Feb 2014 - Scott & Ann

3 Feb 2014 

This week we taught a FHE lesson on the Atonement.  We used a backpack and filled it with rocks to show how we carry the weight of sin in our lives and then how the Atonement of Jesus Christ can remove that weight and burden from us.  We also had them dirty their hands with charcoal and then used soap and water (repentance through the Atonement) to make them clean again.  

We had the oil changed in the car this week.  Here people don't just drive into JiffyLube and get an oil change.  First they have to line it all up with the repair station and then if the local car supply store doesn't carry the kind they need (which is the case with most new cars) they have to drive fifteen miles to Esquel to purchase the oil and bring it back along with any filters they want replaced.  They leave the car in the morning and it is finished around five or six in the afternoon.  Our oil change ended up costing us about $95 - we would hate to think how much a serious repair would cost.

The boy we have been teaching English to all week passed the test so now he will move on to the next grade!

On Tuesday we prayed that the Lord would bring someone new to us so we wouldn't have to go looking for them and sure enough later that day we were parked on a corner deciding where to go next and a man walked up to the car and knocked on the window.  We talked for a bit and he invited us in to his house.  Turns out he is married to a super nice woman we see at the grocery store every week.  He invited us back to talk to his wife and daughter too.  We will be seeing them this week.

Brother Vera recently found a job at a new brick-making factory.  He is in an administrative position and is helping other members to get hired.  Today is brother Mario Jara's first day on the job with the factory and that is a miracle because they fast every other day due to not having sufficient and they were considering leaving the city to find work in a larger city.  The branch is desperate for them to stay because they do so much to help the branch.

Erica Rivera was baptized on Saturday and confirmed on Sunday.  She is Candela's mother.  She has three little girls (8 and under) and another child on the way.

10 Feb 2014 

This week one of the highlights was a visit to a small village in the campo way up in the mountains called Sierra Colorada.  We went with a member of our ward as part of a clothing drive for the people.  Many of our ward members donated clothing (boxes and bags) for these people who are very poor and basically live off the land along with a few sheep.  They were super friendly and we played games with the kids while waiting for the other vehicle to show up with the rest of the clothing.  We distributed the clothes at their community center.

We made German pancakes for the Primary activity this week.  Most of them didn't care for them because of the maple syrup - they really don't like really sweet things in this country.

We started teaching Melina (almost 11 years old) last night and taught her the first two lessons.  Her mother, Lujan, is our new young women's president as of yesterday.  We are excited and know she will help us get the young women's program up and running.

The cost of living continues to decrease for us in Argentina.  When we arrived, the exchange rate was five pesos to one dollar and now it is over eight. That is a 60% rate of inflation in less than one year.  Prices are starting to creep up and we expect to see some fairly substantial price increases in food, etc before we leave.  Gas for the car is the one thing that adjusts daily and has not lagged behind at all. 

On our way home from the combined youth activity on Friday night (after 11:00 pm) we were stopped at the police checkpoint which is a fairly common occurrence around here.  I had Gustavo (our Young Men Advisor) in the front seat along with three young men in the back (Ramiro, Irving, & Sharo).  The policewoman could tell that I was not a local (not sure how she knew....) and instantly considered us a potential risk for drugs, or whatever they were looking for that night.  She drilled me for a bit on where were were coming from and where we were going while other cops with their drug-sniffing dogs were checking out other cars.  After a while, she looked over at Gustavo who hadn't said a word the whole time and wouldn't even look at her.  He just sat there in typical Gustavo style staring off into the dark night.  Gustavo is of from the Mapuche native indian tribe and stands out from the typical Argentine.  She looked over at Gustavo and asked him if he spoke spanish.  He said yes, and then she told him to get out of the car.  About then, Sharo yelled from the back seat something about alcohol thinking it was funny. The other boys told him to shut up.  Gustavo got drilled for a bit and then she pulled Ramiro out of the back seat and did the same.  We were lucky she didn't pull Sharo out or we may have all spent a night in jail.  In the end, she determined that we were just a few church boys coming home from an activity and let us go.

