Life is Sweet!

We started March off with the baby blessing of Maicol Nelson Rolon on March 1st.

We have worked a lot with this family and we were pleased they wanted to bless their son.  They have only been semi-active since being baptized almost a year ago.  Work demands have really made it hard for Gustavo to be in town much, but they are good people and try to live the gospel the best they know how.  E. Rhoades was able to be part of the blessing circle.

We also started the month off with another baptism later that day.  This one in Rama San Martin, Nayla, a 9 year old girl of a less active family.  Her grandparents are stalwart members of Rama 3 but the parents (Romina & Santiago) had lost their way a bit.  The girl has been attending Primary regularly and has wanted to be baptized but without the parent involvement, it hasn't happened.  Well at the end of the year when we had the big flooding going on, the mother had an experience that softened her heart and her and her husband have been coming back to activity.  Things have progressed well enough that baptism was in the cards.  The grandfather baptized her.  It was a very sweet service. 

We had a very nice Family Home Evening in our home on March 2nd with one of our favorite families from Rama San Martin, the Cabrera family and new member of the church, Lis and her mom, Dana (who happens to be the daughter of Sis. Arana, the Relief Society President in the branch and is working towards baptism)  We are dropping the ball and not remembering to take photos!  Here is a previous photo of Bro. Cabrera at a youth activity we had.

On March 3rd we took out one of our favorite families to dinner to celebrate the baptism of the father a few weeks ago.  Victor and E. Rhoades made a connection early in the mission as Victor is an auto mechanic.  We have watched as their family, one by one, has come into the church...and they are solid!  We love to see the gathering of Israel take place by small and simple means.

Not the best photo, but it's a photo, right?  The people don't go out to eat here much so it was a real treat for them.  This is a restaurant called Los Nonos (which is the endearing word for grandparents) and it is basically a big canvas tent on the side of the highway near our apartment.  We had our doubts about the food, but it turned out the lomito (steak sandwich) we had was excellent.  Good enough that we will probably come back again on our own.  L-R (us, Rosana, Tania, Victor)

We've been meeting with most of the recently baptized members.  Magali indicated she had interest in family history so we met with her and introduced her to family search and got her set up with an account and helped her enter what family info she had.  It is really difficult here to get good data on family members.   The culture to just live together instead of getting married creates splintered families a lot and then blended families and so they tend to know one side of the family and not the other.  Also family record keeping is not real common.  But we entered what we could.  She had incomplete dates for some of the people, only day and month.

Later on my own I went and did some sleuthing around.  Since we helped with the BillionGrave cemetery project here in Venado Tuerto and a couple of her ancestors are buried at the cemetery, I figured I might get lucky and find death details for them.  I did find one of them, her mother's mother.

 This will complete her records and make her eligible for temple work in the future.  Sweet!

We've done a number of new convert discussions about the gift of the Holy Ghost to help them learn how to use this precious gift they have just received.  It truly takes a lifetime of practice and effort to develop this gift to it's fullest.  A bit like any relationship we may want to have!

March 6th we witnessed another very sweet baptism experience.  Jonaton Valentino, the 9 year old son of David, a recent convert was baptized.  His father has received the Aaronic Priesthood and was able to do the ordinance.  How wonderful  and touching it was!

E. Rhoades & I had to split up since we had two activities at the same time.  But David is such an eager convert.  Our discussions with him have just been a delight.  He is always so grateful for what we teach him and asked good questions that show he truly wants to learn and take in the light of the gospel into his life.

E. Rhoades held down the fort at our movie night activity for this month while I attended the baptism.  We showed the T.C. Christensen movie, The Fighting Preacher.  What a great, great, movie!

It retells the true story about Willard Bean and his wife, Rebecca who are called in the early 1900's to serve a mission at the Joseph Smith farm in Palmyra, New York.  They go into a hostile environment towards the church and are told to work on improving the attitudes of the people there towards the "Mormons".  The mission call was supposed to be for 5 years. The movie shows the different things they endured because of the hardness of the hearts of the people and the different things they tried to change that.  Finally they realize that service and ministering with love would be the key and they dedicate themselves to doing all they can in that way...the movie finishes with them leaving to go back to Utah after 25 years of living and serving there.  It shows so wonderfully the miracles that can happen through ministering so we felt inspired to show this to the members.

