Enjoying His new Area.

 This week we went out to a little farming city called Solis. Its about a 40 minute bus ride out there, its a little group of people and there are 3 active members. When we were there we walked and walked and walked out into the feilds until we finally came upon alittle house. Clapped it and he didnt want much. 
Solis is good, not very much people but the people are genuine and open. We found some new investigators and we will have to travel out there maybe twice a week from now on. We are still working it pretty hard because we were given nothing when we came in to re open this area. We still dont have a cell phone, which doesnt help but we have a few investigators with fechas to be baptized. One is called Arturo, he has a few problems with word of wisdom, but just about everyone and their dog has a problem with that down here, we are working with him and his son in law who is a member. 
The branch president is a straight boss, the branch is organizing a trip to the temple this next week and in sacrament meeting he expressed his gratitude for those who were planning on going and called the others to repentance big time. It was really straight forward, like, those of you not planning to go and can go need to repent of your sins and change so that you will go. We had about 35 members this sunday, little branch, but I like it because theres more reverance than the big wards with the Uruguayo babies running around. In one of the talks though, a member summoned the congregation to sing with him, it was weird but I guess it works. 
We had an intercambio this week and I went with Elder Saavedra, learned alot and he asked me how I think we can improve the branch and the mission work here. Hes been here for a while and I think they might have hit a slow patch. Its been a good week, we spend alot of time in the streets still, which is not ideal but it gets the new investigators which is what we need, really cold this week, there was even frost in the mornings. But they say it should be warming up pretty soon and we will be coming into spring time. 
Thats about it, Elder Peterson still wont eat meat, so hes had a few uncomfortable moments with members at lunch. yesh yesh, and I got your letters, with the talk. I like getting talks, if you want to keep sending a talk in the mail every month or so that would be nice. or some philsophosies or Ron Swanson quotes. 

Watch a sunset at least once a day- Philsophosies.

Elder Webber

A New Area

Yes the mission is pretty awesome, no doubt bout it. Yes so Indeed I did get changed to a new area. But first, I spent 12 weeks in carrasco walking the same streets and little did I know that just right outside of my area was the rugby field where I played down here two years ago. I didnt even know until the second to last day when we took a bus that we dont usually take and it drove right by it. Brings back thems rugby memories with Calvin down here. 
But yes, we got changes a day early, so sunday, because we lived with the assistants and so we went by to say goodbye to all the investigators and members. I do not like leaving very much. We said goodbye to a family we were teaching and Elias, one of sons cried and said que lastima, which is like, thats too bad. We went to changes and got on a bus that took us almost two hours outside of montevideo city to Minas! which is interpreted to say mines. Its where all the famous alfahores are made and dulce de leche. Its a little branch out here in the hills of the country. Really pretty, the country people are alittle nicer than the city folk. I love it here so far. 
Im here with Elder Williams from Colorado, hes a great guy and were are both in here as a white wash, actually we are re-opening an area that has been closed for a transfer or two. Soooooooooo that basically means its dead. We spent many a hour in the street finding new people to talk to. We looked in the area book, which is where all the investigators are supposed to be recorded with phone number and address but the book was awful with just a handful of names without information. It was hard, still is hard, but we think we will baptize. 
Elder Williams is an old chap, only has these last 2 transfers and then A LA CHUCHA, which means, to the dog house. Hes a great missionary, lots of experience and knows how it is, we live in an ok house with two other elders, Elder Saavedra and Elder Peterson. Elder Saavedra is our district leader and Elder Peterson is brand new in the mission. Just finished his first week. Doesnt eat meat, which will be really hard for him because we have pasta and meat almost every day with the members and doesn{t like fruit either. Good luck. 
Minas has been really good so far, the branch has about 40 or 50 members and we had a branch activity which was just tomando la leche. Which means drinking the milk, we just ate cake and pizza and hot chocolate and watched the primary, which are three kids, do an act or play thing. It was good to get to know the members and have them tell us where all their friends live so we can baptize them. We have two ward missionaries, which is a first, I havent had ward missionaries my whole mission and they are 16 and 17 years old. At first I was hesitant, but they are really really good. They work with us in the street and are a great help, we just have to wait until after highschool gets out to work with them.  
We say tomando la leche to describe elders who sit in the houses of members and waste time. Aint nobody got time for that. Alot has happened this last week, will I miss carrasco? oh yeah, carrasco was great, but minas is a whole nutha level. 
Really looking forward to this changes

Heres a couple fotos of my new house and me and elder Rodrigues and Elias. 

