Ben's in MTC, Zach still serving...

Woohoo, benji is finally getting going. That´s pretty exciting. I´ll have to write him, to his new missionary email woohoo. 

Really there´s not a whole lot to say this week. It was a pretty hard week, basically just working in the streets, because we had to drop Virginia. She´s not progressing and we dont have time for that. Like good ole presidente Vilches said more than a year ago when I was in the city Minas, when you close one door, three more open. Well I sure hope so. We have a lot of potencial investigators, but they have the same problem that everybody else does, lazyness. Uruguay is just there. Not really doing anything, Just a grey area. Its frustrating some time to get the people to get up and change, get out of their routine and come to church. Working in the streets is the last thing we really want to be doing right now, wintertime there isn´t a whole lot of people outside and it gets dark early so that complicates things, so we´re trying to work with our new ward mission leader. Hes such a boss. We´re getting loads of refferals from him and the families and we´re trying to work more that way. Which is the way it should be. We went to a little town that belongs to our area, called hipodromo. whcih means, horse track. There´s no horses, and there´s no track. I dont know why its called that. But its what the members call a "virgin area" because the missionaries hardly ever go out there. So we figured we would go out to visit one of the only members who lives out there. We went to his house and he was just getting home from work and he was in his suit and everything, perfect to come out with us. But he didn´t feel like it, when suddenly, behind me and my companion he say the two 50 peso bills that he had that same morning. Its not much money, about 5 dollars, but for the uruguayos, that´s a good sum. So he took it as a sign, a "tender mercy" and took us to visit ALL of his neighbors, we now have about 11 or 12 new investigators out in the town. That´s what I´m talking about. Another one of the "tender mercies" that we had this week was when we were waliking in the street, having a pretty hard day and I looked behind me and say a lady and a 3 year old walking about 50 meters behind us. We didn´t have anywhere to go, so made an awkward U-turn to go and talk to them. They were members, quack,less acitves, but the 3 year old ran towards us and gave us big hugs.  called  Nahaieli and told us that she was praying that the "elders" would turn around to give her a hug. Just the little things. 

We got the changes yesterday, I´m staying here, and my companion is leaving to Minas. I´m getting a companion from Idaho I think. I dont know him, but they say that he´s pretty legit. We´ll take a look. I´m pretty happy, I was in this house with 3 peru missionaries, now there are 3 americans and one latino. I can speak english again! yess. 

That´s probably all for now. I´ll see tomorrow if those cards with the money came. 

Thanks,

Elder Webber

A "Pretty Normal" Week....

This week was pretty normal. Not a whole lot going on. The members are really getting on board, thanks to the Ward Mission Leader. I dont know why, but when he asks them for friends to visit they just start pulling out lists of their best friends, but nooooo we gotta use a pry-bar to try to get a name or two out of em. Oh well, but now we´re getting lots of referrals from the members and we´re really excited for this week. This week we were invited to sing in a missionary choir in one of the wards, which was a fun experience. Really, the highlight of this week was when a member asked us to go to the hospital to bless her son who was in an accident on his motorbike. Got hit by a bus. This is what went down, we got to the hospital and we had to go through a kind of security check with ID and everything, escorted by a doctor, then we had to take off our bags and our jackets and watches and rings, wash our hands up past the wrists, put on this surgical bibs, masks, and gloves and then they let us into the south american version of "intensive care". It was like steppìng into some horror film. Maybe 6 or 7 pacients all in one big room, all of them groaning from pain and twitching in thier beds. We made our way to the back corner and into a smaller room. The mother told us that he was "getting better". If he´s better now, I dont even want to know how he was before. To use the medical term, I would say he is indeed a "vegetable". But he could still feel pain, because he was groaning and crying and sweating alot. We weren´t allowed to touch anything so we were walking around with our hands in the air like doctors. My companion on one side of the bed and I was on the other, and we gave him a blessing. It was a very spiritual experience. Even though he couldn´t talk or express his feelings, we could feel the peace and comfort that it brought to him in his hour of need. Then we did the whole process in reverse, undress, throw the gloves, the mask, and the bib away, wash our hands and through security again. We´ve been struggling with Virginia, this week she told us that she thought that she cant keep the sabath day holy. Ugh.... We´re thinking about dropping her as an investigator. We dont have a whole lot of time to waste. 

