Record Breaking Sunday...But still disappointing - 28 de mayo 2018
Well it´s been another week somehow. They are flying by. This is the last week of the transfer, which is sad because it´s been a great time with Elder Chamberlain.
To start off I guess I´ll talk about my cliff hangers from last week. So la familia Rosales, the big family with 7 kids. We have been through a lot of things with them and I can´t even begin to tell you all the details or I´d be here all day. The short version is that about 3 weeks ago we had the baptismal interviews for the 2 chicos old enough to be baptized. They passed easily and the baptism was going to be the next day, but it didn´t end up happening because they said they didn´t feel ready and they wanted more time. We got the feeling it was because the parents were putting doubts into their heads. Well we tried to pass by several times the following week, but they were never there. Which was weird because they were always home before. We figured that it was because it had rained a ton that week and maybe they had been staying somewhere else to stay dry. Anyway, we finally found them last week. We clapped several times but no one came out. Someone was definitely there tho, so we were kinda confused. Well we tried again a few days later, and this time we saw some of the little kids playing outside the house. So we clapped and asked them if there parents were home. They all ran inside, and we were like, finally, we´re going to be able to talk with them. But we waited quite a while and no one came out. Then we heard the dad´s voice coming from inside the house. We listened and realized he was praying. But it was a very Evangelico prayer, if you know what those are like, and we are pretty sure he had gathered all his kids for it. It was kinda hard to hear what he was saying but we heard some words very clearly. Basically he was asking the Lord to ¨echar estes diablos de mi casa, y protegernos de su maldad¨. He said a lot more stuff but that´s basically all I could hear. So we just decided to leave. It was basically like a punch to the gut. Elder Nash and I had spent many, many nights with them, as well as Elder Chamberlain. I´m not sure what happened in the week and a half we couldn´t find them, but I guess it wasn´t good. We haven´t been back since.
And then last sunday(not yesterday), we had an interesting experience in sacrament meeting. Elder Giraldo was giving one of the talks and he fainted right before he could end it. He suddenly stopped talking and his eyes went super wide. Then he started to topple over but luckily the bishop and first counselor were able to catch him and they ended up having to carry him out of there. Everyone was freaking out. He woke up after about 30 seconds though and he was fine. All the moms starting asking him a bunch of questions like if he ate breakfast or not. (We didn´t because we never have time on sundays, we´re usually out the door looking for investigators by 7 or 7:30.) Well once they found out we didn´t eat breakfast they all started scolding us and telling us that we don´t eat well enough. So yesterday a bunch of old ladies brought a bunch of stuff with them to church for us to eat haha.
Speaking of yesterday, we got 11 investigators in church yesterday. Elder Chamberlain´s record was 9 so we were able to beat it. Also, the other elders had 8 in church so we had 19 investigators in total. But unfortunately, the 3 that we really needed, a Bolivian family that we were going to baptize this week, didn´t come. So I guess we won´t be having a baptism this week. It sucked because we figured they would for sure come, so we spent our time looking for our other investigators. There´s always next week I guess though.
A couple nights ago we were riding through the street as we passed this little kid that was probably like 8 and out of nowhere this big dog came and bit him right in the leg. We got off our bikes and went to see if he was ok. He started crying and screaming. We looked at his leg and there were 4 huge holes in his leg and blood was streaming down. We carried him to his house and gave him to his parents. They bandaged him up and we left. Hopefully he´s all good. The 25 de mayo is a pretty big holiday in Argentina and the ward had a Locro in the capilla and we went to it. It was pretty cool. We sang the Argentine national anthem which was cool, but it´s kinda a weird song.
Well we´ve had a lot of adventures this week but that will probably do for this email.
Chaucito,
-Elder Shelton
¨echar estes diablos de mi casa, y protegernos de su maldad¨ = "remove these devils from my home and protect us from their evil"
Monday, May 28, 2018
Wednesday, May 23, 2018
Nate's Letter Home - May 21, 2018
What a week - 21 mayo 2018
We´ve had some adventures this past week. But first, we did have our baptism of Gonzalo, the 8 year old. It was really cool, and we got a lot of members there. Unfortunately tho, we only had one confirmation yesterday. Nicolas wasn´t able to make it, which was a long story, but we´ve already talked to him and we will for sure confirm him next sunday. We were able to get 6 investigators in church yesterday, which was pretty good, but it was kinda a let down because we were expecting to get over 10. We had plans to buscar a madre and her two daughters in the morning and go with them to church, but when we showed up in the morning they weren´t there, which was definitely a let down. We had also made plans with two investigators we have that have a car to bring 3 of our other investigators to church with them, which they did. ¡Capos! They definitely came up clutch.
