Un Bautismo!

Dear Mommy,
This week has been pretty long, but I have learned so much this week. I have learned that everything is in the Lord's hands and that we need to accept His will. I have also learned that you need to try your ABSOLUTE hardest to do His will and follow Him with everything you've got.

The sad new first...Hilen moved away and is living with her grandma for two months.....so she isn't in our area anymore, so she can't get baptized. :( Sad moment. Also, Inez and Maria Elena dropped us this week. They like the church and I'm pretty sure they have felt the spirit and the happiness...but they have decided they don't want to change. We have to acknowledge their wants and trust that somewhere down the line Heavenly Father will help them and they will remember what we have taught them. I hope that they will be okay and that one day they will want to be truly happy and follow our Savior.

We found David this week!!! We had a lesson inside his house and we taught him the restoration completely. He is just like Joseph Smith. He has a lot of questions and we answered them. He obviously works a ton and I don't know how quickly he can come to church and have all the lessons, but he has a desire to follow Jesus Christ and know the truth, so we are definitely going to keep working with him.

We had a crazy learning experience. We were walking along the vía ( I think that means railroad..I'm not sure. It isn't a very safe place to be, but it is much faster and it was in the middle of the day.) and we saw this boy about 16 years old. We usually don't just go up and talk to 16 year old boys..especially on the vía. So we said hi and kept walking...then Hermana Thornton and I looked at each other and we both realized we had the same impression to talk to this kid. We thought about it and decided to do it..but when we turned back around he wasn't there. We were both very sad and felt awful because we didn't follow that prompting. We went on with our day, but this kid wouldn't leave our minds. We wanted to find him so bad and follow this prompting. We kept praying in our hearts for some way to make this right. You wouldn't believe what happened. We walked around this corner and there was the kid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He was leaning up against a wall, almost waiting for us to walk by. We literally ran over to him and started talking to him. His name is Lucas. He doesn't live in our area, but he was very interested in the church, so we got his address and referred him to other elders. That doesn't happen. We found Lucas again!! I am beyond grateful for this experience and now I know to talk to every person I see because it was 1 in a million that we found this kid again. I am so grateful!!!

Finally, the Elders in our ward had a baptism! Her name is Jesica. She is the strongest, most amazing person I have ever met. She has such a sweet spirit. They found her and she got baptized three weeks later. She is literally amazing. She has a testimony that is stronger than many other people and she is ready to follow Jesus Christ with all her heart, might, mind, and strength. She is amazing!

We started clase de ingles this week. It is hilarious to hear all the people try to speak english. It is super fun!! I love my mission!! We have to other people with baptism dates now: Andy and Rita. Hopefully we can keep teaching and helping these people! I love you!!!

Love,
Hermana Wood :)

Divisions and Diego

Dear Mom,
This week has had lots of changes! We had zone conference this week. It is really powerful. Our entire mission has the mindset that we can't baptize and that we aren't a baptizing mission. Our new mission president, Presidente Zanni, is changing all of that. The zone leaders gave lots of talks that pumped us up and gave us a lot of hope! The best thing that they taught me was to see every person you come in contact with as a child of God. See them dressed in white in the baptismal font. Imagine them having a calling in the church. Picture them standing in the temple, sealed to their family for time and all eternity. This completely changed my mindset this week. We went from having 15 lessons to 28 lessons this week. We found 10 new investigators and we have callbacks with them. We are definitely making progress now and I am beyond excited to be in Mayoraz, Santa Fe, Argentina right now at this exact moment in time. It will be awesome!

I had the opportunity to do divisions this week! It is when the capacitadoras split up and one person in the companionship goes to another area with one capacitadora and the other stays in the area with the other capacitadora. Sorry, I don't know the word for capacitadora in English. But I had to stay in my area and be in charge of it for an entire day! And my companion was Hermana Condori. She is from Peru and doesn't understand a bit of English. We had 9 lessons together while she was here. This is the first time I have truly felt like a missionary. I know I can communicate with the people and I can control my area. I can have success. I am very grateful I had this big learning opportunity.

I want to tell two stories about two of the new people. The first one is a girl named Hilen. She is 22 years old and we found her one afternoon while we were contacting. We gave her a Book of Mormon and got a return appointment. We went back and taught her the first discussion and she accepted the invitation to be baptized! She is going to pray about what day, but she is going to be baptized. We are very grateful for this humungous blessing. :) Hard work brings success.

