This morning Hna. Scott and I went to el zoologico de Luján-- the zoo! Elder Oliverson and Elder Fish (wearing his trout-shaped tie), who work in the other half of Luján (rama 1, my area is rama 2), came too. The zoo in Luján is like no zoo you could ever find in the U.S.. The enclosures were pretty small, with no attempt to make them look like the natural habitat. And, you could touch and feed the animals! So, today I held a lion cub, petted a tiger cub, petted a full grown lion and a full grown tiger (though not at the same time), fed two elephants an apple and a carrot, and fed a seal fish chunks by hand. Don´t worry, I took lots of pictures. :) The lion and tiger keepers let people in to the enclosures a few at a time to pet and hold the tigers and lions and take pictures. I´m pretty sure the only reason that no one gets eaten is that the big cats are really heavily drugged. They weren´t very lively-- mostly they just laid there, or rolled over. It was actually pretty sad. I´ve got some awesome photos of me with the animals, but I felt guilty the whole time-- they spend their entire lives caged up and on drugs. The seals definitely weren´t drugged though. There were three of them in an enclosure that basically amounted to a round swimming pool with a fence around it. The three seals swam laps around and around the pool-- until Elder Fish and I bought some of his namesake to feed them. Then they flopped out of the water and waddled to the fence. The seals stretched their necks up and we dropped the food over the fence into their large, fishy mouths. That was fun. My favorite thing was feeding the elephants though. They looked much happier than the poor seals and lions. I stood between two of them and stretched out my arms to feed two of them at once. They grabbed the apple and carrot I was holding with their trunks! Overall, going to the zoo was a fun experience, but I much prefer zoos in the U.S.. Animals are a lot more fun to watch when they have a nice habitat to live in and you can get a better idea of how they behave in the wild. The zoo in Luján was interesting, but it made me feel sort of guilty and sad, like I was an accomplice in animal mistreatment.
Well, enough about the zoo. Here are the other highlights of the week.
* On Wednesday we made our weekly trip to Open Door. As usual, we only had a few hours to spend there. We decided to start by looking for the house of a man named Diego. Hermana Lopez got his name as a reference from someone, wrote it down, and stuck it to the fridge. We never had the chance to go look for him together, so I forgot about it until this week. The notes Hna. Lopez took about him said he wanted to get baptized! Excellent, right? We really wanted to find this guy. Only we went to the address (Just the intersection of a street and the highway. As usual the address came without a house number) and there weren´t any houses there! We looked and looked but couldn´t find him. Finally we admitted defeat and went to visit a recent convert and his non member family instead, but it was so late that we didn´t have time for anything else. Four hours of work with very little to show for it. We were so frustrated!
* On Thursday we went to zone conference in Paso del Rey, about an hour away. We taught the workshop we prepared to 3 other zones of missionaries! It went really well and everyone complemented us afterwards, including President Benton. There were also workshops by Pres. Benton and his assistants. Then they fed us lunch-- fried chicken, potatoes and yams, rice and yams, and bread-- yum! There was a really good cake with apple pie filling and cream on top for dessert too. After lunch Pres. Benton asked us if we could perform a musical number-- no advance notice! Fortunately, we had spent all week singing Cantan Santos Angeles (Hark the Herald Angels) in two parts for our investigators. So we sang that. It wasn´t perfect, but it went pretty well and everyone liked it. After all the meetings were over, Pres. Benton told Hna. Scott and I that he knows that we are really hard on ourselves, but that we shouldn´t be because we are doing a good job in our area. That was really good to hear-- we are hard on ourselves-- especially me. I felt a lot better after he told us that.
* On Saturday we contacted a woman named Gisella who is super prepared for the gospel! I was busy stressing out because I felt like we weren´t getting enough done or using our time well enough and then there she was, sweeping her driveway! We started talking to her and Hna. Scott asked how she felt about God. She said "With God I feel complete." Wow. No one we talk to ever answers a question like that so simply and profoundly. When I heard that I felt really excited and felt like I should be really bold-- I told her that our message is that the Church is the restored church of Christ, the only church with the full and complete truth. I´m rarely that direct. We told her that if she prayed God would tell her that the church is true. Hna. Scott asked some more really good questions too and Gisella just kept listening and talking to us like she was sort of in awe, but believed us. She let us come into her house to say a prayer with her and a couple times it looked like she had tears in her eyes. She explained that she has been to several churches but that she doesn´t agree with what they teach, so she is still looking for a church-- sound familiar? She said she would read the pamphlets we left (I decided she was ready for two at once-- The Restoration and The Plan of Salvation.) and pray about them. YES! We have an appointment with her this Saturday. It´s too early to tell for sure, but I think she is going to want to get baptized! I´m so excited!
* I´m out of time, but here´s a quick update on our investigators:
* Mario and Celeste and family: They came to church this Sunday, phew! They continue to be the perfect investigator family. Celeste and Mario loved church yesterday. Celeste told us she listens carefully to everything so she can come home and tell her daughters so they can learn too (they can´t come to church yet because someone always has to be watching the house until they install bars on the doors and windows this week-- they don´t want to get robbed). She is teaching her kids how to pray too-- this week we got to hear Belén and Jasmín say their first LDS-style prayers ever! She´s so great! The only thing that worries us is that she and Mario still haven´t gone to start the paper work to get married-- hopefully we can get them to go this week!
* Graciela, the mother of our mission leader, didn´t come to church again this week. She went on vacation without telling us and won´t be back until the end of the week. This means we have to postpone her baptismal date. We´re kind of worried about her, but there isn´t anything we can do until she comes back.
* Alisander came to church again and we taught him last night in the home of the Humerez family. They´ve really been helping us with him. He gets flustered when we ask him questions to see if he understands what we are teaching, but he seems interested and sincere. We want to commit him to baptism, but Hermana Humerez says his mother is really violent and very evangelical. This is a problem because Alisander is only 16, so we need her permission to baptize him. Hna. H. warned us not to mention Alisander´s name if we try to go talk to his mom. In fact, she told us we shouldn´t even try to go at all-- she thinks his mom might hit us if she doesn´t like what we share with her. Of course we are going to try anyway-- what else can we do? Our plan is just to pass by and contact her and see if we can become friends. If we can be friendly with her, maybe we can talk later about letting Alisander get baptized-- when he agrees to a date, of course.
One more thing-- yesterday was my cumplemés-- my "birthday" in the mission. I´ve been here two months and on the mission for four-- can you believe it?
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