Mission President "Resigns...?"

Yes the baptism went well, she had back problems so she had to go forwards, but the water was way too low for that so she didnt make it all the way under the water, so I had to do it again but this time backwards, and it was difficult because of their names down here, they have like at least 4 names and they´re all impossible to pronounce, but yes it went well. 

We have 2 more planned for this week but they are sketchy because theyve made promises before that they didn´t keep. We will see. With faith! Saturday was the conference of Oros. Which are all the newbies, and I was so surprised with how rapidly my spanish has progressed in comparison to my old buddies from the CCM. Now I see ¨who is the gardener here´. Thats for papa, thats that talk he told me bout.

 This week was extremely hot, sweated right through my shirt and into my tie knot, it was gross. But its raining now so thats good. We also re-activated a non active member, she hadn´t been to church for 4 or something years, but we got her to. Woohoo. Then yesterday, president called a mission wide conference, so we had to go to montevideo again, and he announced his ´¨resignation¨? i guess thats whats its called, we were all pretty shocked because hes only been out six months. oh well, we got free lunch so that was good. 

Going pretty good, staying healthy with my 30 minutes of excersice everyday. Sounds good with aaron and thems. I was thinking about Lord of the Rings the other day because we have the sound track. 

Gracias for the packages. 

Elder Webber

Having fun...

Yesh yesh what a week. So Mirta committed to baptism but wasnt ready for this last sunday, so this friday! They announced it in sacrement and everything. So that will be fun, I have memorized the baptism in spanish so Im good to go with that. My comp had a tooth that was bothering him so we went to the dentist and it was a wisdom tooth, so he yanked it out right there and only cost him like 50 american dollars. what a deal then I got my teeth checked for free. So two weeks ago I thought I would be money smart and buy just rice and oatmeal. That was good for about the following 24 hours. You cant buy milk here because it goes bad way too fast, and rice and oatmeal stay good until you make it. So I have been surviving off plain white rice and soy sauce for the past two weeks. Then a few days ago I ran out of oatmeal and was like wowwwww just white rice. If only i had some milk i could make some pudding that is good for alllll the meals of the day. But the store didn´t have any powdered milk for sale. Sooo i went home pretty glum not wanting to eat rice for dinner again, and lo and behold, the neighbor shows up with some pizza, its not really pizza but its close enough, what a super blessing, and then the other neighbor comes with what? thats right, powdered milk. Rice pudding all the meals!

 I guess everyone here figures that because we´re missionaries we never get ice cream, but thing is, all the members think that, so we get sooooo much ice cream. Its ridiculous. My cool man satchel broke too, the straps just came right off, I sewed it back on but i´m not sure how long that will last, we will see.  

We had 6 investigators at church this week!! Which was awesome but at the same time very difficult because we had to guide them all around to the different meeting and answer their questions. Our investigators are so awesome, they get their best pair of jeans, which is their only pair of jeans, and their best pair of shoes, which is their only pair of shoes, and their best button up shirt, which is their favorite soccer teams polo and they come to church. Mirta is interesting, she has like 10 dogs no joke, and like 4 cats I think, and we were teaching her about the plan of salvation, and she asked what about her dogs, we kinda laughed and said we cant really baptize them but then we realized she was serious, and we just said you will be happy dont worry, and that seemed to satisfy her question. 

Thats about it, oh! We were walking to Mirtas house, which is about 30 minutes away and this special boy runs up to us, shakes our hands and grabs a pamphlet out of our bags and runs off. I was kinda in shock and my comp didn´t think anything of it, I managed to see where he ran off to, and we walked past this house like everyday, and I always felt like we should go and try to find this boy. So one day I told my companion we were going to find him, sure enough we find his family, who had read the pamphlet and they let us in and talked to us and we will talk to them again today!

Sounds good at home, Joseph is getting all grown up. We had lunch with a family from brazil and i said my brother served there and they gave me a cool head band with the brazil flag on it. 

We have guarana todas las dias. and coke. 

And to answer papas question, I would probably say to teach more from the preach my gospel. That book is golden. So many awesome quotes and scriptures in there. 

Much loves, Elder Webber

Happy New Year...

