Monday, May 12, 2014

Stable currency vs. nice weather

Good day sir!

I have a crappy keyboard again. well not crappy, but the letters W, A, S & D have been rubbed off by the excessive number of young Argentine children who come and play counter-strike in the cyber.

We had two less actives and two investigators out to church, what's good!

Also there was and amazingly fluffy puppy that was super cute that one of our less active families had, and it was awesome. but then someone stole it so I can't play with it anymore.

The weather is better! but seriously. It's not to hot here anymore, and the weather has gotten really... Beautiful. just awesome. the exact right mix of warm but not hot. and the region is just pretty looking in general, so, yeah. it would be a great place to vacation except that the peso is absolutely insane.

Oh yeah, um, we built a roof on Saturday, out of concrete, and we're doing another one this week. Horray for applicable skills that I am gaining, I guess (if I ever want to build a janky flat roof out of logs, bamboo, concrete and liquid asphalt). But even better, there are pictures of the service project on the progreso branch Facebook page. here, wait let me go get the link wait I'm not allowed okay uhh just look up "Rama Progreso" and it should show up. there's a great one of a large amount of liquid concrete falling on me from above.

Spiritually this week I had a great experience learning the value of listening. we had an unplanned lesson with one of our investigators, Gorge, and he's a talker, an older fellow, 50 or so, and he just had a lot to say. I was struggling to really be able to listen to him since I had just had an hour-long language study and was feeling rather done with spanish. Still, I focused in and tried to get every single word he was saying. I was hard, and he was talking about things that I didn't necessarily think where super relevant. But as I kept listening, I started to understand more what he was talking about, and how he was expressing his doubts and concerns to us; We where able to understand a lot more of his needs on a spiritual level. He then made a somewhat abrupt change of topic and told us about the death of his mother and the impact that had had on him. he expressed how he had been very downcast and hopeless for some months after his mother had passed away, until one night he had a dream in which he though he saw his mother and heard her tell him that everything would work out. After he shares that powerful experience with us, I felt greatly moved by the trust we had earned in this man by being willing to listen patiently instead of trying to quickly share a planned message and move on to another appointment.

That experience and a couple other led me in my studies to some of the plan of happiness chapters in the book of Mormon. some of the verses that stuck out to me where 1 nephi 8:12 and the antecedent experience that lehi has finding the tree of life.

That's all for this week,
oh wait it's not I had questions to answer. We have lunch with members because that's the big meal here. we have lunch with members every single day except P-day, even though there are only like 9 or 10 families that feed us. They're fairly good about varying the fare, since we eat with each one of them almost once a week... We eat a lot of milanaisas? not sure if that's how you spell it... and uh other food to, like empenadas sometimes and casseroles and pasta, lots of pasta... lots of beef, lots of chicken. yeah.
uhhh now that's all for this week.
Have fun with your cold weather and stable currency,
El. Backstrom

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