Week 70: Time flies when your gone!

Hey to everyone! sorry that I don't have much time, but I went back to Villegas this week!!! WHOOO!! And I was with Elder Tolentino! MY Trainer! WHOO!! And with Elder Hyde! From Arizona! It was super great! I loved being able to see all of the progress that everyone has made in the ward! Everyone is growing so much!! Here are some quick pics! Love you all! 

-Elder Slack

The taxi man wanted to stop by the temple on our way back from the area yesterday to take a photo with the beautiful sky!

The family who's kids were baptized this week!! WHOO!

At lunch with the Tarcaya family!

Elder Tolentino next to a graffitied wall

Week 57: What a week!

Hello World! You're hearing from me tonight, we're back and it's Sunday! Here as an ETM we get back from the area after lunch on Sundays and now we're here in the offices of the mission. We have  a little bit of time to relax, go over the week with the other half of the team and when there's time we can do part of our emails! So I'm going to write this email to all of you right now, and then if anyone wants to send me an email you can send it and I'll look at it tomorrow! 

But it's been a great week here!! It was a great week with the Elders in Burzaco B, there were a few last minute changes on Monday night, we got there and there were a few phone calls made and one of the Elders was transfered super fast. On Tuesday morning they brought over Elder Smout! So we spent the week with Elder Smout and Elder Tolentino!! It was a great week, full of miracles and lot's of learning!!

Some good news real quick, the mission let's us use one of the cameras that they have, so I'm back taking some photos!! So all of you will be happy to see my smiling face, now with 14 Mega pixels!! Haha!

I spent the majority of the week with Elder Tolentino because Elder Smout didn't know anything about the area. We had a few exciting things that happened so I'll try and sum it all up for you guys!

All week we were working really hard to be able to find new people and with the people that we were already teaching to be able to help them be baptized if possible, we had a youth that is 14 years old that wanted to be baptized, he passed the interview and everything but the district leader said that he felt he should wait a week or 2 more. So he wasn't able to be baptized. But we found a ton of people, working together we found some people super ready and prepared for the Gospel of Jesus Christ in their lives. We left the area with 3 people and another family with baptismal dates so that they can help them by doing lots of follow- up. We hope that all of them can be baptized in the weeks to come. The 3 people, Yanina, her sister Zoe, and the youth that was preparing to be baptized came to church today!! 

On Thursday the assistants called us up and they asked us to come to the training meeting of the district leaders so we went over Adrogué (where the offices of the mission are) and we helped them out. We did a proselyting activity, they told us that the best way to learn is to do, so we went out to work and find new people for 2 hours!!  They had us be the "leaders" of 4 different groups, we went out to work and find lot's of people to teach and to help! It was great!! I went with and elder, his name is Elder Soelberg, from Utah as well. After doing lot's of contacts and finding lot's of great people decided that we needed not only to talk with lot's of people, but we wanted to teach someone! We found one man in the train station that was selling shoes, he was just chilling there in front of all the people, and none of the missionaries had ever talked to him. We talked to him for a bit, we explained the Restoration and we asked him to say the prayer to end. As he prayed he started praying for his family for the problems that he has had with his wife and his son. He ended the prayer and started to tear up a little bit, he told us about how he's been having problems for awhile and that he's been searching for help. As we talked with him that day I felt that we were able to bring him a little bit of the help he was looking for! 

On Friday we went back to work with the elders in Burzaco, and on Saturday we were able to find a few new people to teach and the hermanas in the ward had a baptism, we invited a ton of investigators to the baptism and it was great. Only 2 of them could come, but I felt that they were able to start to feel the spirit a little bit better and then they came to church this morning too! 

