August 9

Family,

Another busy week. We didn’t have a baptism this week so we decided to have an activity on Saturday night. My comp made a peach cobbler thing. Basically, you buy some peaches, cut them up into chunks and then take a vanilla cake mix and dump the powder covering the peaches, and then top it off dumping Sprite over that. It was pretty yummy, but we didn’t have any butter to grease the pan with, so my comp just decided to line it with paper. Seeing the goeyness of the peaches gave me second thoughts as we were putting it in, and it turns out I was right. Luckily/unluckily, only one person came to our activity, so while we had to scrape all the paper off and only ended up being able to eat about half of what was there, we had enough for everybody at the activity... oh well. Our church attendance this week was also pretty low because this Sunday was a holiday, dia del niño (childreńs day). What stinks is that Argentina has a *ton* of holidays (worker’s day, friend’s day, animal’s day, seriously), and if it ever falls during the week they move it to the weekend and make it a long weekend. It also stinks for us because instead of being able to teach lots of people we have to put up with the hordes of drunks in the streets. Yay. We did however get to help out serving food at a big block party one of the members was having, so we got to get to know lots of families from that neighborhood, which was awesome. We also got the best lunch ever, a huge barbeque with the yummiest steaks I’ve ever had, so I was pretty pleased.

Our investigators are doing pretty well. It’s so amazing to see them progress and keep commitments, and super sad to see when they don’t. The worst was, last week we had this super awesome investigator, Rosaura, come to church and a baptism and we gave her the commitment to get baptized and she got super excited and told her whole family. This week she didn’t come because she had work so we had to bump the date foreward, but it really stinks having to break her the news that she has to wait to get baptized because she didn’t do her part. Oh well, I guess that’s how it works, do your part - get blessings, don’t do your part - don’t get blessings. As long as we as missionaries do our best, we’ll be happy. As a result, Elder Staker and I are staying super busy and having a super good time.

This week I found a super cool scripture in Moroni 9:6 where Mormon is telling Moroni how incredibly wicked the people are and how they are past feeling and they are a lost and fallen people. Sounds like a pretty tough crowd to convert; I’d probably call it quits and just dust off my feet, but Mormon tells Moroni that: "notwithstanding their hardness, let us labor diligently; for if we should cease to labor, we should be brought under condemnation; for we have a labor to perform whilst in this tabernacle of clay, that we may conquer the enemy of all righteousness, and rest our souls in the kingdom of God." So, no matter how hard the problem, there is one solution: labor diligently because in doing your labor you are becoming a better person, even if you never reach the solution.

Love you all
-Elder Spencer