Week 10 (2/22/10) Email to Dad

Hey Dad! It was great talking to you in the airport. After I got off the phone I found out our flight was delayed an hour and wished I had another calling card. Oh well. This keyboard is funky. The ? is at the top and I can spell cool names like Pierre Garçon haha. Puedo hacer acentos también. Anyway the weather here is pretty hot and humid but I would rather walk around in this summer weather than the St. George weather. It has rained really hard twice in the last three or so days and the streets turn to rivers. One day it started raining while we were in our pensión (apartment) just finishing language study-I have some videos on my memory card I'll be sending soon- and it had been raining for over an hour and a half really hard and the street in front of our pench was like a foot deep all the way across so Elder Sobré y yo put on our sandals, rolled up our pants, grabbed our umbrellas and got to work. It was pretty fun! When we went to the Silvas, Robert-25-told us in Buenos Aires, the city-we are still in the state- had water up to his chest and they were having problems, I'm not really sure though. We missionaries are pretty oblivious to what is going on in the outside world. We didn't find out about Haiti in the MTC until over a week later. Same with all the snow storms in the D.C. area.
The hardest part about being here is not being able to fluently communicate with anybody. I can say whatever I want in Spanish--sorry I mean Castellano-nobody calls it Spanish here, its all Castellano. There are quite a few differences though. A lot of the vocab is different and they pronounce y and ll different. For example bus in Spanish is autobus and in Castellano it is colectivo. Money-dinero-plata. There are other words too but you get it--but I have a REALLY hard time understanding what they say back. Elder Sobré is from Uruguay and doesn't know how to speak English fluently so it can be pretty frustrating sometimes. Elder Sobré reminds me of a three way mix of Bryan, cousin Greg, and Mike Andrus-Pete's buddy. His dad isn't a member either. We both would like more than anything in the world to see our fathers come to know this gospel is true for themselves. I love you Dad. Mom and Pete and Sam too. You guys are the greatest treasure I have. We can be together forever, even after our lives here on earth-how awesome is that? But that is only possible through Jesus Christ and his gospel that I am sharing here in Argentina.
My mission actually doesn't cover any of the city of Buenos Aires. It starts just south of the city. One of the Assistants to the President said this mission has the highest missionary-to-area of all the missions. My area is pretty poor. There are a lot of tiny houses. I'm glad I had the opportunity to go to Bolivia, because that really prepared me for this. It wasn't much of a shock for me coming here. The other new missionaries were pretty surprised. The food here is better than Bolivia and its not as poor. There are SO many dogs. Dogs everywhere. Elder Sobré and I saw the ugliest dog in the world if you can call it a dog. It looked like it came right out of the Lion King. It looked just like a hideous hyena that just came out of a fight. Anyway, I think the work in this area isn't doing so well. Once I get accustomed to the area and the language I will do my best to change that. Elder Sobre will have been here for almost 6 months at the end of this transfer so the area will become mine. He has been here for a long time and I think he is getting burned out in the area. It seems like here in Argentina women out number men by almost double. Maybe its because all the men work or something. Who knows? Its a really poor area though. The sleep schedule is hard for me in the mornings but I bought a jumprope at the store today so I'll start doing that in the morning to get some exercise and start feeling better. If we ever want to go anywhere somewhat close, we walk and any further we take the colectivos and that takes moneda (change). Moneda is somewhat hard to come by so we don't spend moneda on anything else. The food so far has been a major let down. All anybody ever talked about before was how great the food is, you're going to love the food, the food is awesome. Its good but overhyped. Of course, I am still adjusting so by the end of my mission I will probably love it too but still. They do have Gatorade here though, which is pretty cool. The only flavor the same though is Lemon-Lime. Then they have Manzana, Pomelo, Frutas Tropicales, Green Mango, and Berry. The people are really great though. There is one family we visit often named Silva. Hermana Silva and her family moved here from Paraguay 2 years ago and her husband passed away from heart problems about 6 months ago. She has like ten kids-there are always so many people at there house that there are a couple I'm not sure are hers or not. She has 6 boys and like 4 or five girls. The oldest is 25 and the youngest is probably 5. 4 or 5 of her kids are inactive. They are really nice and a lot of fun. Hermana Silva is a great woman-kinda reminds me of my mom. Church on Sunday was business as usual and they had me go up and introduce myself. The ward is pretty small, but I enjoyed it. I sat between Richard Silva,18-19, and Maxi, a new investigator that we actually met on Sunday at church. He has already been meeting with missionaries but just moved into our area so we'll be meeting with him tomorrow. Well I better get going. I'm going to be working my tail off trying to understand Castellano for the next while. I feel like I know nothing but everybody is really impressed with how good I speak and understand for being so new. I am satisfied for now with my speaking but that is worthless if I can't understand people. It is tiring straining to understand all the time, but I'll catch on, I'm not worried about it. The Lord is on my side. I'm excited to learn so I can be more effective and get to work. The other missionaries complain about the weather but I like it. I sure miss you guys but it will be a short 22 months and we'll be together again. Until next Lunes, chao chao.