Tattle Tale Week

So the less actives down here always crack me up. They love giving references. We got like 5 from this one guy on Monday. His name is Washington (that is a common first name down here). We had been looking for him for 3 months. But we stopped because every address everyone gave us was bogus. On Monday though, I felt like what we had planned wasn´t what we should do. So I told Elder Yaques, and he said "I feel like we should go over to Pres. Cabrera´s land, right now." (Our branch pres has a piece of land he´s building on.) So we went, and our branch pres was there. He gave us some instructions on how to get to Washington´s house. So we followed his instructions, and finally found this guy. These were the first words out of his mouth, "Sorry we moved and were hiding, it´s just what everyone does. Everyone that goes inactive hides. It´s just what you do. It´s just a part of the cycle of being a member of the church. You get baptized, are active for a while, then you go inactive and move so that nobody knows where you live. Then you get active again, then go inactive and move again. That´s just the way it is. It´s been that way for 30 years since we got baptized in Uruguay. For example, over there..." and he proceeded to rat out like 5 less active families that we had been looking for and had to stop looking for, for lack of a valid address. So we´ll hit them up and see who else we can get addresses for.

We also went on splits this week. While we were on splits, Elder Yaques (who stayed in our area with Elder Wagstaff) went to visit a less active 15 year old, Agustín. He lives in the Fonavi, and in the Fonavi there are no addresses. People just say "The green door on the second floor of the stairs in the monobloc next to the Hasperht´s." In other words, it´s impossible to find people, but, Agustín gave really specific directions on how to find 2 less active families and another 15 year old the missionaries were teaching about a year ago. Found all 3 :). Now we just gotta get him (Agustín) active again.

So I got sick of sleeping under a blanket during the summer to escape the mosquitos, so I decided to take a page out of Tanner´s book, and ate a spoonful of garlic before I went to bed. Didn´t put on bug spray or anything. I was able to sleep above the blanket, and didn´t get bit once 😁. Unfortunately, the garlic had some negative side affects. My breath was the worst thing I have ever smelt. It forced Elder Yaques under two blankets to avoid the smell. I don´t recommend that anyone do it, no matter how bad the mosquitos are, your breath will be worse.

New Year´s was nuts. Down here, it´s not cold at all, so people go outside and go crazy for New Year´s. We had to be in our pensh at 7 pm on the 31st, and couldn´t leave until the 2nd. Luckily though, we were allowed to sleep with other missionaries. So the other Elder´s in our district came over. It was pretty fun. There were a ton of fireworks going off that night, and we found out the main reason why we couldn´t leave. It wasn´t for physical safety, but our spiritual (I´m sure the missionaries in the city Rosario had to stay in more for there physical safety). It would not be a good idea to allow all 130 or so of us 18-24 young men to be out on the street during this time. Lot´s of temptation.

Anyways, this week was just an overall blast, and I learned a lot about following the spirit and about love. I am pretty grateful for this opportunity I have to serve a mission. I strongly recommend serving a mission if you´re considering it. It is totally worth it in every aspect. It´s a blast, you make eternal friends, and you learn a ton. You learn things you didn´t know that there are to learn. It´s awesome!

Elder Brown

P.S. Sorry I haven´t sent pics for a few weeks, the computers in this Cyber´s have less computing power than my ipod shuffle.