A Few Emails from Weeks Past

#1 things are just great down here. The zone is baptizing like they never have before. For the month, we already have 10 baptisms which is something of a miracle since the first three months that elder hogge was down here, there were like 3 baptisms total. The goal is 20 baptisms for april and we´re working strong towards that goal. Elder hogge and i fasted this last week to be able to find someone who was prepared and ready for baptism that week. The answer to that was realized through the other elders in Caleta Olivia who haven´t been working really hard. They happened to find an old investigator who had already been taught everything before. He had even had an interview for baptism once but had not passed since he didn´t have a testimony of joseph smith. but they started teaching him and found out that he didn´t ahve any doubts and that his two grandkids who live with him also wanted to get baptized so we got three unexpected baptisms this week which was a big miracle. Me and elder hogge are still looking for someone in our area though that is ready for baptism. We actually find a lot of people who really want to get baptized but they always have things that hold them back like smoking or alcohol but most commonly they are living with someone and aren´t married. That has been a killer for us lately. But this last week, people just started getting seperated like magic. We have one investigator, Fabiola who is only 19, lives with her boyfriend who is 21 and they have a kid. The boyfriend doesn´t work, he just drinks all day with his friends and this last weekend, he got into drugs and went home and punch Fabiola. They were trying to get the police involved because he refused to leave even though the house they live in technically belongs to the parents of fabiola so since he won´t leave and since he´s threatening to hurt fabiola, they´re thinking of moving here to live with a friend in a different neighborhood. We were pumped though (even though it is a sad situation) since she had wanted to get baptized for a long time but doesn´t want to get married since she doesn´t really like her boyfriend. but now we have high hopes for her. We´ll be praying for her a lot to get her baptized soon here.

anyway, that´s what we´re doing down here. keep praying for us and i love you

elder newey

#2 yeah it´s weird i´ll be home next easter. i remember easter in the mtc like it was just a couple weeks ago. tell chris that i really liked his card haha.

i did get the package last week and yes everything was in it. those pretzel m&ms are excellent and i got the ring and the phone card. What day in mother´s day this year? isn´t it just the first week in may? it´s in october down here so that´s why i don´t know. Transfers are this week so i will probably have a new companion when i call you since this is already my second transfer with elder hogge. i hope i don´t leave though, i really like being in Caleta.

For easter down here, no one eats red meat from thursday to sunday which is called "semana santa" or holy week which is a catholic tradition but almost everyone follows it. luckily we still got meat for lunches because i don´t really like the fish down here. I tried some weird meats though this week like ostrich and wanaca (which is an animal that lives down here in the patagonia. it´s like a deer type thing but i´m not sure what it´s called in english haha. a member also made us something called "humitas" which have corn, carrots, onions, and cheese all mashed together and cooked in the husk of a corn cob. i wanted to send some pictures of it this week but we´re in the slow cyber since the good one was all full. i´ll try to remember to send them next week. the humitas were really good though i could ahve eaten like 30 haha.

another story from this week. so do you remember how last week i said that all of our investigators where getting seperated? yeah well it happened again this week. I´m starting to think instead of making eternal families, we´re just destroying them haha. but this week, we heard that one investigator, ivan, got seperated. we went and talked to him and it was really hard to find him but we finally did. He´s really depressed and his story explains why. He went to work one day just like any other day and while he was working, he got a text from his girlfriend that said she had left the keys for the house under the welcome mat. Ivan didn´t think anything of it though but when he went home to eat lunch, he opened the door and found his house empty. His woman had taken everything except their fridge and stove. She took the table, all the chairs, the bed, the two tvs they had, everything but the thing that really depressed ivan is that he hasn´t seen his two kids since she left and she won´t answer his calls or anything. the poor guy has been through so much in his life. He really is like the best person morally speaking that i´ve met down here. for example, a couple years ago, he and a guy from Paraguay were working together on building the house of some lady and the lady had paid them all up front. she had given all of the money to the paraguayo and had expected him to give his share to ivan but instead, the guy took off with all the money. so ivan finished the entire house alone and didnt get a single peso from it. in fact, he had to pay someone else to help him and he had to work another job as well to earn enough money just to live. he finished it though because he´s just a good guy. but now that he´s seperated, we´re working towards getting him baptized. so i´ll keep you posted.