The other one is about Diego. He made it into my subject line because it is a very interesting story. ;) We found Diego. He is about 17 years old and he told us we could come back and teach his whole family. We went back another day and found his mother and...let's just put it nicely that she never wanted to see us again. However, Hermana Thornton and I both felt like we needed to go back to that house. We went back yesterday. Yesterday was Mother's Day here in Argentina. We knocked on the door and Diego answered. He said his mom was gone, but his aunt was there and that we could come in. We sat down and taught him, his aunt, and his cousin. Then Diego's mom came back and saw that we were in her house and basically threw us out. We probably won't see Diego again, but we know that we needed to go back right then and there. It was pretty cool. :)

Since we had lots of lessons this week, I have lots of other stories. But I will have to save them for another day. Something funny was that we were walking and this almost dead bird made it's final last attempt to fly and flew right into the back of my head and fell down my back and I had blood and guts all over me. The other one was that we were just walking like normal and a bird pooped on my shoulder. I'm not really fond of birds anymore. ;)

I love you!!!!!

Love,
Hermana Wood :)

My Letter Home

Dear Mom,
This week was a little bit slower on the progressing side of investigators, but we still had lots of lessons and I hope we are still helping people.

We had lessons with Inez and Graciella (Grace) this week. We asked both of them to be baptized, but both of them are very well educated and it is obviously a big step for them to accept a fecha, but they said that they want to keep reading and praying and tell us when they are ready. Hopefully that is soon. :)

One of the new families is the Familia Avila. They are a reference of the Familia Carlotta. Hermana Carlotta's son, Albino, and their son play on the same soccer team and they are really good friends. We were talking to the mom, Liliana, about the sons and she commented on how nice and kind and loving Albino was all the time. He was always well behaved and never got into bad stuff. He was a very good friend for her son to have. Albino didn't even know what an impact he had on this entire family by just being himself. Our lesson with them was really good and we have another this week.

We found Carina again this week! We literally haven't been able to contact her for the last month. We asked her why she didn't get baptized and what was holding her back. She proceeded to tell us her entire, beautiful testimony and that she really does want to get baptized. We gave her another baptism date for November 14, and hopefully she will realize that she wants this enough to sacrifice and get married to this man! He really is great, so we are trying to figure out why they don't just get married already. That's our next goal with her.

We realized this week that we say some pretty funny things while we are walking around the streets of Argentina, so we decided to create a quote wall. Probably no one else will think our quotes are funny...but we think they are hilarious. :) Por ejemplo:

H. Thornton: ¿A donde vamos?
H. Wood: El mundo de los espíritus. (because that is always the answer when we are teaching the plan of salvation.)
(about 5 minutes later)
H. Thornton: Hermana, ¿A donde vamos?
H. Wood: Well..are you ready to die?

I don't know if any of you will understand this, but it was pretty hilarious. :)
Also...........I bought hair dye. Yup......we'll see how that goes. :)

Love,
Hermana Wood :)

General Conference!

Dear Mommy,
This week has been so great. Before I tell you about conference, here is a list of things I did this week:

1. I survived my first transfer in Argentina!
2. I learned to do the bridge with face cards
3. I drank caffeine for the first time in my whole life...it was coca cola. It was super gross.
4. This woman randomly came up to us and told us her whole life story about how her husband died and how she loves her family and then she just walked away. We were so confused. So..we literally stalked her for about 8 blocks to see where she lived until she walked across the street and out of our zone...so then we had to stop.
5. We made a Christmas tree out of a chain that has the number of days until Christmas (80 days, by the way)! We are very excited about Christmas.
6. I watched General Conference! I watched two sessions in Spanish and two in English. I hope that I understood the Spanish talks and that they talked about what I actually heard. ;)

Now, about conference. I don't have a lot of time to write, but my favorite talk was Richard G. Scott. I loved the list he gave! Pray, read the scriptures, have Family Night, and go to the temple!! I love the temple and I miss it so much! Make sure you go to the temple all the time. If we do these things, we will qualify for blessings and personal revelation and peace in our lives. I am very grateful for all the talks and the opportunity to learn and grow. It was a great week! All our investigators are progressing really well. We found two new families and we have citas with them this week. We have lots of people now and things are really picking up! I hope that you all had a great week!

Love,
Hermana Wood :)