Mini Week

Dear Mom and Dad,

This week was great! On Tuesday Hermanas Duarte and Johnson dropped me off in the mission office in Ramos Mejía where I met my new companion, Hermana Noelia Centurión. She is from the stake of Moreno and lives about 30 minutes from Hurlingham. She was baptized with her father and younger brother about 6 years ago. Her mother was the first to get baptized, but became inactive while Hna. Centurión was little and later remarried. Then one day the missionaries stopped to speak to her mother and step father and were invited back. Her family listened to the lessons and a few months later got baptized. Since then they have been completely active. She has one older brother who still isn´t interested in baptism, but she knows he´ll come around some day. Hermana Centurión says that if she likes being a mini missionary, she´ll probably send in her papers do to a full time mission. . .so I´m trying to make sure she likes it. :)

So far I love training. We are piloting a new program from Salt Lake that involves an extra hour of companionship study during the first 12 weeks of the mission to reinforce the basic principles of the Preach my Gospel Manual. I hope it helps my hijita get the hang of things, but I think it will do wonders for me. It´s already helping me remember and apply better techniques I learned in the MTC that I haven´t thought about lately. And teaching Hna. Centurión how to be a missionary is teaching me a lot too! Apparently in a week or two the mission will receive a shipment of mini DVD players so that we can watch clips from the Preach my Gospel training videos during our extra hour of study. Fancy!

Hna. Centurión did great this week and is learning fast, I think. She participates in teaching lessons to the investigators and is practicing her street contacting skills. We are becoming good friends too. We spend all day laughing at each other´s stories and the things that happen to us.

On Saturday our focus was trying to get people to come to sacrament meeting on Sunday. I came up with a plan that involved preparing a lesson on the sacrament to share with all the investigators and less active members and delivering cookies and notes to others. We worked really hard carrying out our plans and planned with our investigators Lucila and Enzo to stop by their house with banana bread on Sunday morning to pick them up for church.

Sunday morning we managed to make decent banana bread without a bread pan, attend a last minute 7:30am meeting in the mission office (involving an extra 45 minutes of travel time), attend half of Relief Club meeting and STILL arrive almost on time to pick up Lucila and Enzo for sacrament meeting. Then Lucila sent us a text right as we were arriving that she couldn´t come after all and Enzo didn´t wake up, even though we clapped several times and entered the gate without permission to knock on BOTH the doors of the house. To add an extra sting, none of the less active members and only one of the other investigators who we had hoped would come arrived. Such is the mission. We will make better plans and have 4 investigators in sacrament meeting this week si or sí , even if we have to _________ (insert extreme verb here involving great personal suffering) to do it.

The bright side is that Celeste was confirmed with the Holy Ghost without any problems. Well, ok, she came down with nausea during the meeting, had to go outside to throw up and was taken home early by Hna. y Hno. Freites, but all that happened AFTER her confirmation, so todo bien. (Don´t worry, she recovered quickly afterwards and was just fine by the time we stopped by that afternoon)

This week I am determined to study harder, work harder, talk to more people and do everything smarter so we can find new investigators, have more people in sacrament meeting, and prepare people for baptism. Fortunately, with Hna. Centurión, I´ll be laughing while I do it. And at the end of the week, my hablar will hopefully be slightly less gringo.

Sounds like Danny enjoyed his birthday party. See my message to him below. No packages have arrived yet, but maybe tomorrow. Tell the kids not to burn the house down while you two are in Hawaii. In the unlikely and unwelcome event of an untimely plane crash, I would happily (or should I say dutifully) accept the charge of my three youngest siblings as minions, provided President Benton allows them to stay on as temporary servants in the mission home until January. You´ve already planned to write that part into the will, right? Enjoy Hawaii! I want to see pictures of you rappelling inside volcanoes above boiling lava and covered in barnacles after your snorkeling marathon. Show those more boring, er, I mean relaxed members of the family how the Moscow Clarks go on vacation!

Love,
Ellis

Dear Dan,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY! You are now TEN! 10! You will never again have only one digit in your age. Welcome to the double digits club! I heard your party was incredible. Hope your actual birthday is just as great. If you were Argentine, you would probably celebrate with an asado and eat lots of large chunks of meat. Then you would eat an enormous piece of very sugary cake covered in inch thick white frosting with dulce de leche in the middle. Oh, and Mom and Dad would rent you one of those inflatable castle things to jump on with your friends and they would play cumbia music (it sounds like this: ch chch ch chch ch chch) so loud the whole neighborhood would hear. Remind me how American boys celebrate their birthdays. What will you do?
Thanks for being a fantastic little brother. Write me more funny letters. My companions like them too.
Love,
Ellis