17 Feb 2014 

We spent a good portion of our week running back and forth between Trevelin and Esquel with the Jaras to visit various doctors and the hospital. Brother Jara is not well and may have cancer so he has to have lots of tests to figure out exactly what he has.

We got to weed and cut a lawn this week for service for the Alarcon sisters. It felt good to work outside again!

We had a great lesson with Raul. He has been taking lessons from the Hermanas now for over four months and attends church regularly but is still trying to gain his own testimony. We taught him about the origins of the Bible and the Book of Mormon and how both are ancient records of prophets who testified of Jesus Christ.  He is very intelligent and is now very excited to dig into the Book of Mormon to see what these ancient American prophets had to say. 

We took the young men fishing and had a great time. We caught three fish. 

We taught the last two lessons to Melina Rocha this week and she is set to be baptized near the end of this month.

24 Feb 2014 

We have had another rough week with the Jara family. Brother Jara has pancreatic cancer and it doesn't look good - we will know more this week. We have lived between here and Esquel for a couple of weeks now with over seventeen trips to doctors or hospitals.

We rode a train this week called La Trochita. We took our good friends and kind-of investigators Elena and Amelia Alarcon. The train is about 100 years old and takes you out in the middle of nowhere to little towns that probably wouldn't exist without the business the train brings them. It used to be a major source of transportation and shipping but now is used primarily for tourists. 

This week Cirilo Gomez was baptized. The Elders have worked with him for a couple of months. The first time he came to church I gave the 5th Sunday lesson to a combined Priesthood and Relief Society on how to strengthen the family and used the Church's publication called "The Family" as the basis for the discussion. After that he told the Elders that he wasn't coming back because "that old guy talked the whole time and didn't use many scriptures."  Luckily he came back and didn't base his eternal salvation on some old guy trying to give a lesson in a foreign language. 

We had two devotionals with Elder M. Russell Ballard and Elder Rasband this week by satellite. They were in Buenos Aires and did trainings for all of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile. Elder Ballard told us that the revelation to lower the age of missionary service rivals the First Vision and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and marks the beginning of a wonderful era.

The Church has started a new open-house program that is slowly being rolled out to every mission.  We were trained for our upcoming chapel open-house yesterday - the big day will be March 15th. 

Jan 2014 - Scott & Ann

1-6-2014 

On New Year's Eve we had another BBQ, this time it was pig and cow with the Jara family. After that we hosted a New Year's Eve party at the chapel. It was lightly attended for the first four hours while people came and went eating and playing games.  But then at a quarter after midnight, everyone showed up.  Fortunately we still had two full cakes left and a piñata that the kids loved.

Argentine Piñata - a huge balloon filled with candy!

On New Year's Day guess what we did?  We ate ASADO, again!  This time it was with the Estrella and Vera families.  What a great way to start the new year.  We had pig, cow, and lamb this time and ate until we rolled out the door.  Its a funny thing that for nine months we have searched for the highly acclaimed "Argentine Asado" and have been unable to find it until now, and now it is everywhere we turn.  It could take months to work off the last week!

We spent the afternoon picking current berries in the Alarcon's garden.  They have tons of current bushes.  They harvest the berries and sell them to a famous "Casa de Te" just down the road where they use them all year long to make cakes and pastries.  It was just like being home again working in the garden.

On Friday, we had a wonderful lesson on the Plan of Salvation with the Alarcon sisters.  They were deeply touched to understand where their deceased mother and father are right now and have asked us to do temple work for their mother when we go to the Buenos Aires temple next month with the branch.

Saturday morning was our YM/YW combined district activity.  We hiked the "Llama Trail" next to La Hoya (a famous ski resort in Esquel).  We saw a mother llama (guanaco) and a baby llama (chulengo) on the trip and hiked a great distance to where we almost reached the snow.

