Good-bye Venado Tuerto!

Last days here in Venado Tuerto

So hard to say goodbye to this awesome family!! 

Chilling with one of Venado Tuerto's best!

I Will Answer The Call!!!

December 31, 2014

 

Hey guys!!!! It was sooo awesome to talk with you guys on Christmas!! It was hard to say goodbye!! I miss you guys tons!! Thanks for all your good questions and everything!! It was a super good time!! Sounds like you guys had a great Christmas!! 

 

On Friday we got a call from the zone leaders informing me I was receiving a transfer. I will now be serving in a small city just outside of Rosario called San Lorenzo. My new companion is Elder Johnson and he is from Utah as well! My first 2 companions have been from Utah. I was really sad to leave Venado Tuerto.  We have a ton of investigators and I love all of them as well as the awesome members of my little branch! I felt like I had really connected with all of them!  But, I guess the Lord needs me somewhere else, so I will answer the call! We mostly spent the last couple of days going around and saying goodbye to all the members and investigators that we have! It was very sad! At the same time, I am excited to start a new adventure! Elder Stanworth is training again in the same area and I think he is excited about it!! He is awesome!!

 

I left Monday morning and met my new companion at the bus terminal in Rosario!! Our new area is the whole city of San Lorenzo! There is a massive river right beside it so it is sooooo humid here!! I am sweating like crazy!! Ha-ha! Buts it’s all good!! I really miss the snow right now!!!! We have the whole city as our area, so it is pretty overwhelming. At least for me it is because my last area was about 10 blocks by 15 blocks! Now it’s like 70 blocks!! It’s massive, but I guess there used to be 2 wards and 1 branch here a while ago and now there is only 1 branch left!! There are so many less active members!! We have lots of work to do here!!

 

Man, I’ll tell you that the pension here is not that nice! I was living in a palace in my other area!! I had air conditioning, and a nice shower and awesome members who fed us and a washing machine! Oh well, but it is livable here!! Ha-ha- I am doing good!!! We have a lot of work to do in this area. I am here for a reason and I am excited to make a difference, whether it’s re activating people or baptizing. I am here to do the will of the Lord!! 

 

Hey mom- thanks for your prayers!! I am slightly overwhelmed here because as you probably know, I’m not the best with change.  But I truly am excited to be an instrument in the Lords hands here!! There is a lot for me to learn here!! So keep praying for me!!

 

 Right now I am just trying to meet all of the members and investigators that they have here!! There is a lot to do here!! I hope you feel better, Mom!! We aren’t allowed to be out after dark tonight for the New Year’s festivities or to go out tomorrow so we might be cleaning (just like you will be at home!!)

 

 

I love you guys!! Hopefully I will email you guys on Monday again!!

 

Love,

Elder Carter

Getting ready to mow the lawn - Argentina style!

"We have a message we want to share with you!"

A great Christmas with a special friend!

Keeping dad's tradition alive - egg in a hole

Post surgery feet - did not fit in my shoes :(

Grateful for this good man!

Some of my Argentina sisters!

My new friends!

Saying good bye to these great missionaries!!

My new companion!

AND MORE CAME!!!!!

December 24, 2014

 

 

Hola!

 

Well, this week was good!! WE HAD 9 INVESTIGATORS AT CHURCH ON SUNDAY!! Which was flipping awesome!!? We just made sure we emphasized it a ton! Two of the investigators who came were actually ones we had stopped teaching so we are teaching them again!!! So awesome!!  I was pretty excited at church, but it was a little stressful, too! I was on my toes making sure that everyone was doing well and enjoying themselves!! One investigator was a young man, B, who we went and picked up before church. He lives in a humble house. One of the walls has a hole where there was a window, but where there is no window there now. Anyways, we arrived at his place and knocked, or clapped I mean, (that’s what people do here) and nothing. So, we waited for a while. They have a tin roof, so it’s pretty loud if you throw stuff on it. Anyways,  I threw a bunch of rocks on the roof and still nothing. My mind was made up - I was not leaving without him. We had walked so far to pick him up and knew it was important for him to come. So,  I put my hands into the window and clapped as loud as I could. It turned out his bed was not very far away from my hands. So, that finally did the trick and woke him up!! We finally got him up and to church, which was awesome!!!! He said he really liked it, along with all of our other investigators!

 

The other day, my companion and I were asked to do a service project. We were asked to mow a sister’s lawn. It was super super long and we were given machetes to accomplish the task!! Never done it that way before!!

 

 

Tonight for Christmas Eve we are going over to a recent convert’s home for dinner and have permission to stay out until 11:30 pm, which is really cool!!