Again, we had a smaller crowd than we would have liked, but the district Relief Society president saw the movie and that is a win!

March 7th we had to meet with the auto insurance rep for our rental car to document our accident we were in back at the beginning of February.  We've been so worried the whole mission that at some point we would have an accident and we did.  The motorcycles here go around at night with no lights on, they pass on either side of the vehicle and it can be scary.  Luckily for us, it happened right in front of our house as we were turning into our driveway.  So we were not going very fast at all.  A moto with no lights, painted black, zoomed past us on the left just as we turned to enter our driveway.  A dad and his 15 year old daughter were on the moto.  They fell down, didn't do much damage to our car, but they weren't very happy about it and somehow acted like we were the ones at fault!

 Above the scratches from impact.  Below the paint from the moto as it hit our front driver fender.

The man left the scene of the accident with his moto at one point.  We didn't understand what was going on.  The second luckily thing was an ambulance just happened to be driving behind us.  They looked at the two for injuries and afterwards talked to us about what was going on.  Apparently the man was also driving without paperwork on his moto, so he left the scene before we knew to call the police.  If the police had shown up and the moto was there he would have been fined or the moto impounded because he was driving without paperwork.

The man even came to our house a couple of days later to ask for insurance info.  When we asked for his, he refused to give us any information...we didn't even get his name or address.  We are amazed that the insurance is taking his claim seriously.  But hopefully they are only doing due diligence and  that is all.  We told the adjuster our opinion, don't pay a dime!

March 7th in the evening we had another baptismal service.  This one was a combined Rama 1 & 2 event.  This was a sweet experience as well as we got to watch Damian Farias perform the baptism for his niece, Ludmila.

 Above - Damian dressed in white with his niece Ludmila & her mom, Damian's sister, Yanina

This is Ludmila's complete family.  The mom took the discussions with Ludmila and would like to be baptized but would need to get married.  Her husband is a good guy and supportive of Ludmila's involvement at church.  He's attended for the Primay program and now for her confirmation, but he isn't interested in getting married.  So prayers are going to need to be said and faith exercised for awhile.

Rama 2 also had a young woman be baptized who's been attending for about six months with one of her friends who is a member.  We don't know much about her.  Her name is Tatiana.

Tatiana & her mother

Refreshments afterwards are standard here.  So we headed out to the soccer court out back to enjoy some goodies.

 We had a great crowd at this baptism.  The youth really came out to support Tatiana.

Ludmila's mom bakes cakes for a living so no surprise that we had a beautiful cake as part of the refreshments.

No soooner were we done with the baptism then we had a district activity to kick off the seminary year.  Jessica Ramirez, our return missionary who served in Peru, has been called to be the seminary instructor and planned an awesome activity.  She had asked E. Rhoades to participate.

Since the Book of Mormon is the course material this year, she did up a giant Book of Mormon that was sitting front and center below the stage.

On both sides she had banners showing the names of major Book of Mormon prophets with a couple of latter-day characters involved with the Book of Mormon as well.

She then had different priesthood brethern dress up as one of these men and then they each took turns talking about their role in the Book of Mormon.

 Above is Nephi talking to the audience.  Below the prophets listen and wait their turn.

Guess who E. Rhoades was?

 Just so you know, he designed his outfit all by himself!  He played father, Lehi.  Below is one of the full-time missionaries, E. Landvatter, playing Oliver Cowdery.  Looks pretty authentic to me.

 Below at the end they pose for a group photo.  Some of them did a wonderful job with their costumes.  Valentino Allasia, who played Joseph Smith gave the first vision story from memory.  That boy is ready for a mission!  He is 17 and will be part of our next mission prep class when we start it next month.

My count for piano students has gone up to 7.  Where was the interest back in the early part of our mission when I tried to get lessons going??  Two kids from the San Martin branch have started with me.  Cielo, who is 8, is really eager to learn.  Her older brother, Mirko, who is 11 already knows how to play the saxophone quite well so he has some musical background and I'll be able to start him a bit more advanced than from scratch.  That's good.  

