Last Companion!

Dear family y friends,

This one is gonna be short although there is lots to say! I´ll try to get it all in! Tuesday I got my new companion... Elder Martinez from Guatemala. He came "pre-trained" and had been serving 3 months in a mission in Guatemala waiting for his Visa to come to Argentina. He y his mom y sister are the only members in his family since his father y brothers have been living in Mississippi the last several years working y therefore weren´t there to recieve the missionaries. They have been members for about 5 years. His sister will also be serving a mission in the not too distant future y for now is waiting for her call. He actually grew up in Mexico most of his life... so I am learning some words, expressions, etc. that will be of use when I get home. :) Awesome Elder y everyone in the ward is pretty excited to have a missionary from such an "exotic" place.

My comps first day in the mission was pretty interesting. It was a very cold rainy day. The pictures we took didn´t turn out great since we were all rushed to get out of the rain! (By the way mom... one of the Hermanas that is training this transfer is from Tremonton Utah! Her name is Hermana Norby... ring any bells? She said she´s from Riverside, a Belmont ward...) We left the mission home in Banfield around 4 in the afternoon and had a 2 hour train ride with luggage which is always fun... We got back to our area around 7, dropped off his stuff y hurried off to a Meeting with our Ward Mission Leader at his house.... which no one else ended up showing up for. :S We had a good talk with him at least y we were able to dry off a little bit at least before getting soaked again on the way back to the pension.

It has been a bit of a rough week here once again. Starting to very cold and all of our plans have been falling through on us. :S We are also trying to "build the area" y have started to work in areas that haven´t been worked in a long time... contacting old investigators, visiting members y asking for references, doing contacts, etc. We talked with some great people y hopefully should see some progress in the coming weeks. My companion seems to like the area y says it is pretty similar to the area he was serving in in Guatemala. On top of all the teaching opportunities that fell through this week we also had several service projects fall through which was a bit frustrating! Things have got to turn around sooner or later so we are just trying to be happy with what we have and keep working!

Thursday we had our first Zone Meeting in Quilmes y we were supposed to be watching a 2 hr video on Preach My Gospel.. but about 15 min into it the power went out. The Zone leaders ended up having to give a last minute lesson, but it actually turned out really good. It has been 4 or 5 weeks since I have had a chance to teach a class with my district! We have a lot of great Elders in our Zone this transfer... with over half the zone training new missionaries. (There are 6 new missionaries in the zone). That evening we ran into the familia Kiss in the church but didn´t get to talk much. They said they really enjoyed the visit y are looking forward to sit down y talk a bit more about it. (They were just leaving as we got there.)

Not much happened in Church yesterday. Oscar came to church alone but had to leave after sacrament meeting. We had one hermana that showed up that I had never met before who said that after several years of being inactive/doing worldly things she started reading the Book of Mormon y felt she needed to come back to church. She is about 30 years old y has a 12 year old kid that will likely end up getting baptized in the not too distant future. She has a very strong testimony y it was a pleasant suprise for us after a rough week!

Anyways, that’s all for this week. Can´t believe it is almost June! Happy Memorial Day! I love you all!

les amo
Elder Ian Wheelhouse