Dear Everyone,

What a week en paraíso terrenal!! Our week was pretty cool. This week we decided to get all of our indicators (aka the stuff we have to do everyday) out of the way at the beginning. We worked really hard Tuesday and Wednesday and even Thursday. We just worked and worked and worked. Friday, we went to a little town called French. I know. Weird name. But, previous missionaries decided to go out of 9 de Julio and go look for people. What they forgot to keep in mind was the other missionaries that have to travel to go visit them. Haha. But it’s all good. The only problem with this member that lives a good 20 km away is that she doesn’t have a car nor money to get to church so she saves up every month to come once a month. It’s sad but what can we do? That’s right, visit her. So we go out there and visit for two hours because once the bus drops us off, it doesn’t come back for another two hours. It’s actually kind of funny. But we visited her on Friday, oh I forgot to mention that she is Australian also.

Then Saturday came around and that’s when it started to get busy again. In the morning we had to stop by a members house who used my baptism clothes for his sons baptism the week before and so we went to their house and then made some failed visits. When I say failed visits, I mean that they weren’t home or they were still sleeping. So after that we went straight to the capilla and started filling up our little baptismal font/ swimming pool. We started filling it up at about 12:30 and then we went home to let it fill up because it takes 5 hours to fill up and the baptism was at 5. Yeah, LOCO! So we went home and ate lunch and had ourselves a nice companionship study. Yeah, you thought I was going to say siesta. No, taking siestas here is a no-no. So we got done with studying and stuff at about 3:30 and we went back. When we got back, the water was only up to the top of my ankle and it needed to be at about my waist by now so we started panicking. The water had shut off and then turned back on when we got there so we hurried and grabbed some buckets and started fillin' her up! We had the hose going and my companion and I filling up the pool that needed to be ready in one hour. Let me tell you, I was beat.

The water ended up being really cold water and the wind was blowing extremely hard Saturday. The mission is great no? Then Vanesa shows up with her family but her brother wasn’t there. She said he didn’t know where he was and so there was another concern of our seeing as the other baptismal candidate wasn’t there! He came like ten minutes later but still. Jaja. So then we waited for members to show up and we waited for 45 minutes for at least an Hermana to show up.

But we still didn’t have another Priesthood holder to be the other witness. So it so happened that the next member that came was a priesthood holder just coming home from work and happened to stop by. So we told him, "Stop, in the name of salvation!" Just kidding, but it probably seemed like that. He became our miracle because no other priesthood holders showed up. Even the one that we assigned to speak on the Holy Ghost didn’t show up. We have commitment issues here. But to make a long story short, even though this is already really long, everything went fine. They both got baptized and confirmed so now there are two new members of the church here in 9 de Julio.


And now the Mission President comes tonight to do divisions with my companion and I. That means he just goes out and doesn’t just work with us but tonight we are doing a Family Night/NDH with the Branch and President Benton is going to give a presentation so it should be fun.

My lesson yesterday was about Joseph being sold into Egypt. We talked about how when bad things are happening to us, we still need to keep the commandments and have a positive attitude. I had each joven draw a picture of a coat of many colors to remind them to have a positive attitude the next time something bad happens to them. A lot of times we like to focus on the negative but each trial is a learning experience.

Thank you for the email Elena. I really liked it. Voy a contestar tus preguntas. Primero, como misioneros, caminamos todo el día buscando personas que quieren escucharnos. A veces usamos las bicis. Te felicito a aprender a leer. Te amo mucho. Bueno, thank you all for your prayers and support of all missionaries. If you still have questions, I am more than willing to contestarlas. Until next week, BYE

Love,
Elder Pickett