Anyways, this is the last week of the change, then next week I´ll probably have a new companion. 

Well, good luck to the benji, I´ll have to send him a tie to africa when I get back. THE TIE. That was given to me by josh which was given to him by aaron, which he got from a long line of missionaries in brazil. 

Love,

Elder Webber

We made Zone T-shirts. I didnt bring my camera but I´ll send some photos next week of what we did today for our zone activity. Cerro del Toro. Hill of the Bull. Its s spring/fountain that is a giant bull and if you drink from its mouth its supposed to be good luck.

A "Noche Blanca"

This week went by pretty fast, with our new ward mission leader here things are really picking up. Pablo Sanchez. He´s just got a contagious energy about him, "the tsunami is coming, tsunami of baptisms" haha that´s what he is always saying. This week me and my companion set some goals to try to be more spiritual and listen to the promptings of the spirit more. We found some pretty legit pass along cards in the church the other day and we´re just going crazy with them, they have a big painting of Jesus on the front, so we do our contact and we usually get denied but then we pull out the cards with Jesus and the people feel bad denying a card with Jesus so they have to stop and listen, and that´s when we strike. We really just spent this week talking to EVERYBODY we possibly could; stopping people on bikes, the people on the streets, the people hanging up their laundry outside (ok, those ones really didn´t want anything). Its been a good week. One night we were pressed for time and so we couldn´t talk to everybody and we walked passed a lady and her kid and the kid was singing some evangical song about Jesus, we walked maybe thirty steps down the road and then, almost simulteaniously we turned and said "we need to talk to them" She didn´t want anything, but her sister did! haha Oh the spirit is good like that. We fasted as a missionary force this week to find more people to teach and that those who we had would progress. Oh the power of prayer and fasting. Let me try to explain. First off, Virginia finally did her first day without smoking, we almost doubled the amount of progressing investigators in the zone, reached the goal of total attendence in the sacrement meeting, and we are retaining almost double the percentage of the mission average right now when it comes to recent converts. The mission is pretty legit. If Virginia stays strong we are thinking of baptizing her not this sunday, but the next one. We are planning on doing a "noche Blanca" where we all plan the baptisms for the same day. Its going to be good. I think that´s about all for now.

Love, 

Elder Webber 

Feel The Spirit...

Well so much is going on I dont really know where to start. This week was all pretty normal and Virginia is still smoking one or two cigarretes a day. Its frustrating because she has come so far and now she is stuck on just one or two a day. We´ll see if she gets better this week. I got to do some divisions with one of the elders in our zone this week, really I´m not sure if it was this week or last week, but whatever. I went with an elder Brumble from Salt Lake. Hard core Utah fan, trying to convince me to switch to Utah. He´s got some good points, but it takes more than a young buck elder to trick ole Elder Webber. haha. This friday we woke up at about 330 to go to the mission leadership council in Carrasco. Its always so good to go and see the other zone leaders, most of my group from the MTC are there and its good to see how they are doing. This months council we had Elder Cabrera from the 7th Quorom of the seventy. He is an inspired man. So is president. He always give us council and that always ends up being exactly the thing we need during the following month. It was good to be there with Elder Cabrera, he participated in almost all the aspects of the council including setting goals and giving report of the last month. Sooo much revelation and knowledge that we would have to give to our zone. This sunday we also got a new ward mission leader because the last one didn´t really know what to do and is kinda old and cant really come out and work with us. Soo we got a brand new returned missionary, and he told us that we had better be doing our excersizes because we´re gunna need some strong arms to stand all the baptizing that this ward is gunna be doing. hahahaah oh....I am doing my excersizes. Yesterday we had a big multi zone activity and so that´s why I´m writing tuesday. And today we had the zone conference. Mayber I was feeling alittle selfish, but it has been ages since I have given a good hands-on training with my missionaries so I decided to take a half an hour or so to do what we call "workshops" where I basically get alittle time to talk to my zone about what I feel like they need. I love doing meetings and conferences. I just get to pray, and get revelation and I always end up feeling the spirit. I decided to talk about giving report and responsiblity. I felt like that is what we needed. We´ll see how things go. 

