Saturday, August 26, 2017

Week 082 - We Got Hooligans Slurping Noodles In The Park Again

Hi,

I’m glad your trip turned out great, I’ve started to miss the mountains a lot, and Santa Fe is really known for its fields. But I hear on the other side of the mission, in Entre Rios, it's full of small hills. So I hope to one day visit all the small hills.

One of the great things about living in the cow farming capital of the world, is that you have the opportunity to visit the FFA (Future farmers of Argentina) Expo. It’s actually call the Rural Expo. Either way it was beyond cool. So apparently they put on this farming expo every year in different parts of Argentina, and it just so happened they decided to put it on in Rafaela for the weekend. We actually didn’t know what it was, someone just mentioned to us that they had food trucks that sold pizza cones so, and we decided to go for lunch. And to my surprise it was much greater than a pizza cone, if you can believe that. dad just imagine it like one of those car expos you go to for work, but instead of cars it’s a bunch of giant tractors and farming machines, so there are ladies all over the place trying to get me to check out their tractors. Come on honey, I’m looking for the pizza cones. Anyway I found my way to the pizza cones, but in the path I saw the largest cows on the planet. so I got my research down, and I learned that there were many types of cow contests going on. You had your vaquillona cows, ternera cows, novillo cows; so they had contests for each one of them. and I guess the loser cows were killed off and eaten, because the amount of asado that was going on was unimaginable. not only that, Las Palmeras, the best Santafesino Cumbia band for the past 40 years came to give everyone a show so as we left, because we weren’t there for that long, as we left all the cumbia fanatics came busting in to get a good spot for the show. Luckily they kept the tunes loud enough to hear the street.

There was this Mexican food truck though, and it was the fakest of Mexican food though. Most people have no idea what Mexican food looks like here but they have heard of the famous burrito or a taco. But I guess if you say you’re a Mexican food truck, you can make up whatever you want and call it a burrito and people with love it, because I thought, oh how delightful there’s burritos here. And so I asked how big the burritos are, and he showed me, and to my astonishment he showed me his homemade corn dogs. He saw my face and obviously knew that I knew that it was not a burrito, so he whispered, "Let me tell you something....it’s just a hotdog inside." Yeah, I figured dude.

So check this, recently a fellow missionary decided to borrow my hair clippers and plug them directly into the Argentina outlet thus frying my clippers to smithereens. Ya fue mi vida. So now I had to go find someone to clip my hair. But people get weird clipping our northern hair. They start to feel your hair and look at the color, and ask us a bunch of question like, "What is wrong with your hair?" Anyways, so I guess if you don’t know what to do you just take the volume scissors and just go at it to see what happens. by the way I’ve never even heard of volume scissors, so this guys just takes out a ton of volume in my hair making me look like I’m going bald. He said all of the best of soccer players are getting cuts like these. Lesson learned, don't get a haircut from a dude named Sanchez.

The other night we had an appointment set up to visit a women that has been inactive from the church for quite some time. The appointment was for 6:30 and when she arrived she said she had to leave, be she had prepared some dinner for us. Super nice woman, and she gave us a to-go box with a ton of spaghetti. But what do we do now with all this spaghetti if we live like 45 min away. Neither did we have a fork to eat with. We weren’t going to go look for people to teach with some hot spaghetti in our hands. So we bought some forks and went to the park to eat it really fast. Super weird though because it’s night time and two dudes in ties are slurping down some noodles in the park totally empty. The best part though is the cop that passes by us on a moto staring us down, probably thinking, "Oh, we got hooligans slurping noodles in the park again, I better give them the business." And so this guy slows down and stops his motorcycle and walks over to us staring over our noodles....... Buenos officer, I said with a smile on my face....... he continued to investigate as he stared into my noodles and then he said, "Can I have the rest of your noodles?".....Well, I can’t deny an officer his noodles, so we gave him the rest plus the bonus forks we just bought and went on our way.

We actually were able to have a few great lessons this last week, through the members. We've focused a lot with the member on the work of salvation. Because I think a lot of the members before had a mentality that the job of the missionaries is to go out and knock on doors every day and bring more people to the club of Jesus. When in reality the majority of converts that stay active are found through the members, especially the youth who bring other youth to church and eventually become great leaders in the church. So we've helped the branch create their own mission plans as well as individual mission plans for each member. because each member here goes to church by themselves, so they got to have at least one friend or family member that they want to bring with them unto salvation, right? But most people don’t really know How to do that. So once someone has chosen a person, we are helping them create a plan, on how to help this one person. And the members find more confidence in sharing the gospel, when they have more of a specific plan. I think missionaries scare the members when they ask them for references all the time and tell them what they should do, as in bringing people unto Christ. But in reality they don’t know How to do it. We hope to help strengthen the members as well as the branch in this way.

I love you guys, thanks for your emails.


Elder Greene







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