Dear family,

hey, you like the title of my email. haha. We just went to an all you can eat pizza and empenada place as a district. it was actually really good. the pizza here is weird, but it still tastes good. i still like pizza from the states more though...sorry argentina. haha. but, they do interesting things to their pizza, that is for sure. the typical pizza is tomato sauce and mozzarella chesse with tomato and one green olive on top. but another typical is papas fritas (or french fries...but usually for their hot dogs and pizza their fries are small little things...not normal sized) or fried egg. they actually put hard boiled eggs in practically everything they eat, pizza, salads, empenadas, etc. They think it is weird to eat eggs for breakfast...especially hard boiled eggs. haha they don´t have pepperoni for their pizza and it is sad. it was kind of hard for me at first, because i love my pepperoni.

anyway, enough about the food...haha. This week was interesting for sure. My first week leading someone around all the time, planning all of our visits, etc. I will admit, I learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes, and hopefully can do better this week. haha The good thing was that we never once got lost. oh yeah, and yesterday i completed 5 months in the mission. wow, that was fast. before you know it i´ll be home. and i´ll be sad.

It was crazy. I don´t even remember what happened because it was so crazy all the time. Let´s see. Oh, I know. no wait, i actually don´t. Oh wait, yes. jk I lied. So this week...I think it was Saturday we were walking down a street to our next visit. We stopped for a second and checked our planners to verify where we were going and such, and in the mean-time some kid (maybe 20 years old...haha I call him a kid) started talking to us. He gave us a pamphlet and told us that he was a missionary. We listened patiently because we know what it is like to have people disregard the importance of your message. He started off by saying they were Evangelists and inviting us to their church. Then his "companion", either his father or a friend, but he was the pastor of their church, started talking to us. He started bashing on Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. I didn´t want to bible bash (or did I? haha) but i knew I shouldn´t either way, so I held my tounge. Then I thought, "the most powerful tool I have is my testimony" so i started to bear my testimony about how I know this is the Church of Jesus Christ because we have a prophet and apostles. Then he said that they do too. haha. of course. anyway, eventually we said that we could go on all day debating, and so we invited them to come to church. i told them if they came to our meetings in the morning we would go to theirs. then we closed with a prayer. first i prayed. then the pastor prayed...and I was scared. I´m serious. I felt so terrible inside. the 20 year old started shouting as the pastor prayed saying that he felt the holy spirit, and such. I wanted to cry because I was so sad that Satan had their souls so wrapped around his finger. It is really sad to see the confusion people have..but more than that, when their hearts are so closed, they refuse to listen to others. the difference between our prayer and theirs was night and day. I know this is the true church of Christ.

Oh yeah, and another great run in with some Jehovah´s witnesses. We were teaching a man named Eduardo in his garage because we can´t enter his house. Anyway, the Jehovah´s witness missionaries knocked on his door and arranged to come back another time. You could tell they felt really uncomfortable. I wanted to laugh because of the irony of the situation.

Anyway, those are my adventures of the week.

Love,
Sarah

p.s. Gene, hang in there. I love you, and I´m praying for you.

Dear familiares,

So, my "mother" in the mission has left to a different area, and I´m left here in Ituzaingo 4 to show my "aunt" around. I´m really greatful for the time I had with Hermana Salazar. I learned a lot, we had fun, and we are great friends. I hope she takes the offer from President Benton and goes to BYU to finish up her schooling. (President Benton told her that he would pay for her schooling to BYU...such a blessing!). That would be awesome!!

My new companion is from Argentina as well. She is from Jujuy, Argentina. Her name is Hermana Estefania Claros. I have a feeling that she is just what this area needs right now. We just changed our bishopric and from what it sounds like she is really good about working with the bishopric. I think I will be able to learn a lot from her.