We finished the first half of March by joining the members on a temple trip down to the Buenos Aires temple on March 14th!  We've been wanting to get down there for some time.  This time we had Victor, Damian & Griselda all going, members we have worked with.  We weren't sure we would be able to go due to the cancellation of meetings in the church.  It turns out we got there just under the wire because the church announced the temples would close effective the 16th.

When the members make a trip to the temple, they charter a bus and the bus leaves at midnight Friday/Saturday.  You travel all night and arrive early Saturday morning, about 6 am.  When we arrived it was still dark so we got to see the temple lit up.

 Buenos Aires temple in the dark.

We were able to go in for an endowment session that started at 7:30 am  The baptism session was scheduled for 10:00 am.  I was able to take some personal family names with us, but hadn't planned to do an endowment session so just took a temple name through.  It was so nice to be in the house of the Lord again.  The endowment movie was not one I've seen in the states.  It was interesting because in this movie the garden of Eden looked a lot like Iguazu Falls!  Plenty of waterfalls.  The celestial room was on the small side (after Mt. Timpanogos most celestial rooms are small) but beautiful.  

I had a nice surprise in the chapel before the session.  One of my Pathway students saw me and greeted me, Juan Beltrame.  He looked different in person so it took me awhile to recognize him.  What fun.  E. Rhoades did not go through an endowment session but he was able to talk to Juan in the temple lobby later.

We had a big group of youth go to the temple, about 30.  They put two of the youth in charge of the session.  Tania & Ignacio both from Rama 3 and both really sharp kids.  They got to make assignments and direct people where to go and what to do.  Tania assigned me to be one of the witnesses for the baptisms.  What fun!  First time being a witness since they made the change.

We watched as both Damian Farias and Emiliano Baudino using their Aaronic priesthood performed the ordinances.  This was actually the second time for Emiliano.  He was such a natural, so poised and confident doing it.  What a gem he will be for the Lord's kingdom here in Venado if he can stay faithful to his covenants.  He is 18 and on our list to attend our mission prep class as well.  This was Damian's first time.  He wasn't quite as confident but he did great.  It was a golden moment when he baptized his mom, Griselda, for deceased individuals.  We tried and tried to get a couple of family names approved just before leaving but there were some glitches that made it not work out.  One of the glitches it appears is that the mother-in-law is already a baptized member!  No one knew that or remembered that.  Now Griselda will just need to prepare herself to take out her own endowments and then do these other ordinances for her mother-in-law then.

It turned out to be a very rainy day so we were not able to hang out in the garden areas of the temple much.  We had a 30 minute window at one point and went out and got a few photos.

Took this view, just to prove we are in Argentina at the temple and not somewhere else.

 What an interesting tree trunk, don't you think?

 For the flower lovers following our blog.

 During the brief dry moment we had at the temple I got this lovely photo of Dave with Damian.  It shows the palm trees and the flower beds and fountain.  Lovely, no?

And of course it wouldn't be complete without E. Rhoades horsing around some how.

 Above we are at the front entrance to the parking lot where the sign is.  See, it says Buenos Aires temple.  Wow, so far from home.

By the time we finished up our walk around and photo shoot it had picked up raining again so this last one has us under the umbrella.

Since we were limited to indoors most of the wait time we had to resort to some creative activities.

 First we spent time visiting...which puts E. Rhoades right in his element even if it is in Spanish!

Some of the youth came prepared with cards and enjoyed themselves playing together.

We did some exploring around the CCM (Argentina version of the MTC, which has now been closed).

Got this lovely photo from the entrance of the CCM.  Then found a second story window that had a great view of the temple so took one from there.

Here's where we got creative.  The hallways of the bedrooms had paintings on them.

 Damian & Griselda looking to the Savior....doubt not, fear not  (D&C 6:36)

We made it home safe and sound around 8 pm.  We are so grateful we had the opportunity to join with the saints in this missionary work for the other side of the view.  What a great memory we will have from this.

We finished the first half of March holding our first home-centered sacrament meeting.  We had the sister missionaries who live above us join us and we had Giselle & her mom come over as well.  We held it a bit later in the day to help Giselle make it and not sleep in.  We had a lovely service.  It doesn't provide a lot of time for meditating during the sacrament this way but we are grateful we can renew our covenants during this challenging time.  We got great news.  Giselle told us she had quit her job.  Hallelujah!  Now, hopefully we can help her get back on track and strengthening her testimony so she can keep her covenants "hasta el fin".

