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)

Conference Time!

yeah conference was really good. it would have been better if all the investigators we invited had come but i guess that´s the mission. But yeah, we got to hear all of the sessions but the conference cds would still be greatly appreciated since we had to watch the priesthood session in spanish, and though i understood everything, you just don´t get the same emotion and feeling when listening to a translator as when listening to the real thing.

yeah when the prophet started talking about the rome temple, he started off all mysteriously, i leaned forward in my chair and thought "is he about to announce the temple in Far West!?!" but no, it was just rome haha.

Well i have an incredible miracle story for you guys this week. i´ll have to write the shortened version but the full version is in my journal so you´ll hear it when i get home in a year haha.

it happened on my year mark, the 31st of march. i woke up and thought, "it would be cool to baptize someone on my year mark." i didn´t know how that would then be completed later that day. we went through a normal day and then at 6 at night, the hermanas who are in Pico Truncado, a 40 minute drive from my area called and said they were having an emergency baptism of a family whose dad is leaving to work and won´t come back for four months. they had called president, and he had told them to baptize them today. there is more of a miracle in that part of the story but it´s hard to describe over email. so the hermanas had called us saying how they needed baptismal clothing right away. so we miraculously got the clothes, and then managed to somehow get a ride down there and the guy was booking it at 100mph down the free way(which is way faster than i´ve gone in a long time) and we got there at 7:30 and the dad had to leave at 8:15 and they were still doing the baptismal interviews. then we saw that there was only about a foot and a half of water in the font because the church had run out of water. the members were bringing big buckets of water to try to fill it up more but eventually we had to do the baptisms, we were out of time. so the hermana asked me to do the baptisms and i was in the font, kneeling, while the person sat in the water and i lowered them back and just managed to get them all the way under the water haha. it was pretty intense. then the dad left and caught his bus so everything worked out great in the end. it was a few hours of insanity but i got to baptize some people on my year mark! haha.

anyway, that was the short version so expect a much better telling of that in exactly one year! love you!

elder newey

Another Week in March

eah, we heard about the earthquake on Thursday and someone told us 100,000 people had died. Well i don´t know where they got their news but i just saw this morning on a tv that 5000 were dead. which is it? I was kind of worried about Kyle, but for some reason, i just felt like he was ok. Maybe people will be more open to listening to us after this huge disaster but we´ll see haha.

In the zone, there are some missionaries who are working hard and others that aren´t. We´re putting a bunch of fechas which is really awesome. in the zone, we put like 12 new ones this week. But all of those fechas are from us and one of the two districts in the zone. The other district didn´t put a single one which is really frustrating. There is another companionship here in Caleta Olivia who works on the other side of the city but they live in our area and the other day, we were knocking the block where they live and saw their lights on. So we went to go see if they had just left their lights on or if they had gone home early. We knocked the door and no one answered so we were just looking into the window to see if they were there and we saw a package of mate that was open with a mate cup right by it (which is super against the rules) and the pench was a pit. so we knocked again and saw one of them poke their heads out from a back room and then both started running around, putting away the mate, hiding other stuff and then they finally opened the door. Neither had ties on and they were both wearing flip flops so they had obviously been there for some time. They had just decided to go home early for no reason and were just chilling in the pench. Oh we were so mad, there is no wonder they aren´t having any success. Ever since that night, it seemed to open the seal on them and we began to see a bunch of things they are doing against the rules and it´s just stupid. I´m glad i´ve never had a trucho comp, i think it´d be really hard. Maybe they´ll get transfered in a week and we won´t have to worry about them anymore.

In the zone though, we have a lot of baptisms planned for this week. we´ll be traveling around to do baptismal interviews and stuff so that should use up a lot of our time. I hope all of the baptisms go through, but Satan is working hard as well.

