First week in Argentina

Wow, what a week! After 2 days straight of travel, I finally got in late Tuesday night to my new zone and area. I’m in the Zone Tucuman Oeste, and in an area to the north called Villa Muñecas. It is super pretty here. We live in the fourth floor of a kinda sketchy building (it’s pretty nice for down here), but we have a super cool view where you can see the green rolling hills for miles. It’s sweet. We also live above a bakery, so every morning I wake up to the smell of fresh bread. Yeah, it’s nice.

The people down here are super poor, but incredibly nice, and they just make do with what they have. My first day we did a service project for this lady whose house was about 20 ft by 20 ft. I climbed up her palm tree and hacked off dead limbs while the rest of the zone hauled bricks and mud to her backyard. I have to admit, that was pretty cool. The culture here is also super laid back. Everything closes between 1 and 6 pm because of the siesta. This makes sense in the summer when the heat is treacherous, but in the winter they keep the same schedule and just stay up super late at night, which makes the time in which we can work pretty short. We study during the siesta time and work in the morning and night, but the night gets a little hard as well because some parts of our areas are pretty sketchy at nights, especially if you are white.

Right now we are working with lots of investigators, and they all love hearing the message and talking with us, but they don’t keep their commitments or show up for church or show up for appointments. It gets kinda frustrating because the whole culture just kinda averts responsibility, but the most I can do as a missionary is do my very best to invite the Spirit as strongly as I can and then invite them to change their lives.

My companion is a Chileno named Elder Vidal. He’s very nice, and even though in this area members don’t feed the missionaries a lot, Íve been eating well because he’s an excellent cook. Anyway, that’s about all the time I’ve got today. Be your best self! The church is true!!

-Elder Spencer