6 months in Argentina!

first off to Kaleb, I completely understand that you have no time because of college writing, but are you learning a ton? It should prepare you so well for the act. Love it though, that the chargers lost to the Seahawks, they seem to be having a rough year Ha!

Hey thanks for kyle´s letter, man does it bring back good memories. It sounds like he´s going to love his companions which really is the only way you can love the mtc so he´s got some good times ahead of him. Could you try to put a little of his letters in your email each week? I really enjoyed reading it and hearing some news about him. Hey, dad told me that ryan is starting his papers, do you know when he is going to send them in? I can´t wait to hear where he´s going.

Mom, thanks for the addresses, I´m going to start writing a letter to sean today, but wow I have a lot to tell him. Things are going better with my companion and I´ll find out this next Saturday night if I´m going or not. We have general conference this weekend which I´m really really excited for. Oh, before I forget, I forgot last week to comment on the fact that kaleb is getting taller. Did I call it or not? I was just almost dead on when I said he would grow at the end of his junior year. I´m going to have to practice hard to be able to beat him in basketball when I get back. Hey how did billy´s wedding go, or is it not for a while? you said you weren´t probably able to go but i´m sure you´ll hear all about it from other people in the family. How is reece´s leg? you said she hurt it again, did it turn out to be a bad injury or just minor?

So my story for the week. With elder whitaker, we tried to teach a 17 year old girl named Nilce who has had a really hard life. she lives all along in this huge house that is her mom´s but her mom is working in El Bolson, a city about 10 hours from here so she never sees her. She has horrible friends and smokes marijuana (which is legal here) almost every other day and definitely every weekend and we wanted to help her so bad. The problem was always that she was really hard to find home and we needed a member to come with us because she is always home alone. So if we pass, there has to be another adult male with us or we´re breaking mission rules. So with elder whitaker, I never taught her, I always just saw her at the grocery store where she works, but about a week ago, elder rengifo and I finally caught her home. she was of course alone so we just left her a plan of salvation pamphlet and said we´d come back with a member next week. We gave her our cell phone number so if she needed anything she could send us a text message and we´d call her when we could. So this weekend, we got two messages from her. They were, "hey I need your help. My friends want me to go to a baliche (or night club) with them but I don´t want to smoke anymore." and the second was "hey I just finished reading the pamphlet and it gave me a lot of grief and I feel really bad right now." Obviously that was not the intention of the pamphlet so we called her as soon as we could to talk to her which was Friday night. And in the call, she opened up incredibly. At first she started talking about the pamphlet and how bad she felt, and then she told us how alone she feels in that huge house without any family there, and then she said "I just really miss my mom." and she started to cry. All this was over the phone and elder rengifo and I were looking at each other wondering what to do and what to say. So we started teaching her the plan of salvation and how it is meant to give us hope in our lives and she started bombarding us with questions like "why do some people starve while others eat huge banquets, and she told us a story of how she bought a sandwich for a kid who was begging for food and this kid gave her a kiss when she gave him the sandwhich," just a bunch of feelings that were deep down inside her finally coming out. She said, "So does God exist? Does he really exist?" She told us how she had done everything she had done only because she had never known that he really existed and how she now felt terrible. We tried to explain that she was now feeling the godly sorrow necessary for repentance and by the end of the call, both elder rengifo and I were almost in tears as well. I´m sure if I had been there in person I would have been crying as well, but really, this is why I´m out here. These are the experiences that really make the mission and it´s weird that I could feel so much to someone I´ve really only talked to through the phone and who I really don´t know, but I guess that´s the nature of the mission. We´re planning on going over to her house on tuesday to teach her some more and I think she will be really open to us so now that transfers are finally coming, I don´t really want to leave. I´ll go where I have to though and just hope that she does what she needs to to be baptized.

Well that´s it for the week. I´m way excited for general conference and the fact that we´ll be listening to the same exact message even though we´re thousands of miles apart. Thanks for everything, really, I´ll check the bolsa to see if my packages got here today. Love you!
elder newey