Loves, 

Elder Webber

Eating "Left-Out" food :-(

This week went by way too fast. I´ve been alittle bit sick this whole week but it wasn´t bad enough to really effect the work, just a stuffy nose and flem. Ate lots of oranges and I´m feeling better.  I feel like we don´t even have time to teach all that we want to. This week we got gifted alot of stuff from some of our investigators including ties and shirts, and I don´t know if I already told you but we were given a full suit that was too small for me and too big for my companion so we gave it to a recent convert. Yesterday Julio Cesar gave us a bottle of cologne, which was nice, but also really creepy. 

Anyways. Thursday night we were walking home at about 845 and contacting in the street as usual. We didn´t have lunch with a member that day so we made alittle rice and tuco. We were pretty hungry, and what the people do here is when they have food that is still good to eat, but they don´t want it, they put it outside on top of mailboxes, fenceposts, or garbage bins, well we walked by and saw a perfect slice of a triple-layered dulce de leche cake with sittin pretty right there. We inspected it and concluded it was good to eat. My companion got pretty sick that night but I felt fantastic really. 

This change went by really fast, and now we have all of our eggs in one basket, all of our fechas for baptism are the 15 of July, which is the day before changes. Almost all of our investigators need a perfect record these next two weeks then, which means coming to church both sundays and completing will all of their commitments. It´ll be hard, but if we can pull it off it´ll be quite the night. It´s been pretty good here with elder Rodriguez 

This week I´ll hit 8 months out. Pretty crazy, I wasnt thinking too much about it until I talked with Elder Taylor, who is financer, and he knows all the information and stuff like that about everybody. We try not to think too much about time. 

Mission president came out with a few announcements, which we knew before he announced them because we live with the assistants and they tell us almost everything. But he changed the music standards so that we can only listen to Mo Tab and the songs that are made by the church every year for the EFY program. Its alright, those songs are pretty good. He also changed the rule so that we can´t play ANY card game at any moment. So that means we cant play UNO during family home evenings, which I´m kinda bummed about, because the members here love to play UNO and it gets really intense sometimes. But rules are rules so I guess we´ll find some other activity to do. 

I´m down to my last little storage of cliff bars and Nature valley bars. My companion always asks me for some and I always say no. There are some things just not for sharing. I´ll share my cheesecakes when I make them, I already made one, and my brownies too, I also made one of those, but my cliff bars and pop tarts are mine. 

Elder Webber

Knock, Knock Jokes...

Yesh yesh, sounds all good at home. Pool sounds good, not right now because its pretty cold, waking up and you can see your own breath kinda cold. But yesss very good. I got your letter with the talk in it and some of the quotes, I got it on monday and couldn´t read it until today because theres the rule that says you can only read and write letters on p-days. But thanks a bunch for that.  

And yeah mapeline. I don´t need it urgently but just whenever you send another package or something, some kind of maple extract or something like that. I dont mean like bottles of maple syrup just the extract that you put in water and sugar or something like that. 

This week was a pretty productive week I feel. We had two intercambio things, one with Elder Pointer from California and another with Elder Caracola from Bolivia. Elder Caracola has about a week left on his mission, so he was pretty trunky and I just made jokes about it the whole day. 

When we saw a plane: 

Me-¨Hey elder, How far do you think that plane is?¨

Him - Oh I dont know, maybe a mile or two

Me- hmmmmmm nooo maybe like 2 weeks. hahaha

Its good fun. And Yes, Uruguay won their game which means that they´re passing into the next round in the world cup. It was deadly quiet during the game and after the game the whole country exploded. It was almost dangerous, we got a call from the Zone Leaders saying that if we didn´t have anything fijo, planned, that we should go home and do our weekly planning. We had plans. So we went out. Everybody dancing and yelling and honking horns. Locura. My pants ripped this week, so I sewed em up real good like, and my comp just asked why I didn´t just staple them together. What? elder.... I dont think..... I don´t think it works like that. Lo and behold his pants rip the next day and he staples them. They lasted maybe a good 4 hours. Hes a pichi. Which means hobo. I´m not sure he understands knock knock jokes either, heres his latest. 

him-knock knock,

me- who´s there

him- Julio

Me - Julio who

Him- Julio Cesar

Julio Cesar is an investigator that we have. 

