Jan 7, 2013

Hey Everyone! This week was pretty great! I got my package, and just wanted to thank everyone for everything! It´s all absolutely awesome, and I love it! I´ve let my companion try some of the things I love, and he has liked the majority of it! Haha, not so much on the sour patch kids. They don´t really have sour candy in his country, in Ecuador. But I´ve been enjoying all of hte things like crazy, and all the little toys i´m going to give away to all the members today, so that´ll be really fun, i´ll be sure to take some pictures. We´ve also made a ton of Tacos, and cookies with the members, because nobody has any idea of what Tacos are, and they don´t have cookies here, so it´s pretty cool to see how much they all love them! We´ve got some fun family night plans too with some of the treats and things. I´ll be sure to take a lot of pictures so you can all see.

 

On monday for New Year´s Eve, we had an amazing experience with Maria y Evelyn y Ruth. They invited us over to eat with them, and they cooked some really awesome food for us. They made some chicken, with real Mexican salsa, which I haven´t had mexican salsa since I left the states, because they never eat it here, because Argentine´s hate spicy food, and they don´t want anything to do with it, but she knew me and my companion liked it, and was willing to make it for us, which was awesome. I also gave Ruth that Book of Mormon in drawings, and I gave them each a few pictures of the temple, and some CD´s of the Book of Mormon, and I was able to give them quite a bit of things, and little 5 year old Ruth was so excited, and they actually bought us some really cool gifts as well, and Ruth gave me one of her little stuffed bunny rabbits that she´s had since she was a little baby, and used it to sleep every night. It was really cool to see how thankful they were, and how they just wanted to give us everything. I really wanted to give them everything I had! I was so thankful for them. It was a really awesome experience, and it was absolutely perfect. Just how I pictured my new years being, even before the mission.

 

The last few days it has rained probably harder than i´ve ever seen in my whole life. A HUGE storm came in from Brazil, and it´s been hammering us with just buckets, and buckets of rain for the past 2 days. But yesterday, even with the rain, Albertina, our investigator from Brazil, (Maria´s cousin) came with her daughter, and they absolutely loved it. Plus, she gave us each a 2 dollar bill of Brazilian "Reales", which was really really cool of her, and she also gave us a bag of brown sugar, because here they basically don´t have brown sugar. It´s really hard to find, and really expensive when you can find it, but in Brazil they use the exact same kind as we do in the states, so i´m really excited to be able to use that. It was pretty funny too, because yesterday we went to teach them, and they actually got locked out of their house, and we had to break a little bit of the window to get in. It reminded me of that mobsters and mormons movie. It was pretty funny. We looked like robbers for a few minutes.

 

On Thursday we went to Resistencia to renew my visa, but their system was down, so we weren´t able to do it, and they let us go into the city and look around. It was awesome. It´s so nice, and huge! But the travel was pretty brutal. It was 8 hours there and back, and we had to travel at 1 am in the morning, so i´m pretty beat, but it was a really fun experience. Resistencia is huge, it´s like salt lake, but with a ton of different stores and things. Pretty cool to be able to just walk around and check out all the new technology that I haven´t seen in a year, because i´ve been in small little isolated towns my whole mission, but I love it. It was a really fun week, and this week it looks like we´ll have to travel a few more times, but i´m excited, we´ll see how it goes. Oh, I also got to see Elder Adams! And we took a picture, even though I had just woken up from the 8 hour trip. So that was fun to see him. Thanks for everything, and all the support, and all the prayers. They are helping a lot, and we´re still working really hard here, doing what we can. I´m praying for everyone, thanks again for the package, I love it! Have a wonderful week. Love Elder Allsup