You asked if i have to pay when i go to pick up packages. I don´t. The packages always go to Neuquén in the mission home and then they send them in the bolsas all to the different zones and we go pick up the bolsas in the post office. We don´t pay anything.

anway, i hope things are all good there. We´re working hard down here! keep praying for us and try to share the gospel with anyone you meet. love you

elder newey

Zone Conference

Caleta is pretty small. It´s the biggest city this far south but it has like 70,000 inhabitants. I guess that´s not that small haha but compared to comodoro that has like 170,000 people, it´s small. Bariloche only has around 40,000 if i remember right (maybe it was 140,000 haha) so it´s the smallest city i´ve been in yet, but it seemed bigger because the city was bigger for all the tourist attractions. Its a pretty flat city and there is a big statue called "El Gorocito" in centro. I can actually see it in the refection of my computer screen right now, we´re in a cyber right by it. The church is just around the corner so we are around the statue a lot even though it is technically out of our area. But yeah, the people are pretty receptive. We have a big branch about 100 people go every week so things are good. It does actually get really cold here but it almost never snows. I´ll probably still be here in the winter so i´ll let you know how it is haha. Based on the patterns of other missionaries (which i´m not following very well) i´ll probably have 5 transfers here which would be 7 and a half months so i´ll be here for a while, but that is no set thing, just a guess on my part.

Neuquén is really big yeah. just driving through it, I saw a McDonald´s and really wanted to go buy a burger haha. Every month we´ll be travelling up there so i´ll get to know it a little more each time.

That´s way awesome that Holli is having a girl! I bet you are all going nuts haha. When is she supposed to have it again?

So kessa gets her permit this week? is it weird to think that all of us will be able to drive? She told me who she likes but i don´t know if you know yet so i won´t say anything haha.

Did you ever see Elder Whitaker? I´d like to see how he´s doing, if he´s going back to school and when and stuff like that.

I´ll be writing a letter to Brady as soon as possible which on the mission could actually be a pretty long time haha. Ryan´s farewell is Sunday? So does he go in the next wednesday, the 16th? things are all happening really fast, or maybe they just seem fast to me. In the mission, you live in the week. You hardly think about the date until planning session on thursdays and that´s only to think about the next week that you´ll be living in a few days haha so it´s a little different. I´m really excited for general conference that´s coming up and i hope my converts in Bariloche will go and hear a prophet.

I should get to call you all on mother´s day but i hear it is pretty hard to get a calling card down here, it isn´t like Bariloche where everyone is a tourist and wants to call home haha. It´s all good though, because i still have the calling cards you sent with me so i´ll just use those.

Anyway, we have some baptisms planned for this weekend and then on the 19th, we have a bunch so we´re hoping all will go through well. anyway, i think that´s it for the week. I love you

elder newey

March and Babies

yeah i´m so excited for Brady! do you know if he is going out for the whole two years or is he just finishing out his time as if he had never gone home?

It´s going to be weird to have a niece or nephew but it´s going to even more awesome! i´m so excited i told holli i´ll be buying an argentina jersey for him/her as soon as i know the gender haha.

Yeah the new area is good, i haven´t received any letter from Lukas but i don´t see him writing a lot of letters. he´s more of a facebook guy haha. My birthday package arrived just fine, thanks for everything, i loved it. I can´t think of anything else i need but if i do, i´ll let you know haha. I still have all of the epipens you sent with me. i show all my comps how to use them just in case and they all get really excited and want to use them but i haven´t had to yet...:)

Yeah, i hear the second year of the mission goes even faster than the first and i´ve been having a lot of dreams lately of when i get home from the mission. One where no one was there in the airport when i arrived and i had to use pesos to travel home haha.

This week was interesting. Early in the week, we stopped a guy in the street and started talking to him. We asked if we could share a message about Jesus Christ and he said he doesn´t worship that side. so my comp asked him what he worshiped and he said "the lord Satan" and he was dead serious. He called himself a Satanist and said he was reading the two Bibles that Satanists have. I think in the beginning of my mission i would have been scared to talk to a satanist but now we just testified as representatives of Christ that the path he was taking in his life will not bring him happiness. He knows he´s going to Hell he just says it won´t be a bad place for him because Satan already knows him as a friend and not an enemy. He´s all messed up in his head. Maybe something we said will get to him though.

