Argentina: Week one

I´m heartbroken

Last week I spent the full hour and wrote an incredibly detailed account of everything.

And somehow it didn´t send.

I feel sick.

I don´t even know where to start...

Honestly...

I can´t think.

That seriously sucks.

It was like beautiful. The best email yet. Hands down. And huge. Straight hour of typing uninterrupted. And it didn´t send. I don´t even know what to do.

Ok....

wow.

Ok...

Now I only have thirty minutes. To detail a bunch of stuff I don´t remember.

So we flew out to Argentina...two weeks ago lol. UGH! I can´t believe that other one didn´t send. I´m so frustrated I can´t even type.

Ok, bulleted list of things that happened.

-flew out to Argentina. 14 hours, not fun. Very surreal, didn´t know which way was up by the time I got off the flight.

-it is cold here. Very cold. First impression of Argentina. Cold.

-As soon as we got here, mission president told us we have a huge day ahead of us. Not exactly the words you want to hear after traveling for 24 hours without sleep.

-First thing we did was go to the capital for visa work. Cue about a three paragraph beautiful lyrical description of the landscape of Buenos Aires, which courtesy of this crappy email service you´ll never be able to read.

-Buenos Aires is not beautiful. It is run down, tin roofs, concrete jungle, and shacks built on top of each other. Don´t trust Google images. Those pristine European buildings are at the front of Buenos Aires only.

-We went to the mission home for lunch and to meet our companions. Food here=delicious. I eat better here than I’ve ever eaten in my life. Here´s another three paragraph description which courtesy of a crappy email service you will never read.

-my companion is Elder Ponce. Native. Doesn´t speak any English. We rushed off to our first area. I was able to communicate very few ideas to him, and it got frustrating fast. (Insert a big description here)

-We had a night full of appointments which I couldn´t contribute that much except my testimony (another description)

-Finally, when nightfall came, I huddled in my bed in the shack of a pension, our apartment (described in great detail in the other email) with the dogs roaming the streets howling, the sirens blaring, in my sleeping bag, shocked and terrified, unable to communicate anything, and lost it.

It was a long cold night in Buenos Aires.

Ok I think I finally can write some stuff.

The next morning was better, but I couldn´t communicate anything except a little testimony. So incredibly frustrating. Ok, so I could actually get a little lesson to, but with a native companion, for the first week I wasn´t able to understand the lesson plan, so I didn´t understand what we were talking about, and there was no way to verify if what was said in our meetings was correct because my companion is native. And every time I ask him to explain, I don´t understand.

I kept having those "that isn´t the language they taught me in the MTC moments." That´s because in my defense, it wasn´t the language. They don´t even call it Spanish here, it´s Castellano, pronounced (castashawno). All "y´s" and "ll's" now become a complete sh sound. Random words like aqui, for example now become akaw. They fluctuate their voices like Italians, speak it really fast and with their hands. They use an irregular conjugative slang called "vos". I still am not quite sure how it works. You put vos at the beginning of a verb and then conjugate them all the same or something. I would ask my companion, but, you guessed it, native.

Actually he´s from Chile. Elder Ponce is really nice, and I´m getting the hang of communicating things with him. Good sense of humor at the very least.

The work here is on fire. This mission is on the verge of making history, doubling monthly baptisms. They had 140 for the month of august.

The people here are warm and kind. Very very loving. Very willing to listen to the message. No matter what, they´ll talk to you. For the first week they always accepted pamphlets. I came in at the perfect time. We had our first baptism last week.

As for the whereabouts of my cougars, I was left quite hanging last week when I got mom´s email and it only had a small sentence about a win. Wow. Number three. That´s the big time right there. See if they can´t get it done against Florida state this weekend.

My football bio-clock struck midnight last week, and I have to fight to not go into mental football mode. Which is especially hard, because it´s easy to zone out in huge discussions when I have no idea what´s going on. If I let my mind wonder, suddenly I´m at college football.

