"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