Adios Mayo, Bienvenido Junio

May 25th is a national holiday in Argentina.  It is referred to as the May revolution and was the day the first independent government was set up by the people of Argentina separate from the Spanish government.  It is a big deal here.  Every single branch held a social that day to celebrate.  Since I was still feeling under the weather, I missed out on all the activities, but Elder Rhoades went party hopping and visited as many of the wards as he could.  Mission life isn't so bad when you can party hop and count that as missionary work!

Apparently, the typical food eaten on this holiday is called, Locro, which many of the branches
served.

Branch 1 however, fixed this stew for their celebration.  Here's what meal prep looks like when cooking for a crowd.

And here is the finished results

I don't know.  To me, it looks pretty close to locro.

Elder Rhoades came home in a good mood from the parties as he had a chance to fly his dragon kite at Branch 3's party and the kids had a great time being chased by the dragon kite.

The last week in May had us working at half speed.  I was feeling better but still not 100%  A pretty nasty cough plagued me and limited what I could do, but I did get out and do a few things.

We did do a Family Home Evening on Tuesday, May 28th with the Alvarez family, the one that is struggling with an 18 year old son.  They live in Branch 3 area and are a bit out of town on what they call a "quinta", which is a larger piece of property.  We taught about prophets and studying the words of modern-day prophets can provide us with answers to our problems today.  We used a talk by Elder Eyring from April's General Conference.  I will include part of his talk as our spiritual thought for the week.  We then played a game that used the names of the modern-day apostles.  It was a bit hard for them to pronounce the gringo names but by the end of the game, they knew those names which before our lesson the only modern day prophet name they knew was Pres. Nelson.

We picked up another new member family to start working with.  A lady and four of her children (17, 13, 11, 9) were baptized so we are now visiting them.  She has one additional son who is not baptismal age yet.  But 4 of the 5 kids (the younger ones) are male, so if we can keep them active this would be a great boost to the Priesthood and YM programs in Branch 3.

Ochoa family w/Elders L-R:  Elder Rios, Giovanni, Victoria, Sergio, Paola, Albano, Isaias,Elder Navaroo

Just as we are starting to add more appointments to our schedule, we got a call from the Rosario mission office telling us we needed to go get fingerprints taken asap as next week we would be traveling to take care of paperwork to allow us to obtain our visas so we can stay in country.  Argentina lets you enter the country without a visa and you can be in country for three months without one, but after that you have to leave the country or get a visa.  If you don't you are considered illegal.

The church has been having difficulties getting enough visas granted for all the missionaries serving here.  The church has had to resort to a work around solution in the meantime.  Many missionaries are having to leave the country and go to Montevideo, Uruguay for a day and then come back just to reset the three month time frame.  Our three month deadline is June 27th.  So it was good to hear that there were plans to apply for the visas.

So the next day we made sure to get the fingerprints taken care of as without that, we couldn't start the visa process.

It was a bit stressful, as certain forms had to be filled out by the mission office, then sent to us and we had to be sure to have our passports with us when we went to our appointment, which was the very next day after receiving the phone call.  We had to go to the police station for the fingerprints and they did it the old fashion way with black ink...yuk!

We were fingerprinted in the US for our FBI background check but apparently those didn't count here and we had to do it again.  We breathed a sigh of relief once we were able to walk away with the completed forms that we were required to bring with us on Sunday afternoon to the mission office.

This week the EnglishConnect program finally got started.  The first class was Friday evening.  The member serving as the instructor, Sister Berta, is a certified English instructor here in Argentina.  So felt strongly that the class needed to be divided into two levels 1 & 2 as many of the member already have a good English background, which is true.  We met one member who has already studied Pathways and we have met other members that have a good English foundation.  So the first night she evaluated where the students were at and made some designation.  The Friday night class will be the EnglishConnect 2 class and Sunday evening will be the EnglishConnect 1 class.

The first lesson was learning the English alphabet.  We, as the assistants, got to teach the class the Alphabet song, you know, the one the kids sing as they learn their A-B-C's.  It was fun to do that with them.  We also help listen to them as they practice.

Saturday we spent the morning doing laundry and getting things packed for our trip to Rosario Sunday.  In the evening we had a Family Night planned with the San Martin branch.  We had spent weeks working with the members and elders getting everything in place.  It turned out to be a great activity.  The elders did a great job getting the word out and inviting people to come. We had 3 less active families there and two part member families there and an investigator family.  So we were able to get names and addresses for future visits.

We gave the lesson and the elders handled the game part (below)

Spiritual Thought for the Week:   "My promise to you is one that a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles once made to me.  I had said to him that because of choices some in our extended family had made, I doubted that we could be together in the world to come.  He said, as well as I can remember, "You are worrying about the wrong problem.  You just live worthy of the celestial kingdom, and the family arrangements will be more wonderful than you can imagine."  I believe that he would extend that happy hope to any of us in mortality who have done all we can to qualify ourselves an dour family members for eternal life.  I know that Heavenly Father's plan is a plan of happiness."  Henry B Eyring - "A Home Where the Spirit of the Lord Dwells"  General Conference April 2019