1-12-2014 

We worked a lot with family history this week.  One by one, we visited everyone who is going to the temple next month and gave them the new pamphlet called "My Family."  We worked with them to start filling out the pages with information about themselves and their ancestors and then we created log-ins to www.lds.org and www.familysearch.org so they could enter the information and create their family trees.  The Jara family already has five deceased family members on the dad's side that are approved and ready to go to the temple.

Mario "Erni" Jara decided during the week that he wanted to be baptized on Saturday.  He had attended church more than what is necessary over the past three months so all he had to do was finish up a few lessons on the commandments to be ready.  Erni's entire life has changed since he came to Trevelin and it has been a miracle to see.  The first week in October he and his girlfriend had a fight and she told him that he couldn't see his daughter anymore.  He left the city with the intention of committing suicide and wandered around for a couple of days until he bought a bus ticket to Esquel thinking that he may see out his father and talk things over.  Once he arrived, we were in the middle of giving lessons to his father's new wife and their daughter (Analia and Micaela) and he listened in on our lessons from a distance with a lot of skepticism.  Little by little he came a closer to the table and participated more each visit until one day we suggested that he start from the beginning and take the missionary lessons so that he would at least know what his father believed and be informed about what the Mormons believe.  He said that he had studied just about every major religion in the world and was yet to find one that he really felt was God's true church, but that he had never looked into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was willing to see what was different in our teachings from all the rest.  Our first lesson was about the Restoration and we gave him a Book of Mormon.  He later told us that he took the book with the intention of reading it to find all of its errors so he could prove to us that it was not true.  We set up weekly lessons with him and taught him the Gospel from the beginning. Before long, he realized there was something to this and really started doing his part to read and pray.  His prayers were answered over and over and he gained a testimony.  He is now in the Book of Helaman in the Book of Mormon and gets up early every day to read because he loves it so much.  He was baptized on Saturday - January 11, 2014 - and it was a very special day for the branch.  It was a very spiritual baptismal service and a strength to the entire branch.

The Young Men had an activity of food from other countries and we made Ceviche from Ecuador, Peanut Butter Sandwiches from the USA, and an Eggplant dish from El Salvador.  Each young man had his favorite but the one they really loved was the eggplant. 

The main speaker for church didn't show up yesterday so President Estrella asked me if I would give a twenty-five minute talk just as Sacrament Meeting was starting.  Sure thing...president...whatever you need!  It went well, in fact, even than the talk I prepared for hours and gave in our Ward Conference.

1-20-2014 

We reorganized the home teaching for the ward this week and did more work on family history for the families of those going to the temple.  We have a little snag with the temple trip - apparently the reservation didn't really get tied down and now they want to charge us twice as much as we were originally told to fly to Buenos Aires.  We are looking at other options including a bus and we may end up holding off until April so we can get cheaper flights.  We should know this week.

We are finding a few new investigators here and there.  One twelve-year old girl we befriended a few months ago named Macarena came to our movie night on Saturday where we showed "Joseph Smith, the Prophet of the Restoration."  She also came to church the next day.

1-27-2014 

This week we took Gustavo to his home town to gather family history data so he can do temple work for his deceased ancestors.  A month ago, he asked his sister to help him gather information from their parents (she lives with their parents) so he could baptize their dead relatives - she freaked out and told him no.  We collected a bunch of scriptural references from the Bible that he could share with her regarding baptisms for the dead and he went back and shared them with her and his mother.  He explained how everyone of Heavenly Father's children that have ever been born on this earth will have the opportunity to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ (whether in this life or in the spirit world) and choose to follow him.  In the end, Gustavo's family understood and he now has a lot of information along with the photos we took of tombstones at the cemetery.  Things are moving along for his family's temple work now.

We postponed our temple trip until April because there was a problem with the flights and the cost we were originally quoted.  We plan to go on a bus in April and it will be a twenty-six hour ride.  This will work to our advantage because it will allow some people who were not quite ready to go in February to be part of the trip.

