Really Camping Now!

PS written Feb 9th:

I'm writing right now because Elder Becerra came from the south and never got to write his family this week so we have permission. He’s from Murray Utah and is half Mexican.  He actually knows Elder Wessman, my other comp from Murray, and he has the same time out as Elder Dewitt. He talks a lot and has a lot of energy and seems to work really hard. He just came from Tierra del Fuego and is dying of the heat here. And since we’re both pretty new here we are happy and excited to turn this place around and work really hard.  Oh, and I got your Valentine Day package.  Def wasn’t expecting it at all, but was way happy to get it!! A lot of the chocolate melted ha-ha but it’s all good.  Thank you sooo much!!! Well, tell everyone hi.  I love you and miss you so much. Love, your son Drew.

Hey how’s it going everyone?

So today is my pday. They changed our transfer days from Tuesdays to Mondays with only last minute notice, so I'm writing today.

Elder Dewitt got transferred and was pretty excited to be leaving 'cuz he got moved up to senior comp. My new comp will be Elder Becerra.  I'm actually not with him yet, he's coming up from the south so I'm with a different Elder until he arrives.  It’s actually funny 'cuz I got to the offices and I was waiting forever looking for my new comp, thinking he was there. After waiting for about 45 minutes, I asked one of the office Elders if he knew my comp. He told me (indicating that I should've already known), that he was coming up from the south tomorrow ha-ha. So I told him no one told me, pretty good communication huh? 

So I am in San Miguel for tonight with an Elder who will be training when his new comp arrives.  We’ll go back to the offices tomorrow to get our comps.  I hear my new comp is from the states, but no one knew much else.  My Zone Leaders also didn’t pay our electricity bill so our power got shut off about 3 days ago.  We were already “camping” but now it’s the real deal  - living with flashlights and candles. All of our food went bad in the fridge.  So we have to go pay the bill tomorrow or Wednesday and we won’t have power until they come back and turn it on and that won’t be for awhile, I just love it!!! Ha-ha.  I guess it’s pretty exciting, though.  Just another mission experience! 

Well, something interesting happened to us this week.  Friday night we got a call from the assistants. They said Elder Dewitt and I had interviews with President the next morning at the mission home. So we figured everyone else had them too,  but it ended up just being us.   We had no idea why but we got there and just started talking with President.  We talked about the area and how the members aren’t working and there not being much progress.  He gave us some pointers and then took us into his office to talk some more. He said he didn’t know why he called us in but he felt he should talk to us.  He read some scriptures, one was in Alma 26.  He also read some stories from a book by Elder Eyring and talked about how the more intelligent people are usually the more faithful in the church and compared that with our church and others. It was a way awesome and way spiritual experience. It’s the first time I’ve had to just really talk with President Gulbrandsen, so I really enjoyed that. He then told me to leave and go have some pancakes that sister Gulbrandsen made for us and he conducted an interview with my comp.  But he didn’t have a private interview with me, weird huh? It was mainly to see if my comp was ready to be a senior comp, I guess. So even though I didn’t get my own interview, I did get a sweet talk with him and some pancakes.  Pretty sweet deal to me!

Paulina didn’t attend church again. We went by Saturday and had a good talk with her and she said she was planning  to come to church and everything with no problems. We called Sunday morning to make sure she was up and everything and - nothing!  She didn’t show up so we probably won't be going by there much anymore. She always says, “yes” about things but doesn’t follow thru. We will see, though. I also did divisions this week in another area; it was pretty cool. I got kind of sick to my stomach after lunch one day and I totally threw up but luckily I was already around the block so the members didn’t see, but I'm good now!

So that was pretty much everything exciting that happened this week. Not many new investigators or changes in the ones we already have. The ward is still slowly progressing so we are just going to try and build on that.  But we’ve had some pretty good spiritual experiences the last couple of days that I've really needed.  One of those was at a FHE we held with a member family about temples. It really made me miss attending the temple.  I liked hearing of the experience Trisha shared with me last week about going to the temple. I need a temple trip soon! So that was my week.

I hope you all have an awesome and fun week filled with spiritual experiences!

Until next week! Con mucho amor.

El elder en Argentina, Elder d d d drew del Ludwig