Recently we started eating with this family on mondays. The dad is a member that´s been inactive for most his life, and his wife´s not a member. But he has a daughter who is 8 and he wants to baptize her so he has been talking with the bishop and doing the stuff necessary to be worthy to baptize her. They´ve been coming to church basically the whole time I´ve been her. And about 4 weeks ago, they got married. Yes, they got married. Well once we heard that we were like it´s time to baptize the wife. So we went to their house one night and taught them about baptism. We kinda acted like we were teaching the daughter, but really it was for the mom. At the end we invited her to be baptized and it was a pretty firm no. (Of course the one couple that gets married doesn´t want to get baptized.) But anyway, we were eating lunch with them last monday and she was talking about her daughter is going to get baptized pretty soon, and then out of nowhere she was like, ¨and yeah I´ve been thinking, and maybe I´ll get baptized with her.¨ Elder Chamberlain happened to be drinking juice at the time and he about choked on it. But anyway, it was a good surprise and hopefully it will end up happening.
Friday was interesting. First off we were riding our bikes down the street in the morning and there was randomly this guy running backwards down the street as fast as he could. Elder Chamberlain had to swerve to miss him. I don´t know why but it cracked me up and we laughed about it the whole morning. We had some bad luck in the afternoon though. It started out with me eating it. Elder Chamberlain stopped suddenly to talk to this group of kids and I tried to get off my bike while it was still moving a little bit but my foot landed in the most slippery mud ever and I completely ate it and landed flat on the ground in all the mud. It was pretty embarassing. Elder Chamberlain got a good laugh out of it though. Later on, at about 7, a storm came out of nowhere and it started pouring. We were on dirt roads with no street lights so it was really dark and we basically couldn´t see anything. We were going really fast on our bikes towards our investigators house because we didn´t want to get completely soaked. Elder Chamberlain was in front of me and out of nowhere he collided with something and he basically did a front flip over his bike and landed face first in the dirt. It was the most unexpected thing ever because we were just riding down the middle of the street. At first I thought he had to have broken something because it looked pretty bad. But he got up pretty quick and he was somehow fine. We looked at what he had hit and it turned out to be a concrete barrior that for some reason had been put in the road. After I realized he was ok, I started laughing for like 10 minutes straight, I thought I was going to die haha. We´re still laughing about it to this day.
Do you remember that huge family of 9 I wrote about a while ago? We definitely had an interesting experience with them this week. I don´t think I have time to write it all out though so I´ll probably tell you next week. Sorry to leave you on a cliffhanger. Oh and we had quite the adventure in sacrament meeting, I´ll probably tell you about that next week too.
Anyway, hopefully it´s all good in the hood back in Cache Valley.
Hay que disfrutar cada día.
-Elder Shelton
We´ve had some adventures this past week. But first, we did have our baptism of Gonzalo, the 8 year old. It was really cool, and we got a lot of members there. Unfortunately tho, we only had one confirmation yesterday. Nicolas wasn´t able to make it, which was a long story, but we´ve already talked to him and we will for sure confirm him next sunday. We were able to get 6 investigators in church yesterday, which was pretty good, but it was kinda a let down because we were expecting to get over 10. We had plans to buscar a madre and her two daughters in the morning and go with them to church, but when we showed up in the morning they weren´t there, which was definitely a let down. We had also made plans with two investigators we have that have a car to bring 3 of our other investigators to church with them, which they did. ¡Capos! They definitely came up clutch.
Recently we started eating with this family on mondays. The dad is a member that´s been inactive for most his life, and his wife´s not a member. But he has a daughter who is 8 and he wants to baptize her so he has been talking with the bishop and doing the stuff necessary to be worthy to baptize her. They´ve been coming to church basically the whole time I´ve been her. And about 4 weeks ago, they got married. Yes, they got married. Well once we heard that we were like it´s time to baptize the wife. So we went to their house one night and taught them about baptism. We kinda acted like we were teaching the daughter, but really it was for the mom. At the end we invited her to be baptized and it was a pretty firm no. (Of course the one couple that gets married doesn´t want to get baptized.) But anyway, we were eating lunch with them last monday and she was talking about her daughter is going to get baptized pretty soon, and then out of nowhere she was like, ¨and yeah I´ve been thinking, and maybe I´ll get baptized with her.¨ Elder Chamberlain happened to be drinking juice at the time and he about choked on it. But anyway, it was a good surprise and hopefully it will end up happening.