On Thursday the sister missionaries called to tell us that the husband of a member had died the day before.  From our previous experience with funerals we knew that it was all but over, but we made some quick calls and discovered that the viewing was over and that the cemetery service was scheduled for five o´clock.  It was about four at the time so we made a few adjustments to our appointments and ran over to the cemetery.  We arrived a half-hour early and watched a few children and grandchildren gather.  When they saw us they thought we were tourists, but once they realized we were missionaries they asked us to offer a prayer.  We took the opportunity to dedicate the grave. 

We spent a lot of time this week helping a widow in our branch.  She is 77 years old and struggles with the shower because of her size.  We installed support bars in her bathroom and shower along with a new hand-held shower and a special shower seat so she can sit while showering.  She has used it twice and is really happy!

We also fixed water heaters and unstopped plugged toilets this week for two of our elderly investigators.   

We are working hard to transfer everything in our heads and in our computers to the branch before we finish and spent a lot of time this week organizing and updating forms and systems to be put on the computer at the church where everyone will have access to them after we leave.

Dec 2013 - Scott & Ann

December was a great month because much of the work we started last March finally came to fruition.  We had five people get baptized this month and our attendance at Sacrament Meeting averaged 56 (there were 12 members in attendance the first week we arrived in March).  Everyone (missionaries, members, local leaders) has worked so hard to help this little branch grow and become stronger and it has been a miracle for us to see it happen and be part of it. 

9 Dec 2014 

The sister missionaries in our branch had a baptism this week.  Candela is a little girl who came to her first "open chapel" activity on April 20th and we have worked with her off and on since.  Her mother is also taking lessons from the missionaries and gave her permission to be baptized.  Her aunt and uncle are members so she should have good support in that way.

The sister up north who retrieved the birth certificate for the Jara family got really busy and forgot to send it in the mail.  We called her on Thursday (the day we expected the document to arrive in the mail) and said we were all excited about the wedding on Friday and the baptism on Saturday and needed to know how much we owed her.  At that point she confessed that the document was not even in the mail yet.  We had her send it express and are hoping to receive it today or tomorrow.


Yesterday was the branch Primary program.  The kids were wonderful and we even had a little girl wander in off the street who jumped up there and participated the entire time.  Of course, she just mouthed the words because she didn't know any of the songs, but it was inspiring to see someone feel the spirit of what was happening and want to be part of it. 

We had 58 people at church yesterday which is really awesome attendance for our branch.

16 Dec 2014 

What an awesome week! 

On Tuesday, the Jara's document arrived in the mail.  We immediately went with them to get registered at the Civil Registry for the marriage.  They were married on Thursday and we had a nice little ceremony where we threw rice and took a lot of photos.  After that we took them out for pizza and ice cream.  

Next we got geared up for patriarchal blessing and temple recommends and issued a calling to Mario Jara (the dad) to be our Branch Mission Leader.  Waste no time!  On Saturday Mario baptized his wife (Analia) and his daugther (Micaela - 9 years old).  It was a beautiful baptism and they are truly converted because they have been trying to get to this point now for about six months and during that entire time they just kept studying full speed ahead.  

Today, they were both confirmed in church, again by Mario.  The are being kicked out of where they live now because the landlord doesn't like Mormons - they will have to find a new place by the end of the year.  They live in the most humble of circumstances - you can even see outside through the cracks in the wood wall.

We met a girl at the grocery store who is a cashier.  She speaks a little English so we try to go through her line when we can to help her practice.  We offered to teach her some private English classes and spent about five hours with her last week helping her prepare for her English finals and oral exam at the school she attends.  She is 28 and just finishing her fourth year of law at the university.  She is a very bright girl.  We were a little sad to hear that school was coming to an end, thinking that we would not be able to see her much over the summer, but then she said she wants to continue meeting with us and that she wants to hear our lessons about the Scriptures.  Excellent!!!  Her first lesson will be this coming Tuesday.

