December 27, 2010

Semana 68 - Villa Saavedra

¡Hola Todos!
Well, we had a pretty crazy week, but it was crazy-awesome! The first crazy thing was zone conference on Wednesday. We had to wake up at 5:00 to catch a 6:00 bus down to Orán, which is about 3 hours away! As we were travelling down there, we were bombarded by a huge rainstorm, making a bunch of streetside rivers! We got off the bus and had to walk about 3 blocks to get to the church and we were drenched. I even had to jump through a couple street-rivers to get there! We walked in about 3 minutes before the conference started too! It was a good conference though and really helped us get in the Christmas mood. President and Sister Northcutt have done this tradition every Christmas where a bunch of people dress up and act out the nativity scene and we sing pretty much all of the Christmas hymns (at least in the Spanish hymnal)--super spiritual! We had a nice lunch, and then another hour to kill waiting for our bus to come and take us back to Tartagal.
We had a small branch activity the next day that was nice to participate in (just some refreshments and a spiritual thought basically).
And then Christmas Eve: With the dangerous situation that we run into during Christmas, our normal schedule is changed. After 4:00, we can't knock on doors or do street contacting at all--we have to use all set appointments, especially with those that don't have family to celebrate Christmas with. We went around sharing a quick Christmas message with a ton of families and it was great! The weather took a crazy turn this weekend too. In the middle of Christmas Eve, it got extremely windy (which is perfect for all the sandy roads we have here!), and brought in lots of clouds for Christmas.
Christmas went really well. We had 12 elders sleeping in our pension the night before after watching all these huge fireworks go off at midnight, and hearing lots of drunk people outside, of course. We organized a huge steak and sausage lunch, played ping-pong in the church, and we carolled in this park downtown. And then we had our big phone call home! I'm definitely glad for the privilege to call home, I'm sure the majority of you reading this letter don't quite know what it's like talking to your family for the first time in 7 months! But yeah, that was a definite highlight for all the missionaries here.
We found out transfers on Thursday and my comp, Elder Speakman, is off to Salta capital. My new companion is Elder Macias from Buenos Aires. He's a fairly quiet and timid elder from what little I've seen so far of him here, but I have a feeling we'll do well this transfer.
It's been a great week overall! We're getting ready for another fun one with the New Year!
Love
-Elder Powell-



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