One exciting but terrible thing happened yesterday on Saturday, I was pedaling along on the bike with my companion, I decided that I want to go a little bit faster (bad decision number 1) so I stood up on the pedals (bad decision 2) and pedaled with all my might to get to the investigators faster (I thought, and bad decision 3) as I accelerated the chain popped out on the bike, that's alright I thought, I'll just slow down and fix it. NOPE it seems like the bike had other ideas, the handlebars bent down from the pressure I was putting on them I fell straight down hit my hangdowners on the bar in the middle of the bike and I dove for the front of my bike head first I hit the grass and did a few somersaults. WHOO! It was super fun. I was not injured seriously, but I did hit one part.... in particular pretty hard! Needless to say I was in pain for quite some time, we retreated to the church close there for 20 minutes so I could recover. 

Anyway's that was my week! It was incredible! I'll read all of your emails tomorrow and I'll respond! Here's some photos! I love you all! It's great here! This week we're off to Spegazini in the zone of Monte Grande!! Whoo!! Until next week!! Chau!

-Elder Slack

Week 16: Rumor has it

Hey! There isn't much time, so I'll tell you the most exciting things really really fast

Saturday we attended the baptism of the daughter of a recent convert that we have been teaching, it was a little crazy because they had 3 ward baptisms that day as well, it was way awesome though.

I had an interview with my president this past Thursday, and as far as I've heard I might possibly be training a new missionary starting next week because this is the last week of the transfer and my 12th week here in Argentina!

Still haven't found my camera yet, so we'll see what's up with that, I hope that I can find it at some point. 

Elder Tolentino was sick for one of the days this past week, so we couldn't leave. But now we are all good! 

Other than that life is great as a missionary!! I love it every single day! I hope you all have a great week! 

De la Misión Argentina Buenos Aires Sur, Chau!! 

-Elder Slack

Week 13: ¡Feliz Navidad!

¡¡Hola a todos!!

This week was incredibly awesome, and different, and about everything that you could imagine! It's incredible! Argentina is the best!! We started out on Tuesday, we had a kind of big Christmas activity, our president came and stopped by our zone and gave all of us some alfajores and some American candy, it was delicious, and then we kind of chilled for a few hours, played some ping pong, cooked a full (a ton) of rice, made some of it into fried rice, and then we ate a ton, and it was great. I heard that the last years Christmas activity was a lot bigger and better, but it was good. I was happy eating a ton of fried rice.

As well we had a service activity the next day, we helped a member in our ward, to paint her door, and also to cut back some bushes and stuff that were attacking her car as she drove by. So we fought back the bushes and disentangled some of them from her fence, painted her door, got sun burned, saved the day and the princess. No big deal. It was fun, and she gave us almuerzo (Lunch) afterwards. 

The biggest part of the week, was Christmas! ¡Feliz Navidad! To all of you! It was probably one of the most different Christmas's that I'll ever have. The best part, I got to skype my family!!! Yah! They are all so awesome! If you haven't talked with them in a while, well they're all changing. It was slightly awkward as well though, because I was trying to talk English again. I can talk like one sentence at a time right now, and I can think and write just fine in English, but when I try and talk, I'm so used to talking to everyone in Español that it was a bit weird. And I tried to explain a few of the things that are going on here, it's kind of crazy. I can write this letter every week, as well I write to them separately. But they can't really understand what I'm feeling and all the things that I'm seeing. I just want to bring all of them here to see it all with me!

Other than that it was awesome to see my family. Here the Christmas traditions are a little bit different. The majority of the Christmas celebration is done at midnight. Everyone stays up until 12 the 24th and eat a ton of food and open all their presents at 12 and also they launch off a ton of fireworks. It's like world war III, it's pretty crazy. We went out up on the micro deck thing that these other elders have attached to their pension and we could see and here just fireworks everywhere. And they have massive firecrackers as well that just explode and are gigantic like bombs it's pretty crazy. All of the mission had permission to be out of the pension until 6 and then we had permission to be in the house of a member if they had a car to bring us home until 10:30, then we had to return to our or another elders in our districts pension. Where we could stay up, because it's Christmas and we don't work on the 24th or 25th. So we ate dinner with a family in our ward, all of the 6 elders in our district, together. And they fed us a ton. We ate asado, which is barbeque here but 10000 times better. And we were stuffed full. Literally, and they fed us some of the best ice cream that I have eaten here and all of the food was just amazing! 