Spiritual Thought:  Alma 32:42

"And because of your diligence and your faith and your patience with the word in nourishing it, that it may take root in you, behold, by and by ye shall pluck the fruit thereof, which is most precious, which is sweet above all that is sweet, and which is white above all that is white, yea, and pure above all that is pure; and ye shall feast upon this fruit even until ye are filled, even that ye hunger not, neither shall ye thirst."

"Crisis" hits Argentina - but not the Coronavirus

We know that there is "opposition in all things" and since baptisms have been picking up in Venado Tuerto since the first of the year, it was bound to happen...Satan doesn't give up...EVER!

We've had a few of our real solid converts who are 6-7 months out from their baptism create some "crisis" for us due to choices they are making.  Every Sunday as we attend church we anxiously look around the different congregations to see if these new converts are in attendance.  If not, we put them on our radar to visit..for sure..the following week or to at least contact and hopefully inspire them not to relax their hold on the iron rod or worse, to let go all together.

Giselle, our 18 year old golden contact who was baptized in September and has been solid ever since -  has a calling, attends institute, never missed church, - has us worried the most.  Since she has graduated from high school she has been looking for work so she can pay for higher education studies.  It is really hard to find work here. There are not a lot of opportunities.  She finally got a job, but it is one that will lead her away from activity in the church.  She is a waitress at a "bar" in downtown Venado Tuerto.  This means late, late hours on the weekend, especially Saturday-Sunday.  We're talking 4 am, folks.  This means attending church at 9 am is going to take a miracle.  The two Sundays since she has had the job, she has not attended.  It means working evening hours, which means she will not be able to attend institute or any of the church activities.  The environment is not good.  The customers smoke and order alcoholic drinks along with food items.  We are going to lose her if we can't convince her to choose God over Mammon.

Luciano, our 24 year old golden contact who was baptized about the same time and has been solid ever since as well, all of a sudden went AWOL with his church attendance.  He went four weeks in a row without attending.  Alarm bells were ringing after the second week absent.  This past Sunday we thought it was going to be five weeks when he didn't show at the start of the sacrament meeting.  Luckily, he slipped in in time to take the sacrament and he attended both hours.  Whew!  Hopefully he is back on track again.

Damian, another 24 year old contact has been on and off with his attendance.  He was asked to help teach a lesson in Elders Quorum (even though he only has the Aaronic Priesthood still) and it was a very positive experience for him despite his timid personality.  But he too often misses attending sacrament meeting.  We think it is this dang custom of staying out/up all night on Saturday and going to bed at 5-6 am that is the challenge.  Joining the kingdom of God really does require a total change of lifestyle for many.

We've been visiting David, a 32 year old convert of only a few weeks.  David is in the red shirt, second from the left below.

He is impressive and has truly been prepared by the Lord.  He peppers us with questions each visit and is eager to learn.  He has us scared, however.  He informed us that he is going to start to attend school in the evenings to study computers.  He works full-time during the day and has 3 young boys (9, 8, 6).  When is he going to have time to study the gospel or have visits from missionaries?  He plans to study for two years!  Hopefully his church attendance won't suffer, but we know how life goes.

So needless to say, we need your prayers on behalf of these little "seedlings" that they will stay on the path of discipleship and hold to the iron rod.

And the baptisms keep coming.  February 16th we attended a baptism in Rama San Martin.

Lis, is the 14 year old grand daughter of Sister Arana, who was baptized less than two years ago.  She is solid.  She is now serving as the Relief Society president.  Little by little more of her family is joining the church.  Back in August one of her daughters joined the church and now this granddaughter.  Lis's mother, Dana, is working towards baptism as well.  She needs to get married and has a date of April 15th set to do that.  She plans on being baptized right after that.

They went all out on the refreshments.  There were a lot of people in attendance and there was a lot of food.  Here is the brownie cake they made.  Plenty of dulce de leche was used.  They really love that stuff here.

February 24th we attended a baptism in Rama 1 for a child of record.  It wasn't a convert baptism but as they are our fairly close neighbors we felt we needed to support them.