Yeah what a crazy week. I did get your package. I opened with my companion and zone leaders and they were all pretty confused to why I recieved a bunch of toys and stuff. But that was good so thanks. I will need to pin for my card though.... and I use the glasses straw thing, its pretty neat. 

Yes, what an awesome week, I shall start at the begining, It was a hot and humid night, as usual and I am awoken around midnight by a very large man banging his hands against the window that my bed is up against. Obviously I am startled and the man leaves the window and begins to make his way to our front door and I hear him trying to open the door! By now I am out of bed and have awoken my comp and have a broom stick as a weapon, see the light change in the kitchen, like a door or window just opened and so I look down the hall, and I see a large maybe, six foot six  dark figure standing in our kitchen. yes alittle heart attack, but it turned out to just be our laundry hanging on the line. My comp calls our neighbors and asks them to come over, once the man has left. Yes it was just the neighbor wanting to talk to us about lunch the next day. At midnight? ok. New years was fun. Food is always always sketchy. and the water, but we just eat and pray. mosquitos at night, or i think, they might be bed bugs because they dont itch, and i never see the mosquitos. Just covered in random red dots. My missionary tan is coming along quite nicely, and we had intercambios, which is where I go with a different companion for a day and a night. and I got to go with Elder Do Santos, Zone leader. He was super nice, and played rugby before the mish, learned so much because he could explain things in english, he was from argentina. We had a really fun night at an inactive members house playing this weird stacking mini chairs game. Oh and it rained this week! So I got to wear the cool sweater that I found in our appartment. And our investigators are doing well. We had almost all of them come to church this week, and one of them it was her second time coming, know what that means? Thats right, an investigator only needs to attend church twice to get baptized, so hopefully we can keep teaching her and maybe this week?! We have Pablo and Lorena, who are not married and ancient investigators, which means they just like talking to missionaries, and we have Evelyn and Ismel who we found last week, and Ricardo who is in a wheel chair, alittle weird, but he has a ton of faith, and then we have Mirta who is the one who might get baptized. And We had 4 of them come to church. woohoo. 

Package was nice, and yes, more g's, and alot of u.s. postage stamps, super glue would be nice and family photos! Email me some family photos too. 

I have a weird indent on one of my teeth, not sure what it is or where it came from but its there, I figure if my tooth falls out, dad promised I could get a silver one. so Yeah. 

Good stuff! Good to hear about ben and rugby going nicely, and joshua, aaron is still just chillin, tell aaron to make me a cd with all the best songs, like a power cd. I need good stuff. 

Much loves, 

Elder Webber

In The New Area (First Week)...

Yesh Pretty exciting stuff. Alot happened this last week. Well to start we left the CCM at like 4 in the morning and flew to argentina and met the president yada yada yada. All good fun. Then we met our companions, all of my american buddies from the ccm got white, american, english speaking companions, and I got..... Elder contreras. Hes super awesome though. Doesn´t speak any english at all which made things pretty fun. We then got on an omnibus, which is just the city bus and it dropped us off in what is now called Autodromo, which means race track. Its this little beach village about an hour east of montevideo city. Sand. sand everywhere. So we dragged our luggage up this half sandy and half paved road for like a mile maybe and found our ´'house'. Yeah its just a shack. A cinderblock shack with a corrogated metal roof.  Yup, and to make it better, the elders who were in this house before were messy lazy bums. So yeah, a companion who speaks no english, white washing an area, living in a shack with piles of trash and wet clothes in the corner.  They did leave some left over food in the fridge which was cool. My comp was pretty angry at the missionaries who lived here before, they literally had ONE investigator. We got like 3 our first day. So this whole week was just finding and clapping. Sunday was pretty cool cuz the ward mission leader speaks english.  The poor members here, they have nothing, yet they give so much. Their whole 'house' could fit in my bedroom pretty easily and the inside is packed with stuff, and a whole family. Crazy. Its about ten million degrees here. I'm getting a pretty good missionary tan already. To get to this internet cafe we had to walk for like 30 minutes then catch a bus that costs about 20 pesos and stand on that crazy train for 15. Busses are nutter butter. They dont even stop if they dont have to, just open the door and slows down. We get 3300 pesos a month which comes out to about 5 dollars a day. Feels good to be thinking in english. Its hard because everybody said that having a native as a comp would be good and Id learn faster but how do I learn if it all just goes over my head? Its a well known fact that chile people speak the fastest spanish, turns out my comp is from chile. Tough.