Friday was interesting. First off we were riding our bikes down the street in the morning and there was randomly this guy running backwards down the street as fast as he could. Elder Chamberlain had to swerve to miss him. I don´t know why but it cracked me up and we laughed about it the whole morning. We had some bad luck in the afternoon though. It started out with me eating it. Elder Chamberlain stopped suddenly to talk to this group of kids and I tried to get off my bike while it was still moving a little bit but my foot landed in the most slippery mud ever and I completely ate it and landed flat on the ground in all the mud. It was pretty embarassing. Elder Chamberlain got a good laugh out of it though. Later on, at about 7, a storm came out of nowhere and it started pouring. We were on dirt roads with no street lights so it was really dark and we basically couldn´t see anything. We were going really fast on our bikes towards our investigators house because we didn´t want to get completely soaked. Elder Chamberlain was in front of me and out of nowhere he collided with something and he basically did a front flip over his bike and landed face first in the dirt. It was the most unexpected thing ever because we were just riding down the middle of the street. At first I thought he had to have broken something because it looked pretty bad. But he got up pretty quick and he was somehow fine. We looked at what he had hit and it turned out to be a concrete barrior that for some reason had been put in the road. After I realized he was ok, I started laughing for like 10 minutes straight, I thought I was going to die haha. We´re still laughing about it to this day.
Do you remember that huge family of 9 I wrote about a while ago? We definitely had an interesting experience with them this week. I don´t think I have time to write it all out though so I´ll probably tell you next week. Sorry to leave you on a cliffhanger. Oh and we had quite the adventure in sacrament meeting, I´ll probably tell you about that next week too.
Anyway, hopefully it´s all good in the hood back in Cache Valley.
Hay que disfrutar cada día.
-Elder Shelton
buscar a madre = "go find a mother"
Hay que disfrutar cada día = "we should enjoy each day"
Monday, May 14, 2018
Nate's Letter Home - May 14, 2018
Here are this week's translations:
14 mayo 2018:
Well this is going to be pretty brief.
So on thursday we baptized Nicolas and it was really cool. I was the one that baptized him, I don´t remember if I told you that or not. And this week we should be baptizing Gonzalo, so that will be good. I don´t think that anything else super interesting happened this week.
I finished the Book of Mormon again a couple days ago which was cool. Now I´m just focusing on reading it in spanish. I´m in the Isiah chapters of 2 nephi, and if you thought it was hard in english, spanish is even harder haha. Although in the spanish versions, there´s a bunch of footnotes at the bottom that will say Es Decir... and then explain what that verse was talking about. Those help out a lot, because otherwise I would have no idea what´s going on.
¨Con todo esto, no se ha mitigado su ira, sino que su mano aún está extendida.¨
-Elder Shelton
- ¨Con todo esto, no se ha mitigado su ira, sino que su mano aún está extendida.¨ = "For all this, his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still"
- "es decir" = "that is to say"
14 mayo 2018:
Well this is going to be pretty brief.
So on thursday we baptized Nicolas and it was really cool. I was the one that baptized him, I don´t remember if I told you that or not. And this week we should be baptizing Gonzalo, so that will be good. I don´t think that anything else super interesting happened this week.
I finished the Book of Mormon again a couple days ago which was cool. Now I´m just focusing on reading it in spanish. I´m in the Isiah chapters of 2 nephi, and if you thought it was hard in english, spanish is even harder haha. Although in the spanish versions, there´s a bunch of footnotes at the bottom that will say Es Decir... and then explain what that verse was talking about. Those help out a lot, because otherwise I would have no idea what´s going on.
¨Con todo esto, no se ha mitigado su ira, sino que su mano aún está extendida.¨
-Elder Shelton
Monday, May 7, 2018
Nate's Letter Home - May 7, 2018
Here are this weeks translations:
palabra de sabiduría = Word of wisdom
ley de castidad = law of chastity
diezmo = tithing
cita = appointment
vamos a ver = we'll see (if something will happen or not)
7 mayo 2018
Well the good news is we`ve finally got a baptism this thursday. Hopefully it will be two baptisms but we`ll have to wait and see. One is an 8 year old kid named Gonzalo that is living with some members on the weekends due to some family issues. He really likes coming to church though so we taught him all the lessons and we had his interview last night. The other is Nicolas who is 20. Elder Nash and I found him a little over two weeks ago and he is capo. We just found him on the side of the street one night and started talking to him. We invited him to play soccer with us the next wednesday (that`s when we play soccer with all the pibes) and then we started talking about baptism and we invited him to be baptized and he said yes. Well he came to church the following sunday, and he came yesterday, so we can baptize him this week. He didn`t just come to church though, he came early and was in a suit. I have never had an investigator wear a dress shirt to church before, let alone a suit. Like we called him one day to try and set up a cita with him and he was like ¨oh, sorry i`m in Morena right now looking for a suit for sunday.¨ We were so amazed we didn`t know what to do. We taught him the palabra de sabiduría about a week ago and told us he smokes marijuana with his friends a lot and that he smokes 2 cigarettes a day but he commited to quit when we taught the lesson and he hasn´t done it since. The only problem is that he works in Merlo and it`s really hard to find time to teach him. So we still have to teach him lesson 3, ley de castidad, y diezmo and have his interview before thursday... vamos a ver. The main problem is that he has a girlfriend and we still have to teach castidad. So we`ll have to wait and see how that goes and then decide if we want to baptize him now or wait a week.
