Nate's Letter Home - June 26, 2018

rip argentina - 26 junio 2018

Note from Todd:  There was a labor strike yesterday in Argentina, that why Nate's email is a day late.

"Cita" = appointment

 ¨...entiende, hijo mío, que todas estas cosas te servirán de experiencia, y serán para tu bien.¨   ...know this, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience and will be for thy good

Well Argentina has not looked to hot in the Mundial so far. They play tonight against Nigeria, and they have to win or they´re done. Also, if Iceland beats Croacia they are done. So I think it´s going to take a miracle. Last thursday we saw a lot of crying kids, and really upset adults, after the loss against Croacia. This is basically Messi´s last chance to win the cup, so there are a lot of big expectations that have been put on him. I set up a cita with some of our investigators so we can see the last 15 or 20 minutes of the game with them today ha ha. Hopefully when we show up they´re not already getting destroyed.

Well as for that family I talked about last week. Things we´re going pretty good. We had some really good lessons with them. They went to the activity in the church friday night where the ward was watching Coco. Then, Saturday morning, they went with the ward on their trip to the temple. So we went and visited them saturday night after they got back. We were pretty excited to see what they thought of the temple. We got there and they were all happy, and they were like ¨yeah it was really cool and pretty.¨ Then out of nowhere Maria was like ¨so here´s the thing. I think I got my answer, and I feel like this isn´t the church for me¨ I literally couldn´t believe it. Like how does that even happen. I just kinda sat there again for a minute or two. I wasn´t mad, just really disappointed and confused. We had a long talk with them about a lot of stuff, but mainly about the restoration and the authority from God to baptize. It is almost impossibe here for people to understand that there can only be one correct church. Because they´ve been taught they´re whole life by all the pastors here that all churches talk about the same God, so they´re all good and you just need to find the one that you like best. (Or the one that happens to be closest to your house). And the pastors say that so people come to their church. They also tell everyone to not talk to ¨los Mormones¨, but that´s another story. I could write an essay on everything wrong the pastors do, but I´ll end right there. Anyway, I was trying to explain to them for like the 7th time that there can only be iglesia de Cristo. We tried for quite a while. At the end I told them ¨We´re not looking for your church, we´re looking for His church.¨ And I think that finally made sense to them. We´ll see how it goes.

We found this old ping-pong table in the church so on Pday we went and played for like 3 hours. I destroyed everyone. I played each of the 3 elders about 8 times each and I never lost once. Turns out I still got my skills.

Well despite all the disappointment, we found 2 new investigators this past week that are very promising. One of them already came to church. So we are going to be focusing in them, and hopefully we will be having some baptisms soon. 

¡Vamos Argentina!

 ¨...entiende, hijo mío, que todas estas cosas te servirán de experiencia, y serán para tu bien.¨


-Elder Shelton

Nate's Letter Home - June 18, 2018

una decepción - 18 junio 2018

Well the week was a bit disappointing and I guess I´ll start with the bad news. So we have our two investigators, Franco and Facundo, and their mom María that we´ve been teaching for a couple weeks now. All they needed was their interview. So thursday after zone conference the zone leaders came with us to their house and did the interviews of the 2 kids. They passed and everything was perfect for the baptism on saturday. Then we visited them Friday night. We brought some white clothes for them to try on. We talked for a while and then suddenly the mom was like, well...here´s the thing. And I was instantly like well this isn´t going to be good. Basically she told us that the kids didn´t want to be baptized. They don´t want to leave their church because they feel comfortable there. (They´re part of a evangélica church) Basically what I think the problem is that María has some doubts acerca de José Smith. Like a week ago she said she read online somewhere that he had 40 wifes. And I´m pretty sure she´s been talking to the people from her church about it because she asked us about how in the bible it says that there will be a lot of false prophets, and she asked us where in the bible it talks about Joseph Smith. So yeah, I´m pretty sure it´s because of the mom that the chicos feel uncertain.

To say the least we were very disappointed when she told us that. I think it was the most disappointed I´ve ever been on the mission. I had to wait like 3 minutes before I said anything because I was actually kinda mad and didn´t want to say anything I´d regret. Then I started asking them a few questions. Basically I was just like, Jesus only has one church right? And they were like yeah. And I was like, it would probably be important that we find that church, right? And they were like yeah. So then I decided to ask them if they had ever prayed and asked God if the church they went to was His church. They were quiet for a second, and then they said no. So basically I invited them to ask God, the source of all truth, what they should do. Then I told them a few of the things that I know, and that I know they can know it too.

So sunday morning I decided to go look for them before church because I really wanted them to come. So we took the bus and got to their house at about 8:45. We had to clap a few times but the grandma finally answered. She told us that María and the kids went to a party the night before and were still asleep and weren´t going to go. Again, pretty disappointing. We decided to go look for another family, which didn´t answer when we clapped. We didn´t end up getting to church until about 10:30, just a little while before sacrament meeting started. By some miracle, and this truly is a miracle, María, her chicos, and her sister Lela, (who we´ve taught one time) were all in the chapel when we got there. Which was a great site to see. She also sent us a text last night saying that she hopes were aren´t mad with her and that she loves our visits and hopes that we keep coming to help her understand what she should do. So hopefully we can help her recieve an answer.

Well the first game of the world cup was a bit disappointing for Argentina. They tied 1-1 with Iceland. Messi missed a penalty kick. All the argentines are basically throwing in the towel. They don´t have any faith haha and they´re blaming it all on Messi. It was super hard to work during the game. Nobody was in the streets and nobody answered when we clapped. When argentina scored the goal we heard like a million explosions and gunshots go off from everywhere. Also, President Resek gave us permision to watch a little bit of the games with our investigators. Basically he just told us to never spend more than like 15 minutes in one house watching the game. But nobody would let us in so we didn´t get to see any of it haha. I did get to see part of the Peru game tho because we eat lunch with members who are from Peru and they had it on.

