is so nice because there is a breeze all night and It is just wonderful. Well Friday night at about 5 in the morning I was woken up by sprinkles and I just was hoping it passed. Then an elder from honduras elder mendoza woke everyone up so we could go inside. We threw the mattreses down and right was we went down the stairs it started pouring. We got down stairs right on time. If we would have waited only like 30 seconds more we would have been soaked. Ha ha it was pretty fun. We havent been able to sleep on the roof since because it has been all misty ever since.

This last week we found a guy named Eraclio. He has 9 kids. He is really sweet. we have talked a lot of the plan of salvation. What he really noticed and what he really liked it the way we pray. I asked him the first time if I could say a prayer before we left. He loved that we crossed our arms, closed our eyes and bowed our heads. He loved the reverence we show. In my prayer I asked that God would bless his family that his house would be protected. We went back the next time and he told us how much he loved that. Just little details this guy sees amazes me. We saw they wife and the kid today in downtown and she told us for sure they are going to go to chruch next Sunday. It made me really happy.

José Castro is getting baptized on Saturday. We are really excited. He is a really cool guy. We are going to have three baptisims in the ward this weekened and 3 in the other ward. Hopefully it will spark the members into helping the missionaries out a little more.

Well that is about it for the week. I love you all so much. Have a good week

Elder smith