Looking for a reason in Campo Largo

Querida familia,                       11 de Noviembre 2013

This week we had transfers and... we continue without any changes. Tuesday night, Elder Marilaf called us and asked, "so do you know who is going and who stays?" I just told him that neither one of us would be leaving and suprised he said, "who told you?" No one had told us, I just knew. So Elder Miramontes and I are going to be together until the fifteenth of December, if not maybe a little longer.

So we were in a member's house,waiting for them to get ready to go out to do visits with us, when a man walked out of the house who is a friend of their dad. I greeted him by saying, "hello brother, how are you?" and we shook hands, but he answered me back and said, "I'm not your brother." "Actually to the contrary, we are all children of God." The members just said that we "don't have to talk to him."

This week we've been really focused on Omar and Marta; we're hoping to get the marriage done this week and maybe the baptism as well. But once they're baptized we won't be needing to teach them so often, so we have been working with them to help them invite their friends and family to participate in the Gospel and the Church.

On Tuesday evening, we talked with Marta and Rosa, the mom of Marta, about missionary work and sharing the Gospel with everyone else. Marta had the idea that we start teaching Omar's sister and mom. So we talked about how they want to approach them and what things they want to share with them; Marta specifically asked for pamphlets of the Family Proclamation because she and Omar like it so much.

Hugo and Belqui have also been in missionary mode, but more so Belquis. But a few weeks ago we gave Belquis some pass along cards that have the Articles of Faith and she gave them out to some friends and family and then asked us for more because there were more people that were asking about the Church. So we might be starting to teach some brothers of Belquis here soon; we have planned to show a movie in their house this Wednesday and they are going to invite some  people to come see it and also to meet us.

It was actually really funny what happened the other day because apparently the culture here is that if someone says that they liked the movie that you watched with them, then you are supposed to let them borrow it. So Belquis said that Hugo was upset because we watched the Joseph Smith movie and didn't leave it with them to borrow it and watch it again. But even if he didn't get to see it again, at least he liked it and now we know for the next time.

The weddings have been an interesting thing though. We need a more updated birth certificate from Marta so that we can get their papers ready for the marriage, but we have to get it from another city. So this morning we sent the necesarry documents to Las Breñas where two other Elders recieved the papers and took them to the court house for us; tomorrow when we go there, they're going to give us the papers that they received so that we can bring them back with us to Campo largo and make this wedding happen.

This last Thursday we got some service hours in a brick making place. There is a member named Epifanio who makes and sells bricks for a living and we helped him with the processes of carrying the bricks and loading them into the oven to burn them (so that they become hard and durable). We didn't do everything that he had ready to go into the oven, but he said that we had loaded up about 2,850 bricks (the oven holds about 14,000).

This week went by so quickly that everything just kind of blurred together and I can't really remember what we did and when we did it. We've been trying to find lots of new people to teach, but it's been difficult; sometimes we make jokes that every righteous person has already been found or we compare Campo Largo to Sodom and Gomora in the sense that we can't find any more righteous people than are already with us. But I know that there's a reason that we're here, even if it's only to help the branch grow and continue; without us, the branch would most likely close. That would be really sad too because there are some really strong and faithful members; one of the young women said that she was going to be moving to another province called Entre Rios in a city called Chajari and she asked us to ind where the chapel was so that she could attend the meetings. Well we looked it up and the closest chapel is eighty kilometers away (there's one in Argentina and another in Uruguay).

os amo,

Elder Burt