Well that´s all I got time for, hopefully you guys have a great week!


-Elder Shelton

Alma 18:14 Therefore Ammon turned himself unto the king, and said unto him: What wilt thou that I should do for thee, O king? And the king answered him not for the space of an hour, according to their time, for he knew not what he should say unto him.

"acerca de"  = about

Nate's Letter Home - June 11, 2018

¿Hace frío? - 11 junio 2018

Well we survived the first week. Haha it actually wasn`t that bad. My companion is Elder Johnny Duarte, he`s from Texas but his parents are both from Mexico. He grew up speaking spanish in his house so luckily he already speaks it perfectly. Although the accent is definitely different and not what I`m used to. Being district leader isn`t too bad. I had to do my first baptismal interview for the other elders on wednesday. It went pretty well and I passed him. Basically as district leader I have to send in the numbers each day to the zone leaders, and I have to know about their fechas progresando for when the zone leaders call to ask about them. It makes it easier since we live in the same pensh so when I need their numbers I just yell at them across the room. I also have to run the district meetings each monday. My first one was this morning and I think it went pretty good.

Training doesn`t seem too bad. We are figuring it out together. It seems like I was just in my training. It definitely helps that he already speaks spanish, and he`s a capo. He`s going to make us some mexican food this Pday and I don`t think I`ve been more excited for anything in my life.

We were supposed to have two baptisms last week but things got complicated and basically we just couldn`t do the interviews in time. So basicallly if we can get the interviews done we will have two baptisms this week. It`s a pain because the zone leaders have to do my interviews and so we have to work with the train schedule and the schedule of the investigators and it`s a huge pain. It also makes me nervous that they won`t end up being there or something and then wasting like 2 hours of the zone leaders day. Hopefully we can end up having them, gotta start my refuerzo off right.

It actually is kinda cold here. I don`t think it´s gotten below freezing yet, but everyone is always bundled up like it´s -50 or something. To their credit, the humidity does suck the heat out of you pretty easily, but I don`t think it`s that cold. There is never a time of the day when you are warm tho. We don`t have a heater in our pensh, and nobody has heaters in their houses so basically you`re just cold all day.

Well my comp has already fallen in the mud twice, so I`d say he`s already got a good idea what Álvarez is like haha. It`s not a good day until you get at least somewhat covered in mud. The second time he fell into the ditch and I tried really hard not to laugh but I couldn`t help it.

¨No importa cuán bien cumplan su promesa de acordarse siempre de él, Él siempre se acuerda de ustedes.¨ - Henry B. Eyring

But no matter how well you keep your promise to always remember Him, He always remembers you.


remembers you. 

Nate's Letter Home - June 4, 2018

¡¡Saqué Messi!! - 4 junio 2018

Well I just saw Elder Chamberlain pack his bags in a car and leave Álvarez forever, which was a weird experience.

So you´re probably wondering about transfers. To put it simply, this will be my first time being comp mayor, first time training, and my first time being district leader. It´s going to be interesting. I´ll find out who my refuerzo is tomorrow. I´m hoping it´s a latino because training a shanki is pretty hard.

On tuesday we had divisions with the zone leaders and I was with Elder Pontón from Colombia. I had an embarrassing moment on the way to lunch. We had to ride through a lot of mud streets to get there, and my front mud guard filled up with mud so it was almost impossible to pedal (peddle?). I was standing up to put as much force as I could but unfortunately I put too much force and the bike slipped out from under me and I landed in straight mud. My left side was completely covered in mud from head to foot. Luckily the lady we ate lunch with was super capa and helped me out. I changed into some of her son´s clothes (which were pretty small for me haha) while she washed my shirt and pants by hand. By the time we´d eaten lunch my clothes looked cleaner than they had been in weeks. I was very grateful.

I ate way too much this week. Saturday and Sunday I had like 3 dinners each day because everyone wanted to say goodbye to Elder Chamberlain. I thought I was going to die from eating so much. Saturday night was interesting. Somehow my back tire got bent and couldn´t spin anymore. So we had to carry it 15 blocks to our investigators house. We had a lesson with them, and after they tried to fix it, but they couldn´t. So then we carried it to our other investigators house who we were having dinner with. We had some really good Peruvian food and  I got stuffed. Well we didn´t finish eating until 9 and we were really far from home. The next train didn´t come till like 9:40 so we had to leave our bikes at their house and we sprinted about a mile to the train station to take a bus back to Álvarez. Then we got off and sprinted the last 3 blocks to the house. We arrived at 9:29. Just in time.

Well you might be wondering about the title. So they are selling these little stickers of all the players from the world cup. They come in little packs of 5. This whole transfer we´ve all been trying to get Messi, but it turned out to be pretty hard. (It´s like a 1/650 chance). Well thursday night on the way back to the pensh Elder Chamberlain bought 10 packs because he was determined to get Messi. I bought 2 packs right after him. We went home and opened them and the last card in my second pack was Messi. We all went nuts. Elder Chamberlain was so mad haha.

There´s like a thousand more things that happened this week but I think I´ll leave it at that. Hopefully everything is going good back home. When I heard about Andrew´s video it made me laugh. That is definitely something he would do.

Less than two weeks till la Copa Mundial!
¡Vamos Argentina!
-Elder Shelton

"comp mayor" = senior companion

"refuerzo" = greenie

shanki  = yankee = american

capa = "awesome" (female)  (must be slang)

saqué = "I got"

Copa Mundial  = World Cup