anyway, other than that, the work is going good. i love you!

elder newey

#3 nope i wasn´t transfered and neither was elder hogge so this is our third transfer together which doesn´t usually happen but we´re ok with it because we have a good number of investigators who are close to baptism. we´ll be going up to neuquén on thursday of this week and we´ll get to see if we met the mission goal for baptisms for the month. our zone down here is working their butts off and baptizing a ton. their was a pretty set idea in the mission that down here in the south it´s hard to baptize but we shattered that these last two months. march we thought was really good with 6 baptisms (if i remember right) and then in april we had 11 so we´re going to do even better in may!

yeah i´ll be calling on sunday so make you´re all there. i´ll call around 4 here from the phone of Jeanny (my landlord i think is the word in english) but she´s super awesome. she called us into her house today to see the news that bin laden had been killed. i didn´t know that he had been killed last week though, that´s pretty tight. i thought it was really good news but Jeanny thinks that there will be big consequences in the US as retaliation from bin laden´s successors. i´m not to worried about it though.

things are good here though. all of the guys who work in oil are on strike and they want a bunch of money which makes everything else raise in price as well so that made the teachers go on strike too and so everything is kind of in an uproar but makes it ok for us because no one is working haha. we´re now able to go to people´s houses whenever we want.

we´re getting really close with Ivan who i told you about last week and we actually have a baptism planned with a girl named Laura on saturday. She´s nine and is really awesome. her mom is already member but is kind of less active and we can´t really tell if she even wants Laura to get baptized or not. we´ll get it done though. Hay que tener fe no más (you just have to have faith is all).

i´m excited to call on sunday and i´ll tell you all about neuquén and everything! love you

elder newey

#4

I didn´t even know you guys were planning on going down to Las Vegas. You probably told me a few weeks ago but my weeks are starting to run together. I really can´t imagine Ryne with a belly haha. But yeah, i got some new shoes and they´re pretty sweet, they have soles like basketball shoes so i don´t feel any of the rocks we walk on all day so that´s nice!

a couple stories from this week. The whole week, we had people accusing us of having church leaders who are thiefs and criminals because the District President, his Secretary, and another member who all work in the same company, went on strike because their boss was withhold money from their checks without them knowing it. So something that is pretty common down here is that when people go on strikes, they block off the freeway since their is only one and no alternate route because it makes the people mad and then things get resolved faster. But anyway, they were accusing us of having corrupt leader because some guy went on the radio and told how the District President and his secretary are the leaders of the group on strike and that they stopped a company truck, beat up the guys inside, and stole a bunch of money. So other accusations have been flying around and their are threats from people outside the church that they will go to the church building on Sunday just to create problems because as they say, "how can we be preaching the gospel when we can´t control our own leaders." But yeah, if i happen to get on the news or something, i´ll let you know. We still don´t know if the accusations are true or not but we hear that the area authorities aren´t going to punish the district president at all so we figure that things are all good. This is just the sort of thing that causes weaker members to go inactive though so we´ll have to prepare for that. Just something bad like this happens, and the people through a blanket sweep across all members saying that we must all be robbers as well haha it´s ridiculous. But hopefully it will all get resolved soon.

Also, Ivan was supposed to get baptized this week but on Friday night, he saw his ex wife with her new boyfriend and it destroyed him. He started drinking and smoking again so that made us kind of upset haha. We´ll keep working with him and hopefully get him baptized here soon.

but that was my week! all in all, rather eventful. we won´t have transfers for another four weeks so not until about mid June. But things are good, we´re working hard and touching lives!

Love you!

elder newey (Nay-way as they say it down here haha)