The actual Christmas day was way different, I woke up and no one else was awake, so I studied in preach my gospel for 3ish hours, then everyone else was awake, and then Elder Tolentino and I went and visited some of the families in our ward and then skyped. Then we played some Magic ( Yes, Ethan, the card game) with our ward mission leader, in which I died a miserable death and lost -52 to 11. Then we went to the church where we played some fútbol (soccer) at which I am no where near as good as any of the young men who came to play with us.

But the week was great, we've got a great progressing investigator right now. Her name is Camila and we're teaching her and she is really interested, but now she just needs to have the faith to come to church with us, and she can receive so many blessings if she does! It's all good. I hope your New years goes well. As well I've learned a little bit of Guaraní here. It's the language of paraguay, and spanish, but.

Avani pa pejasafa año peajú? Which means with who are you going to pass your new years? (spelling is probably wrong, that's the Spanish sounding out though)

Tengan una buena semana!

Chau!

Week 10: Faith, Determination, and Passion

Hello to everyone!

I'm really loving it here in Argentina, I'm just about finished with my first transfer! Crazy! We'll find out Saturday who's getting transferred and stuff, but odds are I won't change because I'm in training, So Elder Tolentino and I should be together for at least one more transfer! 

Elder Tolentino and I have been working really hard, it's been a little different this past week, we had our Capilla abierta on Saturday and Elder Tolentino I'm dressed in all white, because we talked about Baptism, and in the church we baptize in white. And I hope you can see me, in the middle, smiling as usual! 

The Capilla abierta- I am in the middle, in white with the "smile!"

But anyways, it was a very different activity. We had all of the missionaries in our zone come and we did like a white out? I don't know how to translate it into English, but  we had the missionaries go out all over our ward, and search for different less active members. Then later in the day we had kind of a tour of the church building, where we talked about different things and beliefs that we have in the church. It started out a good day. We put a ton of work into making the maps and stuff for the other missionaries to go out and work in our area, and it was a little discouraging the results, because we didn't get as many references and not as many of the less actives came as we wanted to. But it was great. We had some fun and I learned a lot.

Also, there are a few Elders and Hermanas going home next week, crazy! I've been thinking a lot about how fast the time goes. Honestly it flies by. And I've been talking to a few of the missionaries who have been out for a while now and asked them if they have any advice/ any things that they regret that they wish they had done that I should do. And several of them said that I should work all of the time. I've been told several times that if you are working the time flies by, and if the time feels like it is going slow, then you must not be working hard enough and need to rethink how you are working. So I've been trying to think about that more often, trying to work all of the time. Not that I want the time to go fast, because I love it here! But because I want to work as hard as I can, and I learn so much more when I'm working. 

Yesterday, we had an amazing Zone Meeting. One of our Zone leaders, Elder Tolentino and I live right next to the Zone leaders (if you don't remember). They are both really amazing missionaries. Since I am in training, Elder Tolentino is my papi, and I am his hijo, and then I kind of think of the Zone Leaders like my tios (uncles). They've taught me so much as well as Elder Tolentino, about working hard and how I can progress everyday, and how I shouldn't be afraid of anything on the mission. But anyways, one of them was talking, and he said there are 3 things that we should have in the mission. Faith, Determination, and Passion. And he talked to us about passion, how we need to not only share the Gospel and share our testimonies, but we need to, as well, share how much it means to us, not just say words, but as you say them. If what you are saying is really true, people can really tell that it means something and the spirit will be even stronger. 