The mom and dad of the little girl (Ambar) we baptized in July are both taking lessons right now and want to be baptized this month as part of the "White Christmas" we are planning.  We have spent a lot of time with him helping him understand the Gospel and gain a testimony.  He is a very good man and is attracted to the Church and the Gospel because of what it can do for his family - he sees what good it has done for his kids and now he wants to be part of it.

We had 59 people at Sacrament Meeting today.  The missionaries are so good at helping round up the members and investigators for church - today we even had two less-actives come that have not been in the church for years, along with a ton of investigators.  Our Gospel Principles class was so full that we honestly didn't have room for another person and they started sending people to Gospel Doctrine after the room maxed out around 22 people.  That is exciting!

12-23-13 

The Young Men were scheduled to go camping this week, but with the rat problems this year we determined it was too dangerous to chance Hantavirus so instead we rented a cabin on a river.  Five YM showed up.  We roasted hot dogs over a fire and they stayed up until four in the morning talking.  We fished the next day on the river.  It's the closest thing they will ever get to a Boy Scout overnighter. 

On Saturday, Paola Toro and Juan Caniu were baptized.  They were the first people to greet us when we arrived in Trevelin.  That first evening we were in the grocery store (La Anonima) purchasing cleaning supplies and she ran up to us and was very excited to see missionaries in their town because she had two young boys that were members and wanted them to get involved.  We have worked with them for nine months and it took the effort of everyone (missionaries, members, their own children) to get them to this point.  It was an exciting day for everyone.

12-30-2013

We had a pre-Christmas dinner with the Caniu family on Monday night.  They had the house decked out with a strand of lights outside and a decorated tree inside.

On Christmas Day our district got together for a little party at our chapel.  We had barbecued lamb (asado) and exchanged gifts.  After that we went to President Christian Giorgi and his wife Dana's house for another BBQ - this time it was goat and spent the afternoon with the two of them.

The day after Christmas we had Christmas Dinner with Elena and Amelia Alarcon.  They are the best cooks we have met in Argentina and we are always amazed at what they bring out of their kitchen - just like home!

On Saturday, the YM had a cycling activity.  Only one young man had his own bike so we ended up renting the others and completed a twelve-mile trip in the country towards Lake Futalaufquen.  It is some of the most beautiful countryside around.

On Sunday we made the transition from Missionary branch leadership to local.  President Walter Estrella was sustained as the new branch president and I was released.  He and his family have been here in Trevelin now for five to six months.  When they came here, they both said, "We have no idea why or how we ended up in Trevelin."  We all knew why and knew that The Lord had guided them here to help strengthen this branch.  President Estrella called Mario Jara as his first counselor and me as his second.

Nov 2013 - Scott & Ann

11-25-2013 

We have only had two hot days so far and keep wondering when summer will get here.  We still have our heaters turned on and use them every day.  It is still very cold here and very windy which makes it feel colder than it probably is. 

We had Thanksgiving dinner with the Caniu (Ambar, Ignacio, & Irving) family.  They are the only ones who celebrate in our area because they picked up the tradition three years ago from the missionaries.  Turkey is next to impossible to find, so we had chicken.  It was a nice dinner of cold finger-food like hotdogs in a blanket, chicken strips, ham roll-ups, and an apple salad.  

We had a wonderful FHE where we had a scavenger hunt based on scriptures where the people had to hurry around and gather items in each scripture and race against other teams.  But the real lesson was on service.  We had four stages situations where people could stop and help someone or just keep running to help their team win.  In the end, we gave them more points for stopping to help just once than if they had collected everything listed in the hunt.

One of our best investigators (Jara Family) is finally a few days away from getting the birth certificate they need to get married so they can get baptized.  They have been waiting over three months now for all of the documentation to come together.  Working with this family has been one of the highlights of our mission.  The document should show up soon!