I got into a routine here with my companion for these last couple weeks, just working and I think we started to loose the real reason and start to just go through the motions. Luckily we caught on, really I realized this week, EVERYTHING has to be done with love and the spirit. The people know, the spirit knows, when we are doing something without real intentions, you gotta find the way to really love them. President told me about the "as if" principle. He said, if you feel the spirit but you´re not sure that your companion is just keep teaching "as if" he did. I put that to practice this week and really saw the difference. It was a marking moment in my mission for sure.

I got the patches! already traded them with the scout. Some of them. And the leaves came too!  Already sent those out to some of "my" converts. So thanks.

I also got an email from the ward, some ward activity. So you´ll have thank the person who sent those scans of the letters and that participated. 

Thanks, that´s all for now.

Love,

elder Webber

Multi-Zone Conference....

 This week was pretty normal, I wasn´t really taking any mental notes of things to write home about so I dont have a whole lot to say. This week we did have a multi-zone conference here with our zone (Maldonado), rocha, and Minas. So I got to see my son again. That was nice. It was the conference where everything almost went wrong. From the beggining. no offense, but my companion is pretty dumb when it comes to logistics and organization so that didn´t help. 
Because we were hosting the conference here in our zone we were in charge of a few things, the main being lunches for everybody. The offices sent 9600 pesos to my account, about 500 dollars, to buy lunches. So we did the giant burgers called tortugones again. good stuff. We also had to invite 10 members to come and participate, to be practice investigators for us. President was pretty clear that it had to be 10. The conference was friday and we woke up early to go set up chairs and tables and put up signs and everything. We went to the store and bought a bunch of drinks, bananana, plastic cups and all that good junk. About 10 minutes before the conference starts, president gets there and the microphone stops working, great, so I´m trying to figure that out and we got it going just in time to start on time. The 10 members were supposed to arrive at 1030, an hour after the conference started, we went to go see how many members were waiting in our designated waiting room about 15 minutes before 1030, and there were two. But right as we were about to start the practices the other eight showed up. yessssss. Then lunch time and the burgers still hadn´t come, right on time the burger guy shows up but he only has half of the burgers, so he drops off those and heads back to go get the other burgers. The line of missionaries comes through and they all grab their burgers and right when we ran out of burgers, the burger guy shows up again. Nice, and what did he have? Extra burgers, for the members who stayed, (they weren´t supposed to stay but they did anyways) in the end, everything turned out perfect. It was really stressful but successful. 
President was pleased and he said that it was the most punctual multi-zone conference that he had been too. Woohooo. We spent the week worrying about that really. 
But we did see something pretty special. There is a member here who´s son got in a motorbike crash and the doctors said he was basically going to die. He´s getting alot better, but now they say that they will probably have to cut off his leg. Anyways, the member (the mom of the accident man) was praying and asking what God wanted her to do, she said that while she was praying she got the impression that she needed to work more in missionary work, well the next thing we know she is in church with her friend and her grandson and they were all crying in our gospel principles class that my companion and I teach. Why can´t all the members be like that? Its so much easier. That´s what we´re trying to get them all to do now. 

I think that´s it for now. 

Love 

Elder Webber

Busy, Busy...

pero paaaaa. 

haha yeah sorry about last week, I was traveling all day p-day and we didn´t have time to come in to do emails. Well I got two weeks to email about so lemme get started. 

So yeah, last week was change week, I´m staying here with my companion. I was kinda hoping for someone new but whatever. But Elder Leavitt, a missionary from Orem was leaving this change, so he wanted to go back and visit one of his area, Bella Italia, and he invited me to go with him because his companion didn´t want to go and I had served there before. OK! Even though when I said goodbye to that place I was pretty sure that I would never come back. But we went back and saw some of the people that he baptized and some of mine too. OHhhh it was nice to see some of those members again. It seems like it was just yesterday I was there training my son. I still knew all the streets and everything. Weird experience, really made me think how fast the time goes by. So that´s where I all last p-day so I couldn´t write home. The next day was changes, its always good to see the old companions and what not. It was an especially sad meeting because Elder England and Elder Ashcraft both finished their missions. Two really good friends and companions of mine. Not a whole lot changed here in the zone. We have two new district leaders here, so we´re looking forward to training them in their duties, but we are really excited and so far the zone is working really well together. During this week I got a call from the ward secretary asking if I could give a talk next sunday, so I was pretty excited but then when I got to church he asked me if I could change it to that same day. Uhhhhhh yeah I only have half of a talk but ok. so I got home and I´m not gunna lie, probably my best one yet, I didn´t stutter with any of the spanish words and got my message accross pretty well. Mission prep. The bishop came up and said thanks and said that´s how a talk should be given. Made me feel pretty good about myself. Virginia came to church, she is doing so well with her cigarretes. From two packets to two cigarretes but it looks like she´s getting stuck on that number. We´ve tried preisthood blessings and plans and replacements. We´re almost out of Ideas. She has a super testimony of the book of mormon, "can´t put it down" she always says. She also shares the gospel a ton with her neighbors, and thanks to her we found a great new investigator to teach. We went and visited her friend who said she wanted to come to church with Virginia and we were talking about eternal families because about 3 months ago her husband died. Ahh the spirit was so strong. She started crying and then we sang, Asombro me da. orrrr I think its called I stand all amazed. And she cried some more. Accepted a baptismal date and everything. 