Lucia Emacora, the baby of the family at here baptism.

They had lots of extended family there and friends who were non-members so it was great.  An Area Seventy gave the talk on baptism.  Apparently, he is a relative of theirs. It was a lovely day with a lovely spirit.  A few special musical numbers were a treat to hear.

February 28th we attended the baptism of Gaspar, husband to Rosanna (who was baptized just a few weeks ago).  So we've got a chance to create another eternal family if they can stay on track heading towards the temple.  Both Rosanna and Gaspar have very limited education and limited financial resources.  Often when temporal needs are so great, time and attention goes to that rather than developing spiritual and it can make it really hard.

February 21st Rama 1 held a ward activity and as we are in the summer months, it was an asado, or BBQ.  What else would you expect here in Argentina??  This was an amazing set up.

Look at that slab of meat in the foreground!  That is practically a side of beef.  It was huge.  And there were plenty of french fries for all.  That is Bro. Atuna whose hobby is cooking.  His goal is to open a family restaurant in the future.

Here is the team of asaderos.  What's cool is the one on the left is an investigator, Damian.  Then L-R is Hno. Bolano, Pdte Capdevila, Andres Bolano and Hno Atuna.

 Some of the stalwart families that attended.  Above - Menchi family  Below - Allasia family, oh and us too.

We finished up EnglishConnect 1 on the last Sunday of February.  Hooray!!  The course was started so long ago.  It should only take 25 weeks but it has taken much longer due to the class being held on Sunday evening.  We started out with 40 interested students and the last class ended with 3 students attending.

February 24th E. Rhoades went fishing with the Taverna family, this time for both fish and frogs.

 Here's proof that E. Rhoades truly can be a fisherman in not only the spiritual sense but also the literal sense of the word.

 Above - Bryan Taverna with his catch.  To the right - Nicolas Taverna with his catch.

The family than took the fish and prepared fish empanadas with the meat.  We were invited to come enjoy the fruit of their labor on Wednesday evening.

 Fish filling for the empanadas on the right.

February 24th was a full day - baptism in the morning, fishing in the afternoon and a F.H.E. in the evening with a member and less active member family and the missionaries in Rama 3.  It was an example of how missionary work should be done.  The member is the force behind this less active family coming back to church and the full-time missionaries are supporting the member in her efforts.  It is so satisfying when you see missionary work being done correctly.

The last week in February much of our time was spent gearing up for a youth district activity on February 29th.

What started out as a simple youth get together turned into a big production as a result of the spirit's inspiration and guidance, so of course we had to obey and make it happen.  We started out wanting to have a fun activity for leap day but the Spirit said do something related to the bicentennial of the first vision.  So we combined the two ideas into one and had a four hour activity with fun and games to start with, an hour fireside at the end with awesome refreshments to finish up the activity.  We put up posters (see above) sent out lots of reminders and worked closely with the youth leaders.  We anticipated about 40 kids at the beginning of the planning.  We ended up with about 60 youth attending.  We used the young single adults to help run the activities and even got Joel Ellington there in Utah to be the fireside speaker.  Kudos to Joel for having such excellent Spanish!  The kids were impressed.

We planned 4 different games for the youth to play with a first vision scramble activity to do the first 20 minutes while we waited for all to arrive.  The kids were shown these 10 events from the first vision and they were supposed to put them in the correct order.

   1.   José ora en voz alta por primera vez en su vida.

   2.  El Salvador le dice a José que no se una a ninguna de las iglesias existentes.

   3.  Los familiares de José se unen a una de las iglesias cristianas.

   4.   José le dice a su madre que él sabe que las iglesias a las que se unieron los miembros      de su familia no son verdaderas.

   5.  José decide orar y pedir sabiduría a Dios.

   6.   El Padre Celestial y Jesucristo se aparecen.

   7.   José va al bosque

   8.   José lee Santiago 1:5 en la Biblia.

   9.   José se pregunta cuál de las iglesias es verdadera

  10.  Satanás ataca a José para que no pueda hablar.

Most of the kids struggled with this.  So there is some teaching that needs to happen with them on this.

Each youth was given a star sticker as they came in and we had 4 different colors.  This designated which group they were to participate with in the games.  Once we had the opening prayer and gave instructions the groups headed off to the different activites.  They had 25 minutes to play and 5 minutes to rotate to the next activity.

