Tranqueras Uruguay - April 9th 2012

Hi All,

I''m doing well. I actually cannot believe how well things are going. Looks like your hopes and dreams have been fulfilled ;D Things with our investigators are.......................................I'll tell you about that in a sec.

I just finished watching priesthood session and earlier today we set up the baptismal font in the capilla (Chapel). Yes. That does mean we are having a baptism. It's this saturday. More on that to follow.

My week, very quickly. Yesterday, 5 investigators in church and a family that has been inactive my entire time here came. Looks like they squared their grudges away. I hope so. Saturday we went to that inactive families house and met up with representatives with the stake and our branch. Ricardo also came with us. That said, at 8:00 am we started building another room onto their house for them. By 3:00 pm it was done. Construction in South America is a new thing by itself not to mention the fact that I was taking instructions in very rapid portunol. Turns out I don't know normal Spanish. Just gospel Spanish as of right now...I didn't lose any fingers and I'm all  here so looks like it went well.

Thursday, the service that we did saturday was originally planned to happen. Well it started pouring at 4 am in the morning. And there was a brutal lightning and thunder storm from then until 430 am. Fun to watch from my bed.  It poured until about 7 am. We left at 7:30 for the service and got to their house at 8:20 am. Wellllll they canceled it. So we turned around and  walked back home. There was a road bike race that started in the center of town which was fun to see as we made our way home.

Easter was pretty tranquilo but I've been asked more than once this last week if we can eat beef on friday. I told them to go ahead and chow down.


Sunday here was actually  not fast sunday for us. Looks like Pascua (Easter) is still big enough to hold off fast sunday. THAT'S a depressing thought. Time to go root out more tradition, falsehoods and superstition I guess...Not tooooo much of that down here but I've encountered more than a couple instances. Mostly in the older members. Comes from their catholic roots.



Monday, we had tacos in a bag. That was a lot of fun actually. Basically it's taco stuff and you dump it in a bag of Doritos and eat it all. It was actually really really good. Meal idea i think. Okay, on to investigators.

Silvana still really needs to get marreid. We had a charla (lesson) with her husband yesterday but he still isn't jiving with it. Rather frustrating. We may just end up baptizing the 2 daughters and helping the mom to stay active even though she's not baptized. We'll see what happens. They went to conference and really enjoyed it and they also came to chruch this last week. We praying for miracles with them. Ricardo is a stud. He has absolute desires to follow Jesus Christ. He also came to church this last week and is ready to get baptized. He's goin under this Saturday! I'm so stoked. He very much wants to change his life and be the best person that he can be. I'll tell you more about all this next week hey? Other than that, we've got some others in the works. We'll see how they develop in the weeks to come.
 
And my Spanish is........yea. It works. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it isn't. I still really struggle with Portuguese. Portuñol comes sometimes. I'm not too worried about it. I can survive on what I have and it gets better all the time. I'd say people understand me about 80 percent of the time. I'm okay with that.

Elder Andy