We had one of my favorite lessons this week, with a family. The daughters are both baptized, but both are inactive now. So we've been working a little bit with them, and also their mother. But we we're talking the other day, and we invited the daughters to go back to church. They both starting saying "I don't want to go to your church, I actually don't want to go to any church" And we tried to explain a few things, but the girls kept saying that and then their mom started getting a little frustrated with us and started questioning "why are you even here? They've already heard all the other Elders before, and they just said they don't want to go. I don't want to go to your church" And the mother was rambling a little bit, I didn't understand quite all of it, but She said she didn't want to go to our church about 5 times. So we were sitting there and I was thinking, what can we do? I was a little panicked at this point, because I know how much they will be blessed if they do return to the church. Elder Tolentino decided to promise them if they go to the church this Sunday they will receive an answer that this is the true church, and then the mother started saying we don't want to go. Then a question popped into my head. And I asked the mother "You've said about 5 times that you don't want to go to our church, you said that about 15 minutes ago, so what I'm wondering is... What do you want??" and then Elder Tolentino had to clarify a little bit of my broken Spanish, and he said "My companion wants to know, what do you want in your life?" And she sat there for a second, and was very quiet. And then I started to talk about how we, as missionaries, leave our families for 2 years. And it's just like us leaving our Heavenly Father. And the goal for all of us is to return and live with him once again. And we explained a little bit about the Plan of Salvation. And the Spirit was so strong and it was amazing. And then at the end of the lesson, we said a prayer, and we are getting up to leave and the Mother asks "So when can you come back?" YES! We were so happy after that lesson, the Spirit really does work wonders.

My birthday happened this week, yes I am now 19. And yes, I didn't do anything to special. We spent all day Monday at a Capilla Abierta for another area, in Ponte Vedra. They gave me a sweet mug that says Argentina and Buenos Aires on it though. And when we returned to the pension that night, I decided to reward myself and eat 19 birthday crackers! And Elder Tolentino gave me a mini muffin. So yeah, that was my birthday.

This week has been really great, we got to go to the temple too! It was amazing, I've learned so much. Until Monday!

-Elder Slack

Smoothies are the best!!

Cleaning the pension

Birthday fun!

Week 9: (no title)

Hey! I'm here again! I hope you all have had another amazing week even though I'm not in your lives!

Things have been pretty interesting here in Argentina, the election is over, we're still missionaries, you know, nothing really big. This past week has been all over the map. From rainy days to sick days. But all another day in the life of a missionary!

This past week we had another Capilla Abiertta (Open Church) , church tour, in our Zone. All of the missionaries in our zone went over to another area and we went out and advertised all over the area for people to come and see the church and see what we believe and what we do in the church, it was really good. That took all day Saturday, and then this week we've been planning for our Capilla Abierta here in Catán 3! Elder Tolentino and I have been planning a lot and trying to figure out where all of the members (active and inactive) live so that we can send out the missionaries to go find them and invite them all back to the church, and also the same with all of the old investigators. We're hoping for a good turn out Saturday, but we'll see. 

I got sick this past week on Wednesday, we couldn't leave the pension because I was kind of half dying. So I layed on my bed all day while Elder Tolentino worked on the list of names for our Capilla Abierta. Then that night we had to travel to another area, Adrogué because I had to go do a bunch of Visa papers the next day. So we traveled 2ish hours by bus and I was praying that I wouldn't throw up the whole time, and yay! I didn't. We slept in the Adrogué elders pension. Slept, then the next day woke up, and that is when I threw up. Then we traveled around all day with a bunch of other new missionaries as we went to different places to fill out visa forms and stuff. Whoo! What a party right! Eventually we returned back to our pension where I was able to sleep and rest and I was fine by the next day!

Today we had a Zone activity, our Zone is all Elders, because the majority of the areas here in the Zone aren't um.... suitable, one might say, for Hermanas. So we played some futbol, and ate a ton of Churi Pan, (Sp?) Which is this amazing asado sausage on bread with some ketchup or chimichuri sauce, good stuff. 