Ok, this week was a good one. We worked hard and are continually seeing miracles. One miracle was that we finally entered the house of Florencia and Carla. Now we are focusing on their mother Veronica. They are all awesome,and we are great friends with them. They live in a very small house and don´t have a lot of "things" and they are ashamed of it. We never once entered their home before their baptism, and no one outside of their family has entered their house for years. Anyway, my companion so kindly told them I would cut their hair. So we went, and we were let into their house. The truth of the matter is that their house is a lot better than many that we have entered, and we are trying to help them understand that worldly things aren´t important. Also, because H. Salazar was leaving the area, we got to have a dinner with them last night. So we entered the house again. I think from now on we aren´t going to have many problems entering and teaching.

I love teaching from the scripture found in Helaman 5:12. It talks about the rock of Christ and how we must have our foundation built on Christ, so when the difficult things of life come, we will stay strong. So how do we build our foundation in Christ? Through studying the scriptures every day, praying everyday, and going to church every sunday. I truly believe if we do those 3 things always, we will never fall when tough times come, and we will always be able to rely on our testimony to carry us. When people go in active, it is because they hit a rough spot in their life, and they weren´t doing those 3 things consistently so their testimony wasn´t very strong. It is really sad to see that happen.

Anyway, all is swell here in Ituzaingo/Castelar, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Chao,
Love Sarah

Hey familia!

So, we had a weird day today, and I have no time to write, but this week was great! We had such a great miracle. Florencia and Carla San Emeterio started off the week by not wanting to be baptized on Saturday. They both wanted to wait a while, so we challenged them to do the baptisimal interview. If they "passed" the interview then they could decide if they would be baptized or not. Well, after the interview, Flor had decided to be baptized, but Carla still wanted to wait. So we told her to pray about it, and tell us the following day. The funny thing was that Flor didn´t want to commit to be baptized this saturday until Elder Paxman promised her that if she were baptized, her sister and mother would both be baptized. She said yes right away and we very firm in her decision. Carla told Elder Day in her interview that she knew that God wanted her to be baptized that very day, but still said no. haha how is that possible? anyway, we prayed a LOT for a miracle. we got one with Flor signing her membership paper and then the second came when Carla the next day told us that she would be baptized that saturday. The baptism was beautiful. Those girls are just great.

Also, their mom went to the baptism and loved it, then she went to church the next day and loved that as well. She gave wonderful insight in the classes and everything. She is going to be a yw leader or something I can just see it. We also had around 115 people in sacrament meeting on Sunday too. But that is because they changed the bishopric. It will be interesting to see how the missionary work changes in this ward now that we have a different bishopric. Our ward mission leader is now the second counselor...and he loves missionary work, so i think things will improve.

oh, and my district leader was surprised to learn that he had to pack up and leave (we all thought he would stay another transfer) because he is the new branch president for a branch that is out in the country. yikes! crazy things happen when you are a missionary.

anyway, that is it. time to go work! love you all,
sarah

Dear family,
Man, 40 minutes really isn´t long enough...but that´s ok. Rules are rules, and I intend to obey all the rules. I know blessings will come if I do...and I hope those blessings are more investigators that want to be baptized.

Ok, let´s see. Erik, I really liked the email you sent me about touching their hearts as well as their minds. I´ve really noticed that how satan works on the investigators. We have two sisters Carla (13) and Florencia (16) (carla reminds me a lot of my sisters...a mix between abby and eliza) and they will commit to be baptized and then if we don´t see them for a couple of days, we go back to their house and they say,¨"I don´t want to be baptized anymore". But then after we teach them and resolve their doubts, they want to be baptized. We have re-scheduled their baptism several times. haha The plan is for them to be baptized this Saturday, so prayers on behalf of Flor and Carla would be much appreciated. They are very smart, and Flor always has such good questions that are too deep for her to understand right now. But when she gets baptized, if she can stay active, she will learn a lot about the gospel for sure!

Let´s see, what else? Oh yeah, here is a weird fact. I guess Mother´s Day is usually in May in most countries. But here, it is in October. We told the members that we got to call home because it was "el día de la madre" and they were all were saying that it wasn´t mother´s day. haha different cultures....

Anyway, lots of love,
Sarah

P.S. good luck with the floods...i hope nothing terrible happens.