Some other stories from this week, we were doing some visits with the new elders quorom pres. in his car, one of the few members who has a car, and we pull up to a less actives car and accidently his the less active´s dog, the less active saw it and everything, so the elders quorom pres says, "Did we just hit that dog? Well we´re out of here." and sped off and parked around the corner and walked to teach the less active so he wouldn´t know it was us. hahaha. The dog was ok. 

There is sister in the ward who loves missionaries because he son is serving in chile right now and so she always gives us food. One day, I dont know what was going on, but alllll the members were giving us food. and then she invited us to go over and have some soup because it was freezing cold. As we walked into her house I told my comanion in english that I was already full but I had to eat. So I ate. Then she brought out a banana smoothy. I had to eat it, its been too long since I had a banana smoothy. I ate so much I was feeling really sick, so sick that I asked to be excused and went outside and threw up. ahhhhh and they all saw me. I felt really bad because the sister lives in really humble circumstances and really sacrifices alot to give us food. So the next day I made her some snickerdoodles and took them over with a little note saying sorry from vomiting your food. It was really delicious. 

That´s about it for now. I dont know if there were any questions that I missed or anything like that. But thanks for money! 

Love,

Elder Webber

photos of the fingers! 

and this is sister Mari. The sister whos food I threw up. 

Fun at the Beach :-)

Its starting to get pretty cold here, not as cold as it was this time last year. 
Benji all graduated and junk, sounds good haha. This week was good, nothing really exciting. 
We are still teaching Virginia and re activating her son. He is without his rights for now but we talked with the bishop and he said that her son should be able to baptize her in about two weeks if he keeps on progressing. Which is perfect, the end of the change. So we will re activate him and baptize his mom. They both came to church this sunday which was fantastic, this is by far the biggest ward that I have ever seen in Uruguay. We had 150 members in church yesterday. Well really 156 because we are the ones who count the attendence. But that´s huge, compared to 33 or Bella Italia where we were struggling to get 30 or 40. 
This week I also did some divisions with one of our District Leaders, Elder Cervanted from Peru. So many elders from Peru. But he´s good, his district is struggling alittle so we had a little talk to see what we could do to help them out. The mission president is asking that we work more with the ward and stake leaders, which is easier said than done. In orem yeah you can walk to stake presidents house in about half an hour from anywhere in the stake, we can´t even get to the bishops house in half an hour. The stake president lives in Minas, I worked there a while back, (about a year) and its about an hours drive away. But we have to, we´ll probably go this thursday, stay the night in Minas and then go to the leadership council the next day in Montevideo. We´ve been trying to focus on working more with the members, but its hard. We´re seeing results yeah, but it´s slow work. It will result in better baptisms and better converts, but sometimes its frustrating to see how slow the members work with us. Ah I almost forgot, saturday night the young mens president invited us to share a message about the restauracion to the gurises (kids) but he said to make it "different" try to get the kids excited to go and serve a mission. We couldn´t really think of anythin really new but suddenly, bling, like a light bulb, a new idea--fun how that happens... 

I bought some foot cream this week too. paaaaaaaa expensive. haha but oh well.

Yesh, I would like thems leaves, maybe if you can, send some scouting patches too. 

thanks

Elder Webber

Heres a photos of most of the elders in the zone last week at the beach. These are our karate poses.