3 March 2014
This week Gustavo and Raul taught
Family Night - it was awesome. Raul is about 26 and has a baptism date
for this coming Saturday, March 8th. He is from Bolivia and the first
time we met him (about ten months ago) we felt like he needed to hear the message
of the Restoration and that he would be open to it. He attended some of
our Family Home Evenings with the Montesino family. Little by little, the
hermana missionaries have been teaching him and he now has a testimony.
Lujan Silva’s daughter Melina Rocha
was baptized this week. She was baptized
at age eight but the branch leaders at that time failed to record the
information into the Church record-keeping system (MLS) and we could not find
witnesses who could remember who performed the baptism and confirmation so we
were forced to start over and baptize her again. If it isn’t recorded – it didn’t happen.
She didn’t mind at all and was happy to get baptized again thinking she
had sinned plenty over the past two and a half years :)
The Jara family left this week for
Trelew where they have great cancer treatment programs. His life might be
extended some with chemo-therapy treatments so they are going to give it a
shot. We said our good-byes because without a miracle of some kind we may
not see them again.
Macarena bore her testimony in church
today. She is the little twelve-year-old girl we buy homemade cakes and
doughnuts from. We started buying from her about six months ago because
we felt that she was a special girl and wanted to help her and her family.
Everyday she sells baked goods on the street and in the Plaza. She
gets two pesos for each twenty-peso budin she sells and if she sells at least
six a day she gets an extra six pesos as a bonus. A peso represents about
fifteen cents. Her sisters are all too embarrassed to be seen out in
public selling things on the street but she is a determined little girl and is
not afraid to make a living by hard work. In her testimony today she said
that she knows the church is true and that she has investigated three churches
now and this is the true church. She considers herself a member now, even
though she is not baptized, because this is the church she has chosen and plans
to continue coming until her parents eventually give her permission to be
baptized. Her mother is a devout Catholic and her father is a member of an
Evangelist church. She is a very special girl and will make a great member and
a wonderful missionary.
10 March 2014
We went camping in the mountains with
the youth as a district youth conference and had a great time. It was
super cold at night but they all survived and want to do it again. We
ended up with three active youth, two less-active, and three non-members.
Macarena came to church again yesterday and we now have an up-and-running
young women's program so they had their first class and lesson yesterday.
Even though she is not a member she may end up being our class president
because she is a real go-getter and will go out and find the other girls and
bring them in.
We worked a lot with Raul this week
and had two lessons with him and Gustavo to help him get ready for his baptism
which took place on Saturday. He is really converted and took his time to
learn the Gospel and gain his testimony.
The weekends are rough here because
we live on the Avenue and everyone parties all night. On Saturday night
we only had three and a half hours of sleep - we are still trying to
recover.
We cleaned the church on Saturday to
get ready for our open house on the 15th. We scrubbed years of smoke and
soot off of the yellow walls. It seems to be a combination of volcanic
ash from the volcano eruption a few years ago along with the gas heaters that
leaves a black film on the walls. The difference was amazing and you
could see black and white every time anyone wiped the wall with the
detergent-water mix.
17 March 2014
We spent the week scrubbing walls at
the church getting ready for the open house. We also made a few small
repairs and improvements, one of which was a new bulletin board. The old
one had a carpet surface and we could never get anything to stick to it - it
has driven us crazy for a year now. We decided to install corkboard.
Wow, this is where it gets interesting. We first asked the
properties manager to send it to us because the last time we purchased a 12 X
18 inch piece of corkboard for the primary room we paid over 100 pesos which
was equivalent to a little under $20 US dollars. We needed about five
pieces to complete the job and since we only get about 1,800 pesos per quarter
in branch budget we didn't want to spend our budget on it. It took a bit
of coordinating but they purchased it in Bariloche and sent it to us on the bus
and we picked it up a the terminal. When we went to install it, the
pieces they sent were of various thickness and we didn't have enough of any
particular size to complete the job and make it all lay flat. So we went
in search of additional pieces to match the ones we had. It was very
educational, corkboard is not a simple thing. It comes in a variety of sizes
and thicknesses. It also comes with or without gomaeva (a type of rubber)
mixed in. And depending on where you go they sell it by the kilo or by
the cut. The large sizes ( 24 X 36) are preferable because they result in
fewer seams but are next to impossible to find. In the end, we couldn't
find anything in Trevelin or Esquel that matched the pieces we already had.
Additionally, each place must have had a different manufacturer because
the sizes were not consistent from one to the other. The pieces they sent
us from Bariloche were stamped "5" but the other options for sale
that were size 5 were much thicker and the smaller sizes 2.5 and 3 were way to
thin and of course you had to fly to Buenos Aires to find a size 4 which may or
may not work in the end. So, we broke down after about three hours of
searching and just bought all of it from our favorite hardware store in Esquel.