Other than that, the week has been pretty normal. We've been out searching a ton so that we can find new investigators. But we're having a little bit of trouble right now. Almost all of our appointments fell through this week, and we taught probably 4 lessons, granted we couldn't do anything for 3 of those days because I was sick and the capilla abierta. But I've been getting really good at contacting people though. The language is coming extremely fast, the gift of tongue's is amazingly real. I feel like if I didn't have it for one day I would be completely lost all day with what's going on. But we've been searching so much this past week. And we had this one day, where all of our appointments fell through. We had a member with us and everything and they all fell through. So we decided to go out finding. So we were knocking some doors and doing some street contacts, but for about 2 hours we had found no one, everyone was either to busy or didn't want to talk to us, or not home. As we were walking to go find in a different area, Elder Tolentino and I started talking. He said he had asked the President, because we've been searching for investigators for 2 weeks, why he thinks we haven't been able to find anyone. He said the president said that we need to have more faith. At that moment I realized what all of my thoughts were. Every time we would talk with someone or every time we would knock a door, I didn't believe that we were doing any good. I didn't believe that we would get anywhere by talking to the person. At this moment I realized what was happening. I was getting what I expected. All along I had been thinking we would get nothing, and we got nothing, then I would ask in my mind "why can't we find anyone?" I realized how important it is to have faith, how important it is to believe that you are going to find someone, how important it is to believe that the person you talk to is going to let you in, or make an appointment. We have to believe that the best is going to happen or God cannot reward our Faith, because we have none.

Anyway's, just a thought of what I learned this week. Also I remembered that my companion shaved all of his hair off. He got a haircut last week, and paid 50 pesos for it in a barber shop. I don't think the people in the barber shops know any more about cutting hair than I do. Because it was horrible. So he tried to fix it with the Zone leaders cutters, but messed it up even more, so they just cut it all off. I've heard it's about to get a lot hotter, so I guess that'll help haha!

That's all! Yours, always smiling

-Elder Slack

Elder Tolentino's haircut

How I take pictures of me when I'm sick

 

Week 6: When your plane leaks, just tape it!

Hey Hey! I´m alive!!

Sorry this computer is a little bit hard to use, because some of the keys on the keyboard are moved around. But I will try my best.

Anyways, I had a long flight last week, it was crazy, we went to the airport in the morning by trax and we hopped on, it was a short 3ish hour flight to Atlanta, and then we had essentially no layover time, which was nice because we didn't have to wait. We got off at the airport and hurryed over to our next flight and got on. The next flight was pretty interesting. We all boarded, then when one of the flight attendants went to shut one of the overhead packaging things, it started spitting water out of the handle, and this was right before we were about to take off. And so she shut it, and it's spitting water everywhere, and people were getting wet, so she reopens it and it stops. Then to fix it? What do you do? Well just tape it of course! It´s a several million dollar plane and we´ll just tape the plane why not. So the flight attendant put some paper towels and tape all over it and it held the water for the rest of the flight, very interesting solution I thought, but it worked I guess.

Over that 9 hour flight, I slept for probably 2.5 hours or so. I was pretty tired all day the next day. But we got off and I met my mission president, his name is President Thurgood, and he´s from Idaho. And we met the rest of the new missionaries going to our mission who all already spoke spanish and had gone to the Argentina MTC, because they were all from around south America. We ate some interesting pizza and some amazing empanadas and interviewed with the mission president, each one individually.

Then we met our trainers!! My companion is named Elder Tolentino. He´s from Peru and he´s about 4´ 11´´ I would guess, he´s awesome though, really great missionary. And he only knows a little bit of English, so I´ve been learning spanish amazingly fast. Legit, the gift of tongues is so real. I can understand so much spanish, it´s easier to understand than to speak. But I can understand the majority, I´d say probably 75% of what people are saying, or if I don't know the words I can fill in the blanks usually. And I can communicate with a lot of the people pretty well, no where near perfect, but well enough. I usually only talk if I have something directed at me, or if it´s my turn to talk in a lesson. But all is well!