Finally amid my desperation to find something out about the win, I managed to talk to one of the AP´s at zone conference during lunch, who got to watch the end of the game with the mission secretary. He filled me in. Said that Sam Bradford was injured. Can someone verify?

I know I’m not supposed to seek after callings, but if being an AP means watching BYU ball, well....

Anyways today is P-day. The real p-day. So today was the zone activity. And we watched lord of the rings in Spanish. I know right? Lord of the rings? I thought they were just saying that to pull a prank on the new elder. Nope, seriously, we watched it. Apparently sister Asay let´s things slide pretty easy when it come to films. It was pretty distracting dubbed in Spanish.

As I said, last week we were having a lot of success with appointments, this week I saw the other side. Like 65% of the appointments made fell through. And then during contacting I became acquainted with something new in Argentina, rejection.

A guy slammed a door on us. It was the first door I had had slammed on me, and I just started laughing. My companion couldn´t figure it out. I tried to explain the significance of the moment with him, but it was totally lost. I had waited my whole life hearing the tracting stories from other missionaries to get a door slammed in my face, and there it was.

Actually that night turned seriously sour, fast. We had one of our best investigator families tell us not to come back out of the blue. Heartbreaking. Which left us to more contacting. Which we did, for an hour. With abnormally bad luck. I mean, Argentina, people always want to talk. But when things turn south here, they go real south. So my companion decided to let me do one of the contacts by myself while he made a call. Ok, we actually had a member with us, Mario. A good friend of mine now. Very relatable. Anyways I´m making this contact on my own and it´s a bunch of people smoking while I’m trying to explain to them in my broken Spanish about the restoration.

Side note, everyone here smokes. I think I´m vicariously up to three packs a day. Seriously. What I want for Christmas? A gas mask.

So anyways we went to our next appointment, the follow up of a really good lesson detailed in the other email. Long story short it was my first time doing splits and I had a really good lesson with a fourteen year old kid. Really related to him. Thought he was going to read for sure. Bore strong testimony etc. Anyways when we went to the follow up, found out he didn´t read. I really wanted this kid, enzo, to read. I had prayed night and day, fasted and everything. He´s the only non-member in a big family. When I heard he hadn´t read, it broke my heart. I heard a voice distinctly in my head "now you know how God must feel." It was a striking lesson. You can fast, pray, everything in your power. But at the end of the day people still have their agency.

By the end of this week, now, I´m starting to be able to follow all the lessons. Contributing more as well. Yesterday we had splits again, and I taught Alma 34 to an old lady, Marta who´s trying to give up smoking. The spirit was very strong.

Then there´s Rodolfo, who a few weeks ago we contacted and taught the first lesson out of the blue. We just found out his son died a few months ago. Do you have any idea how strong the spirit testifies of the plan of salvation to someone who really needs it? Powerful. It´s hard to get hold of him, and we´re working to get a return appointment.

Then there´s Karen, who´s a lot like me. About 22, living at home, going to school. Isn´t sure if she believes in God. She keeps her reading commitments, is very impressed with the "logical" nature of the gospel. With her it´s the most frustrating, the language barrier I mean. I complemented her choice of art on the wall, Guernica by Picasso, and she was impressed I knew it. Bottom line, it´s hard to communicate the smallest ideas.

Ok, times up. This was kind of a crazy fill you in email.

If I had to describe these past two weeks in one word it would be lonely. It´s hard. When so much is welling up inside me, and I just want to vent for hours. And then not having anyone to talk to. It gets real frustrating, real fast. I know God lives and loves His servants though. This is about enduring to the end. Every day gets a little easier with the language.

I love you all very much. I feel so far away. Like an entirely new world. Not even on the same planet. The gospel is the same here. There are wonderful members. I love them very much. I love the people here. I love this work. We´re beacons to a dark world that desperately needs help.