We played: 4 on the Couch in the Relief Society room.

 Ayana and Carolina were the Young Single Adults who helped with this game.  Above, drawing names, below listening to game rules.

 We had small orange ribbons half the group wore to designate one team.  The object - to get all your team members sitting on the couch (where we draped a blanket over 4 chairs).

2.  Samuel the Lamanite on the Wall (E. Rhoades' version of Dodgeball).  Emiliano & Damian Farias helped us run this game.  This was outside on the court.

 These two photos show the Nephites with their arrows and rocks (balls) attempting to hit Samuel on the wall.

 These photos show a couple of the youth as the prophet Samuel trying to avoid being hit.

 Below is one of the 4 groups of kids that played.  Such a great bunch.  It was a hot day and no one complained about having to be outside.

 Back row- investigator friend, Rocio, Tania, Emiliano, Micaela, Lucas, Tommy, boy from Murphy
front row - Marcela, Magali, girl from Murphy branch

3.  Cootie (this was a table game so they could rest after being outside in the heat, running around).  We set this up on the stage so they would be in a cooler environment as only the cultural hall & chapel have air conditioning.

Luciano & Angel were our helpers with this game.  The Young adults were such good sports about helping and we couldn't have done the activity without them!

And the hit of the night was the 4th activity - Human Hungry Hippo in the Cultural Hall.

E. Rhoades constructed the rolling platforms for the youth to lie down on.  We had watched a number of youtube videos on the game and decided on the version that used rope to wheel them back in.

 We told the youth the tile was hot lava and any touching of the tile would disqualify them because they would "die" from the hot lava.  This kept the kids not on the cart back on the carpet in the sacrament room and not running out where the balls were.

 Ignacio and Tomas were our Young Adult helpers on this game.

Not sure if this was voted the funniest only because it was in the air conditioned room or not, but we knew this would be a hit with them and it was.

Once they had a chance to play all four activities, they gathered in the sacrament room for the devotional on the first vision.

Here's a shot showing the whole chapel so you can get idea of how many kids we had.  We had asked Hna. Moura to be our photographer and she did a great job getting photos from this activity.  We were just too busy monitoring things to have been able to get photos so we are really grateful to her.

 Here they are waiting for the devotional to get started.

During the devotional we tried to cover the suggestions that Pres. Nelson offered as ways to prepare for April General Conference and the Bicentennial Commemoration of the First Vision.  We showed the new first vision 6 minute video that incorporates bits from the 4 different versions Joseph Smith wrote.  We challenged them to read (as a group from each branch) 200 pages of the Book of Mormon between now and the start of general conference on April 4th.  We had made up posters where they can mark their progress.  With 34 days to read, this challenge would require 5.88 pages read a day to reach the 200 mark.  This means it could be done if 6 youth read 1 page a day.  Some of the branches that have bigger groups, we gave two posters to and told them to divide their youth into two groups.  This is totally possible if the youth will be dedicated to reading.

We had Joel Ellington be the devotional speaker and he spoke on receiving personal revelation using the first vision as a model to follow.  Joel has really great Spanish.  His accent is probably better than ours.  We also asked the youth to think about the question "What would my life be like without the Book of Mormon?".  We told them we had a graffitti wall set up in the cultural hall and while they ate refreshments and visited we wanted them to write their thoughts on the paper.

It turned out to be a great activity.  No surprise.  Whenever we have followed the promptings of the Spirit and the inspiration it gives us, things always go well.

Spiritual Thought: "He had seen a vision, he knew he had, and all the persecution under heaven could not make it otherwise; and though they should persecute him unto death, yet he knew, and would know to his latest breath, that he had both seen a light and heard a voice speaking unto him, and all the world could not make him think or believe otherwise.  So it was with me.  I had actually seen a light, and in the midst of that light I saw two Personages, and they did in reality speak to me; and though I was hated and persecuted for saying that I had seen a vision, yet it was true; For I had seen a vision; I knew it, and I knew that God knew it, and I could not deny it, neither dared I do it; at least I knew that by so doing I would offend God, and come under condemnation."  Joseph Smith - History 1:24-25