Dear family,

Yay, I´m an aunt!!...again... Ok, I guess the name patrick hunter is ok. :) but i think if he goes by a nickname it should be rick. pat is a little bit girly i think. haha or his middle name. i like that. and yes i expect more pictures please, because i can´t really tell what he looks like, so i wanna see more. oh, and thanks for the picture of maxwell....oh how i miss him.

oh and the picture of the snow...thanks. that is crazy that there is so much snow, but it doesn´t seem that weird, because it is getting cold here. it hasn´t been too bad, but yesterday was pretty cold. i´m glad i have my sleeping bag. they don´t believe in insulation here...so it is cold at night because we don´t have a heater. well, we have a space heater that we use in the mornings during study.

everyone here is talking about all the hurricanes or whatever that are going on in the US. what´s up with that? something like more than 200 in one day or something. kind of crazy.

dad, i use my exercise time in the mornings to stretch...:) i think i´m improving. the problem is i can´t stretch very well because my muscles are cold even after i try to warm them up. but yes, i think i´m a bit more flexible!!! wahoo.

ok, information for mothers day. i´m guessing that you have church at 11:00 because if i remember correctly i gave my farewell at 9:00 so you should be at 11:00 now. anyway, if this is the case, i´m going to try to call at 1:30-2pm argentina time. that should be 9:30-10am utah time. if i´m doing all the math right. anyway. i get to talk for 40 min. If erik, aubrie, maxwell, jacob, becky, and patrick could be there...i would really, really love it. anyway, that´s all i know about calling. I´m super duper excited! if that isn´t going to work, let me know by thursday, and i will try to change it. my guess is that this should work out fine.

ok, hmmm, this past week. oh, we had a lot of miracles.

#1 one of our investigators is 51 and is handicapped. he is in a wheel chair, and his wheel chair is really, really, really bad. getting him to church is a real struggle because he doesn´t have any money for a taxi and he has no one to take him. his family that lives in a house behind his doesn´t take care of him at all...it is really sad. anyway, the other day a sister in the ward said that she was asking around for a wheel chair and she said she found one that he could borrow until his can be fixed by a brother in the ward. what a miracle! seriously. we have been praying to find a solution for his situation, and had been asking around, and nothing until now.

#2 last tuesday we had zone conference and we as a companionship were really humbled and felt like we could accomplish more, if we made our prayers more sincere and more specific. we returned home and started planning for our investigators a little bit and we prayed very specifically to set baptisimal dates with our specific investigators. then we went to work. in zone conference we learned a lot about the power of prayer and being bold. we learned about how important it was to invite people to be baptized asap rather than wait until they understood more. so, that´s what we did. we prayed very fearvently that we would be able to get more baptismal dates set. we went to work, and that night we committed 2 investigators that had been struggling to be baptized!! it was such a miracle!!! They were investigators, that we really didn´t think we would get anywhere with, and now they have baptismal dates. I hope they will continue to keep their commitments so they can be baptized real soon.

the power of prayer is incredible. i have a strong testimony that prayers are answered. especially specific prayers. but not always when we want them answered. when the timing corresponds, that is just another blessing, but always prayers are answered. just because it isn´t in our timing does not mean that Heavenly Father doesn´t hear our prayers. It just means he knows what is best and we need to have faith and trust that everything will turn out.

ok, and here are some more pictures i thought you might like...

001- my mtc district at 4am before elder andreasen and h. springer headed off to paraguay. haha elder croft and i are still in our pjs.
002-our layover in atlanta crew. this is in the hotel we stayed in. haha what a weird adventure. it was fun though.
003-we ate burger king a couple days ago. i don´t usually like bk all that much, but here anything american tastes so much better....haha.
004-from the left, dustin, me, dilan. our two cutest most recent converts. haha. they are a riot.
005-jesica. the mom of dilan and dustin. she is great. and oober pretty huh? :)
006-my pascuas (aka easter) present. a home-made white chocolate egg that a member gave us. :) made my day.


anyway, until sunday...for the fam. and all my friends...until...next june/july...haha

love sarah.