Turns out, my mission is about half as big as I thought, apparently back in July they split the mission, so now there is a Buenos Aires East mission that was 6 of the stakes of our mission, and we got 2 stakes from the West mission, so we don't have the ocean in our mission, which is alright I guess. But bonus, We have the Buenos Aires temple in our mission!! So our mission president said that we'll get to go there probably 4 or 5 times during our mission, which I´m super excited for! Temple in spanish!

Here in Argentina is completely different than I thought it would be. My mission is Buenos Aires South, but majority isn't in the city, they've got a lot of cars and buses and public transport and stuff, but also, in the area that I´m in they've got a ton of dirt roads. Only the main streets are dirt. Also, there are a ton of "wild dogs" that run around. They aren't like rabid or whatever, they are just a bunch of strays. They have no owner and kind of go and do what they please, so many of them. They'll travel in packs of 5 or 6 sometimes and kind of just run around looking for food or other stuff, they usually don't bother you even if you come up and try and pet it, they'll just run a way. But the other day, I saw this sweet dog, It wasn't a stray dog, it was in someone's house, but it looked like a lion almost, it had like this huge mane, and was all tan, and it´s face looked slightly feline, but it was a dog it was the strangest thing!

Also, the music here is interesting, sometimes I'll hear american music, and I'll be like, "Hey I know that!" but majority of the time the Argentines listen to their music, and it's kind of like polka music with some interesting bongos and lots of Spanish. very interesting indeed.

Also, I´ve found it a slight benefit to being a white boy around here, there are a few people who want to yell at me as they drive by. Either by yelling at me "White boy" or some other things, it´s kind of cool. I almost feel like I'm a celebrity here in Argentina! And I´ve had one person tell me, that after they met me. "Wow, I´m going to be popular now, I know a person from America" needless to say, that made feel pretty cool. 

My spanish is progressing amazingly fast, but I'm struggling hardcore with rolling my R's, I can buzz my tongue and make noises, but I can't for the life of me use it in words. Whenever we're walking I keep trying repeatedly to say the word "perro" which is dog. And my tongue just doesn't want to say it. It's quite disappointing. But I continue to work on it. On the other side of things, they want all of the Latin missionaries that speak spanish to learn English, and my companion is struggling with the words juice, and jewish. He can´t say his J´s.

Something I found out the other day, apparently in spanish, a rooster no longer say´s cock-a-doodle-doo. Apparently it´s kí-ki-di-ki. Just a little fun fact of the day.

But other than that the work is going great, I really love it here, the people are very nice, but the conversations are a little different. They talk a lot about where they are from, which country, because there are a lot of people from Paraguay here. And they talk about the different accents of spanish, here it´s castellano. Where the ll makes a zsh sound. kind of. It´s interesting. But all is well, we are fed lunch almost everyday, which is way nice. And we walk a ton. But I love it!

The driving here, just crazy, we ride in buses sometimes and when we ride around I get a bit afraid, because people essentially just do what they want. In our bus the other day, this light had been red for 5 seconds and he just felt like going, so he did.

It´s fun, all is well! But, I´ll see you all next week, hopefully those who want this are getting it, Paz Fuera!  (peace out) 

Elder Slack

Just tape the plane

Again, me with my trainer, Elder Tolentino and President and Sister Thurgood

Living in Argentina

(Headed to Argentina)

(This post is written by Elder Slacks mom, Jennifer). Elder Slack flew out on Monday and I (his mom, Jennifer) was able to talk with him on the phone while he was at the airport. He is doing great and is so happy! He said to tell everyone: "Just be happy. Life is so good. Don't be sad that I am gone. I am so happy! I can hardly wait to share the gospel with the people in Argentina".

We got an email from his mission which included a couple of pictures of him (below). His p-day will now be Monday. We look forward to hearing more from him on Monday.

Elder Slack with President and Sister Thurgood

Elder Slack with his trainer Elder Tolentino, Sister Thurgood, and President Thurgood