Semana 59 - Mariano Moreno

Hola Todos,

For those that have been following along, this week has gone a little bit better than the weeks before, but we can still improve.

We were walking back to the pension one day for lunch and I was trying to decide what to make. I remembered I had some hot dogs that needed to be used soon, so I thought about ideas that I could use, when all of a sudden, I remembered about pigs-in-a-blanket! It was actually really easy to make and it turned out delicious! For those who don't know what it is, you cut a line in the hot dog, stuff it with cheese, you make a bread dough and wrap the hot dog in dough, and then oven-bake it! I also made a great salad with vinegar and oil: I was so full--it was great!

This week was the big moving week. Unfortunately, we still don't have a pension set in concrete yet, so we had to move all our stuff to the zone leader's pension, making that 8 missionaries in a single apartment! We're looking hard for somewhere to move out quick!

We also had divisions with the zone leaders this past week. We had so much success when they came over! I learned a few things from them, as well as my comp, so we were hoping to be able to put it all into practice the rest of the week. We tried and didn't really have too much success with it......not sure what they had that we are missing, but there's hope!

I've gotta run, but I love you all!

-Elder Powell-

NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.

Semana 58 - Mariano Moreno

¡Hola Todos!
Well, this week turned out to be just as bad, if not worse, than the
first week: nothing is working for us as we desperately try to find
new investigators. We're in a huge drought it seems--which is an
ironic statement because we actually got rain in the past few days,
which, coupled with it being Mother's Day in Argentina yesterday,
really killed church attendance! We're now trying to focus our efforts
a little more on the active and less-active members to try and talk
with their friends, family, and coworkers that aren't members. We're
especially paying attention to this approach because we've also
checked and confirmed that every investigator that we have right now
already had a family member or friend that is a member before we
started teaching them. 'Preach my Gospel' also promises that if the
members do their job in finding new investigators, giving references,
and then help out with the conversion process, more baptisms happen
and post-baptism retention rate goes way up. In my opinion, it's the
second-best method to raise retention rate, just below doing
family-history and temple work. I've had lots of meditating time on
the topic of low-success and I know that my challenges are growing my
character and that I'm going through a very important self-conversion
process, but I'm done growing up for awhile--I wanna teach someone
that wants to learn!
As for other news, due to Mother's Day being yesterday here in
Argentina, my comp got to call his family yesterday! Sorry fam, but
you'll have to wait a few more months ;)
That's about all I've got for this past week though. Here's to hoping
for happier news next week!
-Elder Powell-

NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.

Semana 57 - Mariano Moreno

¡Hola Todos!
Wow, this has been one of the toughest weeks yet. We've had to resort to knocking a bunch of doors this week, but it gave us 0% success. All our numbers were low. There was a lesson we taught with an extremely hard-to-teach man that fulfilled what 2 Nephi 9:27-29 says. Lots of appointments cancelled or just weren't there, even though we had members walking around with us a ton to help us out. Not a lot of people in general went to church this weekend (38). We tried having a ward council, but the bishopric postponed it because the required leadership callings still don't exist in the ward, so we have to wait--which means we won't be able to get as many references from the members as we could......yeah, I felt rather beaten emotionally, mentally, and spiritually by the end. It doesn't help that the neighboring sister missionaries that I'm the leader over had numbers literally 4 times as big this last week......from doing the same things as I'm doing too: knocking a ton of doors whenever you can...still trying to discover where the difference is.
I'm not giving in, that's for sure. I know I need to keep doing the things I have to do if I'm ever to leave this rut in the progress of this area, but I've found myself doing a lot of praying for these people so that we can actually get in their homes to help them out in their hectic lives. A quick question to return-missionaries: what're some ideas for finding new investigators when doors don't work? Ideas involving the church building don't really work here either because it's out of the area, out of the way, and there aren't many people that normally pass by the church.
But yeah, that's about all I've got for this week...we're all hoping for a better week coming up.
With love,
-Elder Powell-

NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.

Semana 56 - Mariano Moreno

¡Hola Todos!

Today's the first day of a new transfer so I was at the bus terminal for a large portion of the day saying goodbye to a ton of missionaries and hello to a bunch of incoming missionaries! My district just had 2 leaving out of the 8 of us: 1 sister goes home tomorrow and one of the other elders is headed to Tucumán--Elder Grzelak and I are together for another transfer. The funniest part is that my old comp from Tucumán--Elder Bjorklund--is coming up to be the zone leader now! Go figure :P

Zone conference was nice this past week. Being Elder Grzelak's first, he loved it. There are lots of changes in the day-to-day things that we have to do now. I'm pretty sure these changes are worldwide: officially, we are in charge of teaching new converts the new-convert lessons that they must receive (because the members aren't really teaching them), we must invite the head-of-household before teaching a 2nd time or we don't teach, and we can only take an investigator to church one time during their progress. These are hard, but good changes in protocol and will help out in the long-run.

General Conference went well this weekend. For those that don't know, we watch conference live down here, but for the missionaries from the US, and any others that understand English, there was a tv set up in English for us. It was interesting to see lots of talks on prophets, family strength, raising youth, personal spiritual development, and lots of other wonderful topics. The biggest talk that stands out to me was President Dieter F. Uchtdorf's talk on bringing down your stress and busy-ness levels. There were plenty of other good ones though, so definitely check them out if you didn't see any of it.

On the flip-side, we're actually getting a little stressed out because the contract for our apartment is ending soon and we need to find another to rent! It's getting tough though because no one is renting anything in the two areas that we are in! Hopefully we'll find something soon!

Well, I love you all! Hope things are going well as you are passing your first month in school/another month more in work :P

-Elder Powell-

NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.