Sept. 6, 2011

Transfers this week, but I’m still here in Flamingo Ward, thank goodness. Probably my last 6 weeks here, though, because this will put me around 6 months in this area. It’s flown by so far. I can’t believe I’ve already been here over 4 months. Crazy. I’m still with Elder Kakau too, so it’s nice having a companion for more than one transfer again. We are happy and excited to keep going in this area, despite all of our frustrations.


We helped with two moves which took out the majority of those two days. Both recent converts, so helping them was pretty fun. I haven’t moved two people in one week since Yerington. It felt pretty good, but I was dead, haha.

One lady we are going to work with a little more is Mili who is the mom of a member in an English ward named Saul. This last week we went to visit with her and spent most of our time talking about how her son is doing (she just dropped him off at University of Utah last week for the first time) and how she’s doing. I told her Mom went through pretty much the same thing when all of us left and all of us were (maybe not Sarah) were kind of like Saul and didn’t call as much as we should have, haha. We ended up making her cry a little bit because we talked about a food that Saul loves, and I told her that she is definitely like my mom, so that must mean she’s a good mom, haha! We had a good chat and talked a little about their trip to Temple Square too. At the end of the lesson I was missing college for sure! haha, but I was happy we could help her out a bit with missing Saul. We are going over for a BBQ/lesson/Spanish lesson for us this Saturday, which should be fun. She is Peruvian and is a teacher at a dual language elementary school (she teaches the Spanish half for her kids).

We also taught a 77 yr old Argentinian man named Jorge who is actually homeless. Teaching him was pretty humbling. He is a great guy, but just can’t get a job and ran out of money. He even has his legal residency, but only has been given food stamps and a bus pass, so he can’t afford a place to live. He worked as a painter, but now has medical issues that make that an impossibility for him, and he only speaks so much English, so that hinders him from getting other jobs. It’s tough, but we are going to be helping him however we possibly can. Hopefully the members we will be bringing with us to the next lessons will be able to help him get on his feet, though his real goal is to make it back to Argentina. We'll see what we can do!