Christmas seems to not be a big deal here. People put a little tree inside their homes, eat dinner at around 11:00 pm and then open gifts at midnight, and that’s it! It is weird for me to have Christmas without snow! It just does not feel like Christmas in one sense, but in another, being here has helped me better appreciate the real reason why we celebrate Christmas in the first place. We have had a great time sharing the video clip the church put out for Christmas (share the gift). It is a cool thing we get to do.

 

 

Thank you for everything! I am looking forward to talking to you guys tomorrow afternoon!! Merry Christmas!!

 

I love you!

Elder Carter

 

They came to church!!!

December 18, 2014

Hey guys!! How’s it going?

 

The big news for the week is that the MISSION IS BEING SPLIT INTO TWO IN JULY!!!! There will be and Argentina Rosario mission and an Argentina Santa Fe mission! There will be a new mission president, new mission home, new everything! So, what will happen is that if you are in the area of the new mission when the new mission president arrives, then that’s your new mission. If you are in President Zanni’s zone you will be in his mission. (His part is Rosario and lower). So that will be very interesting!! I wonder where I will end up!! Exciting, huh!! 

 

This week was good! We are eating and ordering lots of food cause pretty much here it is as cheap to order the food as it is to buy it and cook it. So we save ourselves the time and energy of making the food and just buy, it so that is very nice!! Ha-ha and plus the food it usually better if we buy it!! 

 

This week we had 3 investigators at church!!! Pretty awesome!!! I was super glad they came!! Hopefully, they will come this Sunday too!!! Recently, President Zanni has changed our missionary focus to reactivation. He is not so concerned about how many lessons we teach the less active or how many investigators we have. He wants us to help increase church attendance. In in our area, we have 280 families that are members, but we only have 28 families that are going to church every week! So, we have been working a lot this past week finding those people and trying to get them to church and teaching the members of their families who aren’t members!! It’s exciting to have lots of work to do!!

 

Yesterday we had a service project with the president and his family, which was really good! We went to an old folk’s home and painted rooms. When we first we went in we talked to the residents and man that was hard for me!!!! Sometimes I can’t understand the elderly talking in English, let alone in the small amount of Spanish I know!! So, I just nodded my head and said “si” and “que bueno!” but it was all good! Then we went to the church and ate pizza. The president talked for a while and then we played some fun games like ultimate Frisbee it was so much fun!!

 

We did division (went on splits) with the assistants to the president which this week! It went really well!! It was good to see and learn from others. I enjoy that. My Spanish still in not that great but I understand more than I can speak. Sometimes that is frustrating  because I know what they are saying but I don’t know how to respond!! Ha-ha, but i can usually figure out some way to say something.  I am learning slowly!!

 

I love you guys!!!

 

Can’t wait to hear from you on Wednesday and Skype on Thursday!!!!!

 

Love you,

Elder Carter

 

Toe Surgery

                                                                                               December 8, 2014

 

I got your package and envelopes this week!! I also got Bita’s!! I have not opened the package from home but I opened Bita’s and it was very nice!! She sent a bunch of snacks and it is all very yummy!!! I have been opening one card a day and they are super awesome!!!! Thanks everyone!! I can’t wait to talk to you guys on Christmas!!! We will skype from a member’s house, probably around lunch time, Argentina time, but I’m still not sure. Hopefully I can give you more information next week.

 The first half of the week was good!!  We are working hard. We taught quite a few lessons. I forgot to mention last week that during the big downpour we discovered that one of our investigators was not 100% stable. We had a suspicion before the day of the big rainstorm, but that day, we confirmed it pretty fast! She was outside screaming at cars as they passed by and then later we saw her bathing in the water. We decided to stop teaching her because we think she will go straight to heaven anyways!!

Our new branch president is awesome!!! He goes out with us often and is really involved! I think that is where we will skype from on Christmas. There is another family in our branch that also is super involved in missionary work. These members make such a difference!! I am really excited about this week! I think it will be better, especially since we will be able to work again!!

Elder Stanworth and I got surgery on our toes on Friday. The mission paid for everything. We went and saw the doctor a couple times this week and we had it operated on Friday. We had a few meetings with him and we took some antibiotics for a few days. We got the more expensive medical treatment which I think means that it was better quality. I went into the office and the doctor and nurses just started poking needles into my feet. As soon as they were frozen they started snipping and cutting and digging. It was pretty bloody, but they wrapped it up and I was on my way!  I had two in grown toenails, one on each foot. My companion had one so he got his operated too. We then spent the whole weekend in the pension which kind of sucked!!!! I was so bored!!! I like the scriptures, but man, I wanted to go out and teach!!!! Ha-ha - but yesterday one of the members was able to drive us to church and today we can walk. So everything is good again!! Sadly we didn’t teach a ton of lessons this week cause we were stuck in the pension, but it’s okay. We will this week!!

