Garbage roasting o'er an open fire......

December 6, 2010

Garbage roasting o’er an open fire….

Kind of like chestnuts, but usually people just roast garbage here.
It´s their way of "cleaning" and boy does it just get me in the Christmas spirit!

Hna. Collette and I are both kind of weirded out by this "hot Christmas" thing so we´re doing our best to sing Christmas songs and decorate the apartment and... stay cool. But I´m sure we´ll feel more Christmasy as it gets closer. We´re pretty excited to celebrate our first Christmases in Argentina!

We´re just busy here getting Ismael ready for his baptism and fighting the rest of our investigators to get them to church... Ismael was so funny yesterday. It was his first time going to our ward and an hermano asked if he wanted to come back next week and he said, "YES!
And the week after and the week after that and the week after that..."
haha. He really loved it. He especially loves the classes because he´s allowed to make comments. He keeps saying, "MUCHO mejor que la católica" (MUCH better than the Catholic). He´s just so great!

Today for P-day we went to a birthday party of a little boy in our ward who turned 5. His mom wanted us to come to talk to all her non-member friends. She´s so great! So she introduced us to a lot of them, and they were surprised at how normal we were. haha. Maybe they´ll let us in their houses now to baptize their families... But one of this hermana´s (Claudia´s) sons had a friend there and he wants to come to mutual now and we´re pretty pumped for him.

We have pretty great, funny things happen almost every day but I always forget to write about them. We only speak Spanish in the street, so Hna. Collette says some funny things sometimes. Like, "I feel dangerous" instead of "I feel scared" and she talks about her "nietos" (grandchildren) instead of her "sobrinos" (nieces and nephews). I wish I had more funny stories like that... too bad I already knew a lot of Spanish when I got here. And then there are the times when she starts speaking to me in French instead of Spanish because she gets confused sometimes... Those are fun, too. And just the random, funny things we see. Like a man crawling out from under the fence of the golf course, saying "buen día," and walking away like it´s normal. Or when a little boy was screaming and flapping his arms around and chasing his little, terrified dog all over the yard. We laugh a lot and have a lot of fun. But I guess Canada (you know, my old roommate from Canada) doesn´t like those stories so much. She wants to hear more about the suffering... Well, just so you know the mission really is hard, but the good times more than make up for that.
What´s the point in talking about the hard times?

I love it here, and I´m thinking about not coming home. You better start giving me some reasons to come back there. (Yes, Dad, capitalism is one reason to go home.) I do love you all, but I think I love this work more! We´ll see what happens in a few months when President tries to kick me out of Argentina.

Love,
Hna. LaPray