I'll be skyping at 4 o clock here in the afternoon. dont know what time that is there but whatever. That´s pretty good stuff about the korean kid, I think i do remember him. Didn´t get that package but oh well.

Loves, Elder Webber

P.S.  Yesh, and my comp said that his goal was to be the second best missionary because he wants me to be the best, pretty neat. They call new missionaries 'oros' which means 'golds'. Neat neat. 

Moving Out....

Yes so we leave tomorrow and my p days from now on are going to be on mondays.  I think.  Proceliting was really fun, we gave a blessing to a member we met on the streets, we saw him smoking then he found us like 3 hours later and we could tell that he was physically struggling and he asked for a blessing then we had to sprint like half a mile to the bus stop in 90 plus degree heat.  Its pretty killer, thats all I have time for now because we only have 5 minutes.

 

Much loves,

Elder Webber

Having Fun and Moving out (soon)...

Our whole district, all 11 of us, are supposed to leave that same day--next Tuesday.  We will see. So yeah we changed zones for these last two weeks in the CCM.  Our new area is super duper ghetto, straight up shanties, like you can touch two houses with both elbows at the same time, if that makes any sense. 

Down in the depths of the ghetto theres not a whole lot of sun light.  Its creepy, but the people are super humble and really receptive to the message.  And the kids are awesome, they swarmed us and i did a magic trick for them and they were blown away, then they called me a liar when they figured it out... But whatever. Yup. 

This is my last week here, supposed to leave next tuesday, still going strong in the spanish stuff, except I still couldnt give directions if i needed to, but I can teach somebody about the apostasy and the restoration.  So it will be an interesting first couple weeks in the field. Ill have to send some photos when we visit the shantie town again this week. I learned how to do that clicking thing when you whip your wrist and your fingers snap. Its that thing that selena gomez does in that movie with her mom. Its called ñemongaru down here. Just figured mariah might like that fun fact.  Send me ties  :-) Just normal ties will do, I dont really mind, i just need some variety up in here.

Much loves,

Elder Webber

Follow Up... to "Clapping"

Yeah It's pretty fun going out on the saturdays, So we went out this week fully expecting it to be as grand as last week.  We hop off that bus and hit the four first appointments we made, but since 12 to about 4 is siesta time, all four fell through. Things were looking pretty dismal so we made a stop at a local store and bought some goodies Then  we went to our good friend from Georgia, the country, and we taught him an awesome lesson about the LDM and he promised to read and pray about it, and said it was ok if we gave his info to the real missionaries, who we met like 30 minutes later walking the streets. Then we found this girl while we were clapping, I guess I never really described clapping, so everybody has gates at the front of their property and they rarely have doorbells cuz it's pretty ghetto, so you just stand on the street and clap, like 7 or 8 times and I guess they hear that. No idea how they know its for their house because all the houses are squished into the tiniest little gaps, but whatever.  Anyways we were clapping and found this girl who was learning english so I think she only wanted to talk to us because she wanted practice but we gave her a LDM and she started reading it and stuff but me and my companions think it was just because she wanted to keep us around longer but we had our appointment with the Faundo, the real english speaker! so we ran over to his place because we were almost late, and we were just giving him the run down of the LDM because he had alot of questions, and he asked why we were always so happy when we dont get paid and dont get to see our family and we work all day. Testimony time.   It was rad. then he almost cried when we gave him a LDM for free.  Supes cool.  Then we almost missed the bus but it was fun.  My comps are the best. Best two guys in the whole district.  Other than that, it was a pretty slow week.  Oh, if you havent already sent my christmas package to the mission home i would appreciate it if you would include my retainer, i think i left that at home.  And some ties, alot of ties.  Yup I started to get sick a couple days ago which was difficult.

Much loves,

Elder Webber

P.S.  Me and my teacher, and heres two more, Me and papa noel, our one chef, and my district.