Its been really foggy the last couple of days, which makes us feel like creepers. But we work, we should have some baptism dates coming up. Anyways I think that´s about it. But anyways, Thanks for everything. 

Love,

Elder Webber

Doing Well...

Yes yes a pretty normal week. We had our interviews with president this week, which is always good. He always has good insights to help with the work, we talk to him at least once a week because he´s in our ward but its still nice to get an interview. Its getting colder and starting to feel like christmas, but we have a good house and good clothes so we dont worry too much. We do have those green parrots that are eating all of the pine cones in the trees which is really cool. Just flocks of these green parrots that eat the nuts and then spit out the shells down on us as we walk under them. Yes, we have the world cup going on, you would think it would be crazy but its actually dead. Deeeeeaaath. muerte. There is nobody in the streets and nobody wants to talk to us during the games, even the members. That has made this week alittle harder than usual. But that´s ok, we just go to those that don´t like futball, who are few. When Uruguay won, they all went crazy and they were all pretty happy, so we got into alot of houses just by talking about futball. I really hate futball, with a deep passion, its all my companion talks about and all anybody wants to do or talk about. Its almost to the point where they´re breaking the commandment, you know, the one about thou shalt not worship any other thing before the Lord, on earth or in heaven. Its difficult. We even had an old lady call the police on us because we went by her house twice during the week and both were during the futball games. Just crazy people. We´re working hard, its good to hear all is good with the family and the pool. Joseph getting into rugby, atta boy. I don´t think I need anything, maybe some mapeline? but I don´t know about anything else. 

Love you guys,

Elder Webber

Baptisms Coming Up...

Yesh what a week no? So to start, we spent our entire p day last week in the mall, because the battery to the assistants car was flat because Elder Cutler forgot to turn off the lights. It was a long day, especialy because Uruguayo help takes forever. But we worked real hard this week and it paid off. We had President Gonzalez from the 70 come to talk to our mission this week too. We spent hours and hours with Diego, who is a guri as they call them here, a teenager. He´s got about 17 years and he is ready for baptism, we just had to make sure he was good to go, because he appeared alittle fem.... but hes good so no worries. The rest of the week was basically spent in the houses of Sandra, and Paula and Raul. Sandra and Diego had their interviews yesterday after we had lunch with the familia Giles, who are temple missionaries, the same ones who let us skype at thier house. Good ole american food, we almost threw up after because we had wayyyy too much pie. But anyways, they had their interviews yesterday and Sandra had a problem, and had to have an interview with president.... She didn´t tell us anything when we went over the questions with her the day before, so we called president and luckily he lives right next door to the chapel where the interviews were, he interviewed her and we finished the interview with diego. They both passed so thats good. 

Afterward, president took us in his car to Sandras house, during the drive I totally accidently insulted president on his driving. We were talking about I.D. and I asked if he had his Uruguay drivers license right after he took a crazy turn. Yeah it was bad. Then we had dinner that night with the assistants because Elder Cutler is going home next week, we had dinner at the familia Chinos house. Yes, another american family. We ate sooo much food again, it was so good. And we felt like we were going to throw up again, but we made it home and then I threw up. Just way too much. 

This week has been a cooking week, because we have established what we call the ¨carrasco cooking club¨ which just consists of us four elders in our house cooking boxes of cake mixes, then we ran out of cake mixes so we actually had to start making real food. We´ve gotten pretty good, snickerdoodles, amish oatmeal (super good), and loads of french toast. It was an expensive week, but it was the last week of the change so we just spent all the extra money for the week on ingredients. 

We have two baptisms tonight, at what we call a noche blanca, or a which night. Which is when the whole zone comes together and has all their baptisms for that week in one servicio. There will 7 baptisms in total tonight in Carrasco. We are really exited, really because the whole mission said that Carrasco would never baptize, even my old Ward Mission Leader said ¨well that sucks¨ when I said that I was going to Carrasco. We just work hard and we know the lord will do the rest, but only after we have done todo. 

