Hello all the people that read this letter! ¿Cómo están? Or maybe I should just say ¿Cómo está?
This has been an interesting week. A few weeks ago we had a mission wide conference call. Every single missionary in the mission (including the missionaries in the bottom of South America -- a total of about 200 people and 100 phones) was on the call and President Gulbransen talked to us. He talked about the urgency and the need of baptism. That all people need to be baptized to show their obedience and desire to follow Christ. And that we need to be baptized NOW! Often, especially as missionaries, we think is it ok to wait a month or two until the circumstances are better or something, but we need to follow Christ and be baptized, and we can not afford to wait in showing God our faithfulness. He challenged us all to do all we could to baptize someone this month (in May).
We worked hard and visited people that had been listening to missionaries and gone to church before, but we didn´t find anyone to baptize this month. But we did have a miracle with one of these people, Miriam. She is the mom of a member and my first week in my area we visited her and she was really happy to see us and wanted to start learning from the missionaries again. But after that day we couldn´t find her again, she goes fishing every single day. We passed by her house almost day this last week, and finally on Friday we found her. She told us about how hard her life is now and how much worse she feels now and that she was a lot happier when she was talking to the missionaries and going to church. It was a really good lesson but I was afraid to bring up the topic of baptism, since she stopped going to church because the missionaries pressured her too much about baptism. But my companion (who has more faith than I do; that´s one of the best parts of junior companions) brought up baptism. She said she had almost gotten baptized twice but never did, but she still wanted to get baptized, but wanted to wait a little bit to learn more first. So we started talking about dates (I was thinking in two or three weeks) and she herself chose this Saturday as the day to get baptized. We told her that it was a great idea. Now we got to work hard to make sure she makes it this time. Third time the charm!
That´s all the stories I got for this week. Time to go shopping. Got to start buying myself some birthday presents! Wink, wink...
Nos vemos,
Elder Gardner
Here is a series of e-mails that I got 2 hours later:
Ok. I don´t have time for the whole story, but here is a quick run down. Last week on p-day we were playing soccer and I fell and hit my face on the cement and broke my two front teeth. I went to the dentist and he said that everything is ok, it didn't reach the roots or nerves so the teeth are fine. But he needs to put on a crown. Two of them. He is going to do it tomorrow in the morning. The dentist just barely called me and told me that each crown is 1700 pesos or 3400 pesos for both. That is a little less than 1000 dollars, which he said is a lot cheaper than it would be in the states, which is good I guess. So I think it will be easiest for me to pay for it with the debit card that I have, which means I need you to put about 1000 dollars on it. If you get this soon reply back. I´ll stay on for a few minutes.
Well, you didn't reply yet which I assume means you haven´t read the last email. I´ll just trust that there isn't a problem and I´ll write and tell you more about it next week. Yes mom I´ll take pictures. And don´t worry about me, I´m in good hands. The dentist speaks English and went to school in the states. Thanks for everything.
I hope I´m not putting the family in a financial crisis! I just think it would be nice to be able to bite things; though I have a much better understanding of how Argentines feel, they all have terrible teeth problems.
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