Offices week 12

Well, I couldn´t think of a creative title for this email. That pretty much explains the whole week. I lost my agenda the other day (I think I left it in a housing agency place) and I honestly can´t remember what happened during the whole week. It´s hard working without an agenda. I feel lost and like I don´t know what is going on (I feel like that a lot anyway in the offices). I´m hoping that on Monday I can go back and find it.

So, this week I have been handling both the finances and the housing issues. Fortunately, there wasn´t anything too complicated. I don´t really know much about the finance job yet, I just give money to people when they ask me for it. But only if they have a receipt! The most exciting adventure was when an elder had his credit card eaten by an ATM machine. I don´t really know how to handle that situation, but I took the money off the card. I was also amazed how fast all my money ran out. There is a limit to how much cash we can have on hand in the offices, and Elder Schoeny filled it up to the limit before he left. We had some unexpected spending (like fixing the mirror on the car) and by Wednesday I was worried I wouldn´t make it to the end of the week before Elder Schoeny came back. But in the end I still had money left over and on Monday we´ll get a check cashed to get some more.

Other exciting office adventures include: going to a lady´s house who was really mad since the missionaries didn´t take good care of her apartment; Elder Castañeda is really good at taking care of situations like that. Going to the hospital at 11:30 at night to get an MRI for Elder Hill. Kind of sort of firing a guy that has worked for the mission for ten years fixing the apartments. Killing a mosquito by kicking it out of the air. Having a video conference from President Gulbrandsen´s iPad with the cell phone department. Spending hours checking baptismal names to figure out why the church records have a different number than our records. Well, those are just some of the fun things we do here. Too many stories to tell them all.

So, we also focused a lot this week in finding people to teach. We have been passing by members and trying to talk to their friends and or family. We have had some good success. The two girls we baptized a few weeks ago took us to all of their neighbors introducing us to them. The 13 year old girl was funny; she was like. I´m not a missionary yet, you guys go talk to them! But she came with us anyway. We found a couple awesome families that want to go to church. Hopefully things will keep progressing with them.

Well, for now that is all. We are about to have a ping pong tournament. Got to go win!

Hasta luego,
Elder Gardner