We have worked really hard to get everyone who is worthy a current temple recommend along with patriarchal blessing recommends for those who are ready.  We spent two full days doing nothing but interviews so we could have things ready for our mission president to sign when he came to town.  It is nice to get things like this ironed out and updated because in a little branch like this they tend to get overlooked, especially when the temple is so far away that most people have no real hope of attending any time soon.

We had a district conference and Gustavo Painenao was ordained an Elder.

11-18-2013 

We had a great charla fogonera (fireside) last night and focused on how to gift a Book of Mormon.  A few of our members are catching the vision.  We have the goal for everyone to give a friend a Book of Mormon or invite someone to hear the Gospel message between now and Christmas - Elder Ballard's challenge from the last conference.  We are hoping for a White Christmas (a baptismal service the week of Christmas) this year.

11-11-2013 

This week we had a gas shortage.  Apparently the truck drivers went on strike and people were coming from all parts to buy gas in our city because the others were out.  Of course, it didn't take long before there were super long lines and car wrecks created by all of the chaos.  We waited an hour in line to buy gas this week and were grateful to get some because many people waited only to be turned away after it ran out.

We are working with Gustavo and helping him get prepared to receive the Melchizedek Priesthood at the end of this month.  We opened the missionary portal for him this week so he can start on the medical portion of the paperwork.   

We had a ward service project to dedicate the grave of a member who passed away a year ago.  He is the grandfather that everyone is related to here and the one they all talk about and want to be like.  When he died, nobody bothered to tell the branch president and since they bury people within twenty-four hours here it all happened so quickly that he his grave was not dedicated.  In our ward council we discussed it and the plan was to take everyone (adults and children) to dedicate the grave.  Then the Primary president said that we should not take the children to the cemetery.  I pushed her on it because I couldn't see any reason why the Primary children would not benefit from the experience too.  Then she explained that in the public cemetery, not everyone is buried in a coffin or a cement box and that with the amount of water they get in this area there is a lot of shifting and movement of the ground.  She said that it was possible to go this time of year, after the heavy rains, and see things poking out of the ground.  That did it - I agreed that the kids were better off at the church drawing pictures of Jesus than to be subject to nightmares the rest of their lives.  The dedication went well, and thankfully we didn't see anything disturbing.

We had a new family move into the branch on Friday - they are from Bahia Blanca (the coast near Buenos Aires).  They should be a great help to us because they have two Melchizedek Priesthood holders in their family.  We also found a less-active fellow named Saul Casanova who let us and has agreed to have the Elders over this week to teach him the Gospel so he can understand how it really is and get prepared for the last phase of his life.

11-4-2013 

We are starting to make the transition between us and the members on a few things now and this week we started with FHE.  For probably the first time in six years a family in the ward (rather than the missionaries) was in charge of the lesson, game, and treat for FHE.  It was one of the best we have ever had and everyone loved it.  We are getting about 25 people a week out to FHE and it has been a big boost for many of the recently reactivated members.  

We baptized Silvia this week.  Her sons, along with a sister, parent-napped her and hid her so she could not be baptized last Saturday, but once she resurfaced she said she still wanted to be baptized so we went ahead and had a service on Tuesday.  She is a sweet lady. 

The Elders and Hermanas in our branch are working hard and continue to turn out miracles just about every day.  We  are so grateful to have their help because we could not accomplish the amazing progress that is happening without them.Gustavo Painenao, who was baptized in July, has read the Book of Mormon twice now and will be receiving the Melchizedek Priesthood at the end of this month.  We are starting his missionary paperwork this month too.  He is excited.

We hosted a treasure hunt for our combined activity on Saturday and it was great.  We gave them scripture clues which led them from one location on the church property to another and eventually ended at a fruit tree with a treasure of candy.  We then had a lesson on real treasures and talked about families, Jesus Christ, temples, and scriptures.  There were five young-women investigators who came to the activity and we were excited that some young women are finally coming out to our Mutual activities.

