Get your hair cut shorter...

Querido familia,                             13 de Mayo 2013

During our zone meeting we had last week with President and sister Heyman, President Heyman said that he wants all the missionaries to have shorter hair and told all the missionaries there, except for three, that they needed to get haircuts. So I bought an electric buzzer to have instead of having to borrow one from members or from other missionaries. So from there, I gave Elder Lopez and Rivera a haircut this week.

Saturday was the birthday of one of the members here named Felix. He is the member that can't hear or speak. So we went to his house to visit him and while we were there he asked us if we could share a spiritual thought and a prayer with him and his brother, who is not a member. His brother is also deaf, so to share a thought with them we had to have them read scriptures and sign things out. Felix has one of the Book of Mormon story books that has pictures to go with the verses, so that helped out a lot to use the pictures and then have them be able to read it too. At the end of our lesson, Felix's brother, I don't remember his name right now, said that he believes in the Virgin María, but that he would think about getting baptized in our church.

The next day, Sister Baldovino, the branch president's wife, brought cake for the members to celebrate Felix's birthday and we gave him a tie as a present.

This Tuesday we had exchanges with Elder Humphries and Elder Lopez, but this time and I went to Curuzú with Elder Lopez while Elder Humphries went to Mercedes.

While we were there, we ate dinner with the Villaba family one night, milanesa and salad, and the night before they made us torta frita (like scones, but flatter) and hot chocolate. The salad dressing that everyone uses here is also an oil with just a little bit of seasoning in it and it's homemade. They don't have anything like ranch or italian here, but the dressing they make isn't bad either.

Then there was a member who recently decided to go inactive after being an active member since her baptism more than six years ago. So we went to talk to her and decided it would be best to just listen to her and see what the problem was. So it turns out that she doesn't want to be in the church because she is tired of hearing about eternal families and eternal marriage when she feels like she is never going to get married and is too old to get married. Our whole discussion with her was almost two hours long, but we were mostly just listening to her. So I asked her if she had received her patriarchal blessing and she said that she had not. So we started talking to her about getting her blessing and that there was a patriarch coming to the district center in a couple of weeks and she could prepare herself to get the blessing. During the course of the conversation her attitude completely changed from almost not wanting us to be there in the beginning to almost in tears by the end.

While I was in Curuzú with Elder Lopez, we had an interesting encounter with a guy who had a little too much to drink. While we were walking down the street, this guy walked up to us and started to talk to us, but it as kind of hard to understand him because he was pretty drunk. He had wine in his beard and we could smell it on his breath. He started off by telling us how he is from Spain and will only be in own for a few days and then he started telling us how awful he thinks Argentina is. After a little bit of talking, he pointed to me and said, "You are going to give me a hundred pesos," and then pointing at Elder Lopez he said, "and you are going to give me a hundred pesos." We weren't sure if he was trying to rob us or if he was just asking for a donation; either way, he wasn't very good at either of them. So I told him that we didn't have any money, but if he liked we could give him a pamphlet about Jesus Christ and then before he had time to respond I asked him if he knew who Christ was and by then he had completely forgotten that he had asked us for money. So Elder Lopez went to give him a pamphlet and he said he didn't want a pamphlet from him because he was from Mexico and that he would only accept one from me.

os amo,

Elder Burt