We didn’t have anyone at church this Sunday which was disappointing, but it’s alright. It rained too on Sunday which might have been another reason why no one made it. This week I am pretty sure will be a lot better!!! My Spanish is coming along. I can understand more but still not a ton. I can usually pull out what I want to say, but sometimes people are not too patient with me. All in all, I’m progressing!

Sorry, no time for pictures this week but next week I will send some. I have some gross pictures of our toes!! Ha-ha  - but thanks for everything!! Hopefully the recent cards you guys sent me will come soon! I will write  to you next Tuesday! (President it coming down to do some service with us on Monday so Tuesday will be our p-day)

Thank you for the prayers and everything!!

I love you guys!

Elder Carter

And the rain came pouring down!!!!

December 1, 2014

 

We survived our low-money week!! We had to dip in to some personal money a little bit, but it’s all okay!! It rained on Sunday so our branch was in low attendance!! We did not have any investigators at church, again, but it’s alright, this Sunday will be the week!!! Ha-ha - but we sustained a new branch president and he is super awesome! He is super involved with us and wanting to help us, which is good! We also have some inactive families that are excited about the change.

 

 

The big news this week was that we had a big flood!! Okay, so we were sitting at a lunch appointment and it just started pouring, like super super hard!!! We were eating with the new branch president and his family. They had made a yummy pizza, but there were olives all over it (I took them off) and we were sitting there eating and trying to talk but we had to yell to each other because the rain was being so loud on the roof!! It was awful! About 5 minutes later, their whole back yard was full of water! It was even coming in through the back door!! Within another 5 minutes there was approximately 3 inches of water in their whole house!!! Luckily we got all the important stuff off the ground. Their house, like most of the houses here, is built of brick and tile so there was not much damage to the houses, which was really good. When the rain slowed down and stopped for a bit, we looked outside and the roads looked like a river! It was crazy!! The president has a car and he was going to drive us home but he couldn’t get out because the water was too high (anyone who has a car here is rich) so we decided to start venturing our way back through the puddles. Well, we got a decent way back to the pension then bammmmm it just started pouring again. We were soaked within 10 seconds!!. I put my camera under my arm pit and we started running back. When we got to the road that our pension is on, we found it was covered in waist deep water!! There was no other way to get back to the pension, so we walked for 15 minutes back to the pension in waist deep water, in the pouring rain, in our shirts and ties!! There were cars submerged on the side of the street, it was so bad!!! Luckily my camera did not get wet at all. I don’t know how that was possible! We pretty much went swimming!! Ha-ha, it was kind of fun, even though at the time I was just worried about my camera!! But we made it back okay and our pension is higher up so no water got in. What an adventure!!!!!!!!

 

The other elders were supposed to have a baptism but it got cancelled because of the rain. Our baptismal font is challenging because it doesn’t drain water so we spent some of Saturday night taking the water out of the font bucket by bucket which was annoying but it had to be done!!

 

On Sunday some of our investigators fed us “asado” which is my favorite!! Lots of meat and lots of bread. It is super super super  super yummy!! I really enjoyed it! It’s all awesome when your investigators feed you because you get food and a lesson!!!

 

So, I have an ingrown toe nail. Actually two and so does my companion. So today we went to the doctors and they gave us some medicine and we are coming back Friday. The doctor is probably going to have to do some kind of surgery to our toes so we might be out for a couple of days. It doesn’t hurt to walk on it, it only hurts when I stub it really hard or try to do push-ups, but it could be dangerous if the infection grows. I am fine and will be fine, you don’t have to call the mission home or anything. I wasn’t going to tell you guys but I thought maybe I should. You will find out next week how everything went!!

 

It was a little bit of a slower week with not a ton of lessons or anything because we couldn’t find a lot of our investigators which was too bad!! But this week will definitely be a lot better!!!We had lessons last week but a lot of our investigators don’t seem to want to come to church. We have even had a couple that said they received an answer that the church is true! I wanted to yell at them “WHY DONT YOU COME TO CHURCH THEN!!!!!!” Ha-ha but its okay, I think they will come if it doesn’t rain. I will keep you guys posted on that

 

I now weigh 185 so I’ve lost a little bit of weight since the last time but slowing down a lot. Life is good!! I really enjoy it here! It’s just challenging sometimes to not see anyone getting baptized yet, but I know patience and faith will get them there!

 

I love you guys!!!

 

Elder Carter

 

During a rain storm!

Getting ready to go for a swim (in order to get home)

The big bag of cereal used for weekly sustenance :)