Ray Ban´s and Building Houses

Our super cheap Ray Ban´s

Real pretty sunset

Making raisins with our old grapes! We´ll see how well they turn out!

 

Horse that stopped by our pensh and left me a birthday present on our porch ;)

Laying bricks

So Empalme is a really different place. When I was in Casilda, I thought I got that small-town missionary game down perfectly. I was wrong. Empalme is so much smaller, and way different. I don´t know if I´ve talked about the siesta before, but, it´s basically national nap time. In Casilda, most people sleep from 2-4:30ish, but there is almost always someone outside you can talk to, and people are out in the streets all morning. In Empalme, people are outside (or inside and willing to talk) for like 3 1/2 hours a day, which makes missionary work really, really ineffective and super slow. Our effective hours are: 10:15-11:30 a.m. and 6-8:15 p.m. These people take their daytime sleep very seriously. I like it a lot, I would totally down to be live in an area like this. But, it just makes missionary work really slow and ineffective pretty much all day. Also, I feel like we are always on the bus going from city to city. I´m not even district or zone leader, and we have to leave our town, not just the area, the whole town, about 5 or so times a week.

Things are going great though. Even though it´s tough, I´m loving this place. Pretty much everyone we do talk to is super nice and willingly to talk for a few minutes in the street. The people are hilarious. The few members are awesome. One family in particular, family Cabanilla, is prolly the best family a missionary could ask for in his/ her area. They feed us every week. The husband always invites himself to go out and do visits with us (which is especially nice cuz he has a car, which definitely beats walking). And they bought me a tie pin of Argentina for my birthday. That was really sweet and awesome of them. Also, we have really proactive mission leader´s, both from the ward and the stake. Always ask us when they can come visit certain less active member´s or investigators with us. It´s way sweet.

So we found some super sweet Ray Ban´s for 100 pesos (like 8 bucks). Pretty sure they´re fake, but they look real and are pretty nice. So, naturally, we each grabbed a pair. Now we got two pairs.

So Juan José Pilotto is totally changing my mission. This guy is really awesome, but worries us a ton. He made a ton of changes in his life, and stopped drinking and smoking cold turkey, and kept at it real well for about a month. About a week and a half ago, he messed up. We had a real great talk with him that day, and the spirit was super strong. Then, after that, he dropped off the map. He wasn´t at home when he said he would be, and when he was home (when we dropped by at unscheduled times) he wouldn´t get out of bed to talk to us. So, we were really worried he had been going to another town or city to drink. So, we decided we needed to do an intervention (that´s prolly the first time I´ve ever used that word other than to quote Nemo). So, we left the pensh early, and went to one of the farthest out bustops in Empalme, and got on and off every single bus that passed by, and asked the same question that we already knew the answer to "is this bus going Rosario?" the answer "No you have to catch a bus going the other way." The idea was, if JJP was on that bus, we would just buy a ticket anyways and ride with him until the last stop in Empalme, and try to convince him to get off with us there. I don´t think I´ve ever felt dummer in my missionary life than I did getting on about 10 or 15 busses asking the same question, getting the same answer, and getting off and facing the same people who had heard our previous attempts. Luckily, we didn´t see him on any bus. And ended up being able to talk to him later that night. It was a good talk.

We spent about 4 hours organizing our area book. I found out it was a complete disaster the other week, so, this week, we bought some things we needed to organize it, and then spent four hours organizing it. Hopefully it saves time in the future and someone can get baptized because of it.

On Friday we helped a less active guy build his house. It was pretty cool of him to let us lay the bricks. Most people we help don´t even trust us to make the cement mix, just enough to move the bricks. Laying bricks was pretty copado.

Hope you all have a great week!

Elder Brown

Matthew 22:36-38