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 :)