Hello everyone once again from Ibarreta Argentina and Happy Argentine Mothers Day (yesterday)!
Happy Birthday Grandma Perkins and Uncle Jared! And a very late well wishes to you Uncle Rick as well.
I get to write from the church owned family history computers. They are surprisingly new. Two of them are touch screens. It was surprising. I am in a room with three locks on the door though and it is not very big. There are three computers in here and one in the secretary’s office. So we get to have four people writing at once. The difference between this week and last week is that we have ten elders instead of six. We have zone meeting today. Two of the twelve elders in our zone are coming later from their area that is very close.
Yesterday and Saturday, were pretty laid back days. We have lunch with the members on both days so we don’t get much chance to study when we eat with them because we talk with them about everything. We had lunch with a member on Friday now that I think about it. With them we had mutton Giso, which is like a stew without the soup part. They have mutton, pork, beef, and chicken giso common, and I think that we eat mule and donkey as well in giso’s without the members telling us. Fortunately here I will never have to eat dog. The people here love the dogs. Stray or otherwise. Like I said before, many households have five or six of them. You also put rice or noodles in the giso and SOOO many onions. Saturday we had beef giso with a single mother and her daughter. The daughters name is Paloma and as a nickname because she is small we call her Palomita, which is popcorn in English. Sunday we had chicken milanesas and fried bananas. That was weird. Eating a hot banana is not something I would recommend. But because it is offensive here to refuse, I choked them down. A milanesa is a very thin piece of breaded meat that is then fried in oil. It tastes really good and I like it a lot. They eat a lot of what we call in the United States, french bread, and I eat a lot of that to wash down whatever I think tastes funny or bad. Fortunately there hasn’t been a lot of that. I still eat a lot of bread though. I ate a hamburger for dinner Saturday night and it wasn’t bad but it definitely wasn’t American. Mom add to the list of things I want for dinner lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. I ate some honeycomb the other day. It was pretty good. It didn’t look a whole lot like honey but it tasted like honey. It was chewy too. I liked it. Argentine Pizza sucks. I hate it. It made me a little sick last week. I slept it off though. Better in a couple of hours.
After lunch on Saturday and Sunday I teach English to a sister who is learning in school or something. I do that for literally four hours of English. Anyone who wants to come is welcome. But when you can barely speak Castellano, they don’t even call it Spanish here, it is hard to explain why something is that way. It is also hard to explain when you don’t understand yourself, and for you it just is that way. That is how it is for me. Saturday morning we taught a lesson and then we went to the barber to get my companions haircut. He literally pulled out a straight razor for some of the spots on his head. That took forever. After the English class we had “mutual” except that it is for all the members of the branch. We watched El Propósito de un Perro which is a dogs purpose in Castellano. That movie actually can have a lot of parallels with the gospel if you watch it right. But I will let you all discover those parallels on your own if you so choose. Sunday we have church then lunch then English then travel to Ibarreta. So we don’t get a whole lot of teaching in then either. Saturday and Sunday seem to be primarily to uplift and encourage the Saints.
We got two more Fechas, which are baptism dates. One of them seems pretty promising. A fifteen year old boy whose mother was taught some but not him. He reads the stuff we give him and he prays but he hasn’t been to church yet. The first time we talked we didn’t invite him and yesterday was mother’s day so his mother must have kept him home. The other date we have is a very old woman. She reads, and prays, and has a granddaughter who is very excited about the gospel. Unfortunately the granddaughter is only six years old so we can’t baptize her. Maybe when I leave here she will get baptized. Her name is Priscilla and she is ready. She lives with her grandmother and has her grandmother read her the Book of Mormon and the Bible all the time. If she was old enough, I think she would get baptized right away. When we invited them to church, she jumped up and down clapping her hands excitedly and said, “We get to go to church!” Her grandmother is a little bit afraid of getting baptized again, because she joined a different church a while ago and doesn’t want to make fun of God. We are working around it though.
So the American dollar is worth about forty pesos, so when you go to the grocery store and feel like you are being charged an arm and a leg, a lot of times it is just over a dollar. Do you guys remember the ditches between the road and the houses I told you about? Well they are full of poop. Dog poop, human poop, fish poop?, bird poop. You name it, it probably has poop in the ditch. And you can smell it. I thought that it was just stagnant water like at the ropes course at Aspen lakes under the rope bridge. Nope it is actually poop. So be careful of what comes out of the ground from here. It might be fertilized with human excrement. Here the Gringo like they call whites in Mexico are mostly called Rubios, but that doesn’t make any sense to me because my hair may not be as dark as the Latinos, but it is definitely not blonde. Plus Friday at lunch I met an Argentine who looks as American as I do. I don’t know how they know the difference but they do. Everything here is made of concrete. Including but not limited to, Houses, buildings, the poop ditch, and telephone poles. Yes even the telephone poles are made of concrete. Everything is made of concrete except the road. They use it for everything else you’d think they would pave. Guess not. I saw two kinds of bugs this week. The first is very familiar to the people in Missouri. I saw Fireflies. That was exciting. The other was a leaf bug. They were crawling on the road. Another weird thing about the Peruvians is they believe columbus first landed in Peru. Which is ridiculous because it’s on the wrong side of the continent. I saw how they collected garbage for the first time on Friday. They hook up a trailer to a tractor and they drive around throwing the bags into the trailer. The trailer has a trash compactor to. We were moving too fast for me to take a picture unfortunately.
The Argentines keep the Sabbath better than the Utahns do. There is literally nothing open so you couldn’t buy if you wanted to. They have goofier hours than the stuff in the CCM. Because of the Siesta everything is closed for two to four hours. And nothing opens until nine. One of the reasons people don’t come to church is because they sleep until one in the afternoon. At first I thought that it might be because they couldn’t do it during the rest of the week like in America, but when I listened closer, they sleep so late Monday to Monday. It puzzles me a little and makes me laugh. Though it is a bit frustrating that they aren’t willing to wake up early one day a week.
Mom I need you to suggest translating the hymn number 88 in Spanish to English and putting it into the English hymnbook for me, because it is awesome. Maybe some tips for keeping clothes nice when you hang dry outside?