Week 65: I need thee every hourly bathroom breaks

Well well well! What a week it has been! I love you all! I hope you all had a great week, and if you don't it's your own dang fault!

This week was a different kind of week. We went to the area of Longchamps, that was in my last zone before getting this assignment. It was fun actually. We were with Elder Tobler from Las Vegas Nevada and Elder Cornejo from Chile and for part of the week Elder Méndez from Argentina! They are really great Elders. 

Elder Tobler was my first district leader, so it was great to work with him! He's really funny, he's going to be finishing his mission in 3 weeks he was pretty excited for that, as you can imagine, he had a whole list of the different foods that he wants to eat when he gets back he read it to me and it made me just a little trunky, it made me think about all of the foods that I miss. But it's all good!

Elder Cornejo is from Santiago Chile, he knew Elder Reyes before the mission, one of the Elders I was with in Ciudad Evita a few weeks ago. He's pretty new in the mission, he's only got 3 months here he just finished his training, but he's really excited and he's really smart. He loves working and serving the people. He's ¿24? years old. He was studying astronomy before the mission, specifically about black holes and stuff like that, so that's pretty cool!

Elder Mendez, he´s from Argentina Buenos Aires North, he was just waiting for his Visa to get here so he could go serve the rest of his mission in Mexico. He's pretty funny, really Argentine that's for sure. But just this week on Friday he went and hopped on the plane to go to the Mexico Puebla North mission! So he was super excited for that. It was fun to be in a trio for a few days this week.

Elder Escandon is still my companion. (Just in case you guys forgot) WHOO ARIZONA!!

Well, this week has been pretty interesting, we had a few new challenges that we had to overpass (if that's a word). We ordered some pizza from this kind of iffy place on Tuesday night, so we all had some diarrhea for a few days! Whoo! That was pretty bad. Elder Tobler got the sickest of all of us, he was throwing up and everything, so he had to stay home on Wednesday and Thursday. My tummy problems started on Thursday pretty bad in the morning, so I didn't go out to work on Thursday. I woke up with needing to go to the bathroom and a low grade fever. After resting it up all day with Elder Tobler we were back in the game on Friday. Our stomachs were still kind of iffy on Friday and Saturday, but we went, as some would put it, accident free! Now my stomach has been back to normal almost all day today, I decided it would be better if I eat more fruits and vegetables than pizza to prevent any kind of future problems. But all in all it was a good learning experience and I hope that we'll be ready to go to work this week on full blast!

Tomorrow we are going to have our interviews with Presidente Calquín! Pretty excited! I hope it goes well!

One of the highlights of the week was being able to teach the Sanchez Family, they're a super great family, we taught them the law of chastity and we talked about the importance of being married. They were all agreed and said that it was really great! One of the couples said that they want to get married! So that was pretty awesome! 

Anyway's that's all for now! I love you all and I hope that you guys are all great! Have much love to you all!

-Elder Slack

Week 62: Changes

Hey everyone! MERRY CHRISTMAS!!! WHOO! Yesterday was Christmas!
 I hope it went really well for all of you! I loved it here, it was super awesome! We spent the time over here in the pench of the missionaries of the offices, so we were a ton of missionaries all in the same pench, it was crazy! We made an asado with a ton of meat, there was sooooo much we didn't even eat it all, It just fills you up super fast so I was stuffed. Then at midnight when it turned from being the 24th to the 25th everyone everywhere in Argentina started lighting off tons of fireworks, so we went up on the roof and we enjoyed watching all of them for about half an hour. Then afterwards we enjoyed some ice cream and went to bed. It was pretty awesome. 

On Sunday morning we went to church and then we got to talk with our families!! THE BEST! The last times it was a little bit weird, but this time I just enjoyed it, it was so great talking to them! And I got to know my future brother in law (in 4 days!) then we ate estrogonof, a brazilian food super delicious! And we talked for a little bit, then we went back to the pench where we slept for  a little because we were wiped out and then we woke up, planned super fast, ate a quick dinner, and slept again.

This week was a week of lot's of learning, we were with Elder Minshall and Elder Morris, both from the United States, Elder Minshall is from South Jordan Utah, and Elder Morris is from California! Both of them are great missionaries, we were able to work with them and one of the kids that we were teaching this week was baptized this weekend, his name is Walter, he's really awesome, he's a kid that is 14 years old, I only taught him once, but it was awesome to be able to teach him!

We had a very special meeting this week on Saturday. President has been making a lot of changes in the mission, he sent us something last week that said that we can't do the same things that we did 15 or 20 years ago and think that it's good enough, we need to make changes we need to do new things. So he's been making lot's of changes here in the mission. A few months ago he changed some of the rules of the mission like I told you guys. This week he completely changed the structure of the mission. Before in the mission there were 6 zones, one for every stake, and it was a little bit harder to be able to communicate and know how the missionaries were doing with everything. But now, it's all changed, now there are double the amount of zones, we now have 12 zones in the mission, they're all smaller and have less missionaries, there are now less missionaries in the districts as well, before there were districts of 8,10, or 12 missionaries, now they have generally 6 or 8, and there is only 1 that has 10. So now there are 24 Zone Leaders! WHOO! Haha! It's going to be great! With all of the changes president is hoping that there can be more communication between the missionaries, that we can talk one with another and that he can know better how the missionaries are doing individually. It was harder before because the leaders had lots of missionaries to care for and couldn't focus a whole lot on there specific needs, but now they should all be able to work one with another and help out everywhere in the mission to grow.

I'm super excited for the changes that we're seeing, this month is just ending and the assistants informed us that we had an all time record of baptisms this month since the mission split about a year and a half ago, so it looks like things are changing for good!!

It was a great week, I loved working with Elder Minshall and Elder Morris, we learned a lot while working with them. I think I forgot to tell you guys last week, I've got my new companion already, he started working with us this last week even though transfers are today, his name is Elder Escandon! He's from Arizona!!! He's really fun to work with and we've been talking a lot about the changes we are going to make to have a bigger impact with the work that we do, to help more people and change more lives. I love you guys! I hope you enjoy this week and have a happy new years!! Until next week!! Chau!

-Elder Slack