We have had an average attendance at Sacrament Meeting over the past four weeks of 50!

Oct 2013 - Breanna & Zachary

Oct 2013 - Scott & Ann

10-28-2013 

On monday for Family Home Evening (FHE) we created a Jeopardy game.  It was really fun for the ward members and our attendance at FHE has doubled - we now average around 24 and we can't afford to feed everyone.  We think we will just heat up more water and pass more MATE around to get them full.

We found a really cool (new) fast-food restaurant that offers the traditional pizza, pasta, and empanadas but the awesome thing is that every Thursday they celebrate with international recipes and this last week we had Chinese food - how cool is that? Previous to that we have had Hungarian goulash and Arabian chicken.  Thursday is practically our favorite day now!

We have a new investigator - his name is Mario and he is the son of a member.  He recently came to town to live with his dad and start a new life.  We got to know him through teaching his dad and now he has asked if we can teach him too.

We taught the YM how to play American Football this week.  We couldn't find a real football anywhere so we ended up purchasing a rugby ball for $35 and making do.

Our branch had a baptism this week.  Eliesar and Silvia were scheduled to be baptized on Saturday evening.  We had zone conference all day and when the Elders finally got back to Trevelin to round everyone up for the baptism, Silvia was missing.  She and Eliesar are brother and sister and live in separate homes on the same parcel of ground.  Eliesar had no idea where she was and had not seen her all day.  Silvia's two sons have had concerns about her being baptized because they are of another religion. One of her sons was at her house the night before trying to talk her out of it and must have "arranged" for her to take a little vacation so that she couldn't be baptized.  We will see when she shows up again.  Eliesar decided to move forward with his baptism and not wait for his sister to surface.

10-21-2013 

On Monday we got together with the District and had a BBQ called Choripan. After that, we went to see the tulip fields that are in bloom.  

The father of one of our part-member families told us this week that he wanted to take lessons and be baptized.  That was good news because for the past two years he has not allowed his wife and children to attend church or even have scriptures in their home.

We pulled off a nice Mother's Day for the branch with flowers (real and homemade), cake, alfajores, and a nice thought on paper with a bow.  

We had 68 people at church yesterday.  Thirteen of them were from the district, so if you back those out we really had 54 of our own.  That is a miracle to have so many people.  Nine of those were investigators!  The Mother's Day songs that the Primary kids sing were fabulous and it was a great Sacrament meeting. 

10-14-2013 

We received our new missionaries - an Hermana Solorzano from Ecuador and an Elder Finch from West Jordan.  We now have a trio with the Elders.

We continue to visit less-active families in the branch to teach them and encourage them to become active again.  We are finding good success with the Plan of Salvation lesson when we just draw it out on paper and then walk them through the scriptures that apply to each section.

One of our less-active young men was sustained to receive the Aaronic Priesthood (Sharo) this week and we are happy with his progress.  His entire family has come back to church and are a great support to the branch.

10-7-2013 

We have a young lady (Daiana) who wants to be baptized, but can't until she gets married to her novio (boyfriend).  She is diligent about reading the assignments.  This is the girl whose baby we gave a name and a blessing to about two months ago.  We had a great lesson with her this week and are excited to see her progress.  Gustavo, her novio, says they will get married in December so we will start to help them get prepared.

We were able to watch conference in English over the weekend - it was a real treat.  We spent two hours trying to invite and round up people to go see conference and in the end took a woman who was going to take the bus anyway.  It is sad that something so great as conference is not appreciated and treasured for what it really is.  We will keep working with our members to help them grow their faith.

We find ourselves being more direct with people as we realize we have been teaching some of them for two to three months now and need more action on their part to really progress.  We also realize that we are under seven months now to finish and want to reach more families in the time we have left.   We are sifting our current pool and constantly reevaluating what they need and where our efforts are best spent.

Sep 2013 - Breanna & Zachary