It rained like every day last week and the streets are straight mud. Our clothes get covered in mud every day and we try to scrub them off every night but it doesn´t work too well. Then they never dry and so they´re wet when we put them on in the morning. Saturday night at like 8 we were in the farthest part of our area when the chain of my comp´s bike snapped in half. Long story short I ended up on his bike holding on to his shoulder as he pulled me all the way home on my bike. It was quite the adventure.
Another interesting story. We were eating lunch with familia Rojas, which is who we eat lunch with every wednesday. They are awesome. Well while we were sitting there the grandpa comes out, who I`ve only seen like once before, and he starts talking to us a little bit. Then out of nowhere he asks us if we knew his brother´s name. I was really confused but my comp knew what was coming. So then the guy was like ¨his name was Adolfo Mussilini Rojas.¨ Things got awkward real quick. He asked us if we knew where those names came from and my comp just said that he knew they were leaders of Germany and Italy a long time ago. He didn´t say anymore because he knew the guy was just trying to get us to say something bad about them so he could start arguing with us. Luckily Hermana Rojas told him to leave before anything else could happen. There was definitely some serious tension and it was kinda scary.
So about next Sunday. We didn´t realize mother´s day was this sunday until just barely so we haven´t really set anything up. I think we decided though that he´ll do his call at 6 and I´ll try to do it at 7 (my time). So I guess we´ll plan on that. Hopefully we can find a member´s house where we can do it at that time.
Well I gotta go, hopefully you all have a great week.
-Elder Shelton
palabra de sabiduría = Word of wisdom
ley de castidad = law of chastity
diezmo = tithing
cita = appointment
vamos a ver = we'll see (if something will happen or not)
7 mayo 2018
Well the good news is we`ve finally got a baptism this thursday. Hopefully it will be two baptisms but we`ll have to wait and see. One is an 8 year old kid named Gonzalo that is living with some members on the weekends due to some family issues. He really likes coming to church though so we taught him all the lessons and we had his interview last night. The other is Nicolas who is 20. Elder Nash and I found him a little over two weeks ago and he is capo. We just found him on the side of the street one night and started talking to him. We invited him to play soccer with us the next wednesday (that`s when we play soccer with all the pibes) and then we started talking about baptism and we invited him to be baptized and he said yes. Well he came to church the following sunday, and he came yesterday, so we can baptize him this week. He didn`t just come to church though, he came early and was in a suit. I have never had an investigator wear a dress shirt to church before, let alone a suit. Like we called him one day to try and set up a cita with him and he was like ¨oh, sorry i`m in Morena right now looking for a suit for sunday.¨ We were so amazed we didn`t know what to do. We taught him the palabra de sabiduría about a week ago and told us he smokes marijuana with his friends a lot and that he smokes 2 cigarettes a day but he commited to quit when we taught the lesson and he hasn´t done it since. The only problem is that he works in Merlo and it`s really hard to find time to teach him. So we still have to teach him lesson 3, ley de castidad, y diezmo and have his interview before thursday... vamos a ver. The main problem is that he has a girlfriend and we still have to teach castidad. So we`ll have to wait and see how that goes and then decide if we want to baptize him now or wait a week.
It rained like every day last week and the streets are straight mud. Our clothes get covered in mud every day and we try to scrub them off every night but it doesn´t work too well. Then they never dry and so they´re wet when we put them on in the morning. Saturday night at like 8 we were in the farthest part of our area when the chain of my comp´s bike snapped in half. Long story short I ended up on his bike holding on to his shoulder as he pulled me all the way home on my bike. It was quite the adventure.
Another interesting story. We were eating lunch with familia Rojas, which is who we eat lunch with every wednesday. They are awesome. Well while we were sitting there the grandpa comes out, who I`ve only seen like once before, and he starts talking to us a little bit. Then out of nowhere he asks us if we knew his brother´s name. I was really confused but my comp knew what was coming. So then the guy was like ¨his name was Adolfo Mussilini Rojas.¨ Things got awkward real quick. He asked us if we knew where those names came from and my comp just said that he knew they were leaders of Germany and Italy a long time ago. He didn´t say anymore because he knew the guy was just trying to get us to say something bad about them so he could start arguing with us. Luckily Hermana Rojas told him to leave before anything else could happen. There was definitely some serious tension and it was kinda scary.
So about next Sunday. We didn´t realize mother´s day was this sunday until just barely so we haven´t really set anything up. I think we decided though that he´ll do his call at 6 and I´ll try to do it at 7 (my time). So I guess we´ll plan on that. Hopefully we can find a member´s house where we can do it at that time.
Well I gotta go, hopefully you all have a great week.
-Elder Shelton
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