Then right after talking to that guy, my comp and i were walking through a neighborhood and these two groups of girls started yelling at each other right in front of us. We quickly walked away and i was joking about how they were going to start a gang fight and then at the bottom of the street, we hear screams and stuff and looking back up, they were indeed fighting it out! Haha it was a funny fight though because they were just pulling hair and some of the girls were on the ground curled up in balls while other ones dragged them around by their hair. craziness. As you can imagine, we thought it was kind of funny haha.

Then at the end of the week, we found out we´re going to be traveling up to Neuquén for zone council with president and the other zone leaders so we´ll be preparing for that. We leave tomorrow in the afternoon, get there wednesday and get back here thursday so basically our whole week is shot.

anyway, i have to end up, i´m short on time. I love you all.

elder newey

Caleta Olivia

I think you might have looked up Neuquén´s weather because it is definitely not temperate down here. It was hot for like 4 days down here and everyone was saying how weird is was. this is like my first area just further south, i´m actually an hour away from Comodoro, my first area. I´m glad to be a zone leader, because if you aren´t, you´re in the middle of no where in the rest of the zone. The zone is small to begin with, with only 10 missionaries, and it´s super spread out so at least i am in a rather big city. The wind is just like in my first area, but i´ll get over it.

My new companion is really cool he´s a lot like elder whitaker and he´s a lot more obedient to the rules than i´ve been lately which is probably why i was put with him, to learn some obedience haha. we work way hard though and it´s satisfying the success we have.

i´m emailing on tuesday because we had a visit from elder Aidukaitis from the area seventy. It was way awesome but i can´t do a very good job of explaining what he said. He just opened up our eyes to the importance of goals and planning well and just basically kicked our butts in a good way. he told us how we should be baptizing EVERY WEEK and if we aren´t, it´s because we don´t have faith, which i realized is true. it was super awesome to hear him and i learned so much. we´re going to have a ton of success and he changed a lot of old traditions we had that we didn´t even realize we had. like usually, we just do contacts to find new investigators, but he opened our eyes to how much time we waste doing contacts. he said how if we keep doing the same thing, but expect different results, we´re idiots. Haha that´s something i´ve been saying my whole mission but no one thought the same as me so i could never try to really change things. I think that´s why i loved my last area so much because i was doing things in a different way. my last week, we received 7 real references and we only did 87 contacts because we were trying something different. My zone leader in bariloche got mad at me because we didn´t do a lot of contacts so i tried to show him that we found double what we would have found if we had just done contacts all day. Hopefully elder aidukaitis can open everyone´s eyes down here and we can start having a lot more success.

that´s about it for the week, i've got to be finishing. I love you all

elder newey

A Sad Transfer!

*Kind of hard for a Mom to read that her missionary is sad! I think Hayden may need a few extra prayers this week. -Gretchen

hey sorry I don´t have much time, President threw a curve ball at us and I´m leaving for the south again, called Coleta Olivia to be a zone leader...but yeah I leave in the afternoon today and I´m super sad to be leaving. I only got one transfer in this area and I just had enough time to get really close to the members and now I have to leave. We worked so hard too this area is going to have like 8 baptisms next transfer and I won´t be a part of them which is really depressing. I´m trying to look on the bright side but yesterday, I was just so sad. I was literally bawling in the house of a member who I feel is part of my family and it´s so hard. I´ll adjust though.

I also got to talk to elder whitaker just barely. He´s having his interview with president today and he got to call me and we had a good chat. He sounds really good and it made me feel really good to be able to talk to him again. say hi to him for me when you go hear his homecoming talk.

anyway, my new area is literally the bottom of the earth, even further south than Comodoro, my first area so I´ll be back to wind and dirth without a green thing in sight. It´s hard to leave Bariloche because I love it so much but I´ll be ok. I hear my new comp is a stud so that should be fun. I´ll try to email you when I get to my new area. I get to comodoro tomorrow at 5 in the morning and I have to wait until 8 for another bus that takes me to coleta and i´ll finally arrive at around 10. so that´s the schedule. that´s all I have time to write. Love you! wish me luck as zone leader!!!

elder newey