As we were walking out the door to leave, I had the thought to ask this
fellow if the two small tubes of glue we were sold by another hardware store in
Trevelin would be sufficient for all of this. He laughed and said,
"No, you need some serious glue to make this stick to the already existing
carpet." He showed us two sizes of some super-duper glue that would
do the job - a quart and a half quart of glue - one costing about $9 (64 pesos)
and the other about $6 (46 pesos) and told us that the half quart would just
barely finish the job but that the quart would leave extra for other projects.
We purchased the quart of headed home. Once at the church we laid
everything out and cut the pieces perfectly with our Leatherman knife so that
everything was beautiful and snug. Then we opened the glue. The glue
had a terrible smell that gives you a headache just like the Kilz primer we use
back home. We spread the glue with a spatula and laughed as we did it
that the two small tubes of glue we bought from the first hardware store would
have hardly been sufficient for one piece. About half way through we
realized that we were almost out of glue and that created a problem because
once applied to both the cork board and the carpet, the glue only needed to dry
for ten to twenty minutes before being pressed together. We ran to the
hardware store across the street and paid over 100 pesos for the exact same
bottle we had just purchased in Esquel a few hours earlier for only half as
much. We finished the job and were left with about half an inch of glue
in the can. We stacked books it to apply pressure and left for a few
hours to run other errands. When we came back and took off the books the
board instantly bubbled up in about five places where it didn't want to stick.
We determined that the moisture from the glue had caused our perfectly
sized pieces to expand and that the only way to make it fit would be to
trim a few centimeters off around the edge of the entire board so that it would
lay flat. We borrowed a razor blade and went to work scraping and
separating the cork board from the carpet in the areas that had already dried
firmly so that it could be cut and lay flat again. It was at this point
that we both looked at each other and said that whatever amount of pain and
suffering these people would have incurred over the next ten years of having to
deal with a carpet bulletin board was small in comparison to what we were dealing
with. A couple of hours later it fit perfectly again. We placed
heavy books on it again to hold it in place and left it over night. The
next day, as it dried, the cork board contracted and shrunk back to it's
original size now leaving gaps in the seams and around the edges of the board.
We looked at it and simply said, "it works and it will be full of
papers and announcements so maybe no one will even notice." What an
adventure!
We handed out over 55 invitations to
our non-member friends in the city. We have made a lot of friends at the
various businesses so we went out and invited them all personally to our open
house.
The open house was a HUGE success and
we ended up having 32 non-members attend. Many of them were contacted on
the street during the open house and ushered in by our missionaries who stood
out on the street greeting everyone who passed by. Five of the people we
invited came. We received many referrals and our missionaries are going
to be very busy for the next month.
Our sister missionaries were called
as young women advisors last week and we called Macarena to be our Beehive
Class President yesterday. She is very excited. Even though she is
not a member yet, she is our only active girl in the entire young women's
program. She is anxious to go out and help us bring the other young women
in.
24 March 2014
This week we taught FHE again.
We based the lesson on Mosiah 4:30 and focused on thoughts, words, and
actions. For thoughts we rolled up colored pieces of paper (bad thoughts)
and pushed them into a toilet paper roll (our minds) and then pushed in white
pieces of paper (good thoughts) to get rid of the bad thoughts. Then we
had someone squeeze a tube of toothpaste and then try to put it back again to
show how words are difficult to take back after having been said. Then we
had a row of dominoes that represented our actions and how they affect others
and how we can stop a chain reaction by just pulling out one domino or by
changing our actions. To top it all off we popped popcorn and said that
those who followed this counsel were like the beautiful pieces of popped corn
and those who did not would be like the kernels at the bottom of the bowl that
never flourished or amounted to anything but to be tossed out.
We did a lot of branch work this week
to try and wrap up the loose ends. It is all coming together. We
act as both counselors, the executive secretary, and the financial clerk all in
one so there is always a lot to do.
On Saturday we held our YM/YW
activity taught them to make bread. They played ping pong and foosball
and built popsicle stick homes while it was rising and baking. They
enjoyed it so much that it turned into a four-hour activity. We used the
bread on Sunday for the Sacrament.
31 March 2014
We did a Family Home Evening with the popsicle stick
housed the youth built on Saturday to demonstrate the difference between a house
built on a rock and one built on sand - it was a hit.
We are having lots of success from
the open house and already have baptisms set for April. We want to do it
every six months!
We took three investigators to the
General Women's Meeting on Saturday and then went out for ice cream after -
they had a great time.
Ann gave a great talk in church
yesterday on missionary work and I did the 5th Sunday combined lesson on
finances and budgeting which is an important part of self-reliance that needs
to be taught in this area.
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