June 14, 2010

This week was great! Out here everybody is super excited and energetic over the world cup soccer tournament. Out here, soccer is everything. They have a 2 hour game, and then spend the next four days on every single channel analyzing what happened and figuring out ways to say how awesome their team is. Everybody watches it, all the time. Seriously, every house we go into to teach a lesson they either have the game on or sports commentators talking about it. They’re fanatics. And if Argentina wins a game, they light off a ton of fireworks and all get drunk that night. It’s kinda like the superbowl but 5 times bigger.

Anyway, because of the world cup, this week was a little slow; we had lots of appointments fall through, but we still worked our tails off and our district met all the mission goals. The ward out here isn’t very big and doesn’t put on many activities, so as missionaries we are looking for opportunities to unite members with investigators. Our Mission President told us we should do an activity at least once a week. It gets hard to be creative after a few months in the same place but we still managed to keep things interesting. This week we put on a special refreshment: "Panqueqes gringos" which are just normal pancakes, but they have never tried them out here. It turned out great, but we spent the three hours of study time taking turns studying and making pancakes one at a time because we don’t have a griddle, just a fry pan. It turned out great and we got a ton of members, less-actives, and investigators to come and mingle. Our investigators are doing great, and we should have 2 baptisms in the coming week. We have another investigator who is super great, comes to church, reads the Book of Mormon (he started from the beginning a few weeks ago and is already in Mosiah!), but has a huge smoking problem. He smokes roughly 30 cigarrettes a day. We’ve tried a lot of things with him, having him read and pray when he feels the desire to smoke, but he’s super addicted. Any suggestions?

Anyway, all is well in the field. Sounds like you guys are having a blast out there! I should get the package from Bro. Calley this week at district meeting. Have fun, work hard, don’t forget to read your scriptures every day. It’s important stuff.

Love,
Elder Spencer