But thank you very much, packages are awesome. and letters, which I need to write. 

Love,

Elder Webber

He Got the Package.....

yesh yesh I finally got the package! thank you so much for that, I was not expecting stuff that nice, and thank you mom for the recipe, we made snickerdoodles this week, me and elder England, and we gave one to lucas, who is a recent convert and he said ¨waaaa que es eso?! es muy rico!¨ so they turned out good.  

So this is what happened with the package, I asked the secrataries how to get it, and they´re my  homies so they hooked me up with the inside scoop and gave me permission to change our p-day from saturday to monday for that one week, now we are back on saturdays. But they gave me my passport because I needed it and I emailed you guys for the receipt because I would need it. Thank you by the way for sending that so fast. So we got to ride with the assistants to what is called, ciudad vieja, or the old city. We found the place and went inside and the assistants told me that it would cost 60 dollars plus 60 percent of the total value of the box. So I brought all my money, but we got there, they asked to see my passport and my receipt brought me my box and told me to go. For freeeeeee. sounds good to meeeeee. But they did tell me to tell you that I am not alowed to receive any shampoos or deoderants or any hygiene kind of gell or liquid. So that made me really happy. Then we had lunch with the assistant in tres cruzes. Which is a huge mall here. Its in the other mission but we were with the assistants so we were ok. So anyways, thank you very much for the package, and thank you aaron for putting the songs on, and yes I can tell it was aaron who put them on from the songs that are on there. haha Yes yes, I am loved. 

but this week we got sooo much done, we have some really good investigators. Paula and raul, sandra, diego, and sergio. Paula and Raul are a pair that are living together and paula wants to get baptized sooooo bad, everytime we visit she tells us she is ready to be baptized, and raul isn´t so much excited but still wants to, but they´re not married..... yesh sooooo we had a long lession with them about this. Paula wants to get married but raul, doesn´t, so we told them to talk about it and to pray and we will visit them later this afternoon to see how it went. We are praying that they came to the decision to be married. 

Then we have Sandra, who has Parkingsons and Diebetes. So she is suffering alot. She has a date to be baptized a week from today and she has had all of the lessions. Totally ready, but two days ago we had taught all the lessions except for one, tithing. She is very poor and we had made plans to visit her and teach her the law of the tithe, but the morning of the lession she texted us and said that because she cant work, because of the sicknesses, she doesn´t have money to support her family, she cant buy food, they´re living off of donated food from neighbors and her kids dont have clothes to wear to school. This worried us alot, but we felt like somehow we still had to teach her that paying her tithing was vitally important. We went and taught the lession and everything turned out great, turned out she had a bad idea about tithing because she was assisting another church, The Universal Church, (sooo currupt) that asks for a minimum tithe on certain days that needs to be paid or basically her salvation is on the line. But all went good and now she is ready for baptism, and we visit her this afternoon as well. 

We are still working on opertation: Clean up Sergio. He told us yesterday that he promised he would pray and try to stop drinking and smoking. We prayed with him for help, and he said he would only drink one fourth of a liter and smoke only two cigarretes before sunday. Its progress. When we found him he was a drunken bum, or as they say here, a pichi. Diego is a kid, he knows its all true but hes just nervous and he isn´t sure he is ready for baptism, he has a date to be baptized this next week as well, but its very tentative. We are preparing to do an open-house at the church in the up coming weeks, and to invite people we are getting the whole ward on board. As well as visiting the local ferias, which are the open air markets that sell fruits, veggies and fish, and we are handing out invites like crazy. Thats our backup plan when people reject us in the streets, we just have an invite in hand and basically throw these little bad boys at them before they get away. Its gunna be great. We are really excited for this coming week. 

Elder England and the assistants are awesome. We never really have any problems and the time is just flying down here. The members are really helpful too, with the open house coming up and with the lunches, like yesteday we had this really good pizza from a members pizza shop, ooooo yesh, because there is huge italian influence here we get lots of pastas and pizzas. I´m not complaining. Carrasco is the place to be right now. But its good here, and changes are coming up, I hope I dont go. 

Thank you very much for the package and everything and thank you mariah for your letter and the stamps! I will probably be writing home this p-day if I have time. 

Loves, 

Elder Webber

P.S.  My haircut and the "Left-overs" :-)