Hermana Barker in Bahia Blanca : I Met and Killed My First Cockroach!

This week was a pretty good one! We had 3 investigators in church yesterday, Moira, Enso (her son), and Oscar. We found a new investigator that is pretty solid but we have only met with him once. I´m just so hopeful for the people here because I know the gospel could bless their lives so much. My Castillano is coming along pretty well. Don´t think I´m learning Spanish, and never tell an Argentino that they speak Spanish, it´s a major insult. Sometimes it is really hard to understand people because they don´t have ANY teeth...like none. The dental hygiene here or lack there of is unreal.

A couple funny things from this week; we had a member take us out to a really far neighborhood in our area and we got in her car and I looked down and there was a shoe tied to her clutch pedal because I guess the pedal just fell off so ya know why get it fixed when you can tie a shoe to it with some nylon and call it good. Sometimes in lessons the people just start talking and they never really stop, I have never met someone in my life that talks as much as anyone here. They will tell you their whole life story even though they have no idea who you are. Sometimes in lessons when they start to ramble I will look at Hermana Zubeldia and go cross-eyed and she can´t do it so she just laughs. There aren´t a whole lot of funny things that happen on the mission so we have to take what we can get.

We also had Zone Conference this last week. It was awesome, and all in Spanish, 8 am to 4 pm, I got super lost by noon. We also had hamburgers for lunch, no not hamburgers. They are sandwiches with 4 hamburger patties that aren´t real hamburger and the buns are like the size of printer paper. They were HUGE not real hamburgers...haha. The food here is always a surprise but pretty good, sometimes it´s better not to ask what it is and just eat it, sorry mom I bet that freaks you out. Nothing awful or super scary yet, I had ravioli this week with a family that owns a meat shop and it was homemade and it was seriously amazing, Ethan might have even liked it...hahaha!

I´m sleeping alright. It´s getting pretty hot here and we definitely don´t have AC. Oh and all the weather forecasts we looked at were super wrong. I guess they have ruined their ozone layer here so there is like no protection from the sun, so I guess winters are pretty cold, but no snow, and summers are SUPER hot. Like 50 degrees, Celsius some days, that is 122 Fahrenheit, oh no, I might melt here.

We have to walk 10 blocks just to get to our area and our area is huge because the edges of it are lots of fields and few houses so we definitely walk a TON, like probably 100 blocks a day. I´m getting some pretty nice tans lines from my shoes with the straps and my watch.

I love my house, it´s very interesting. Here´s a couple stories: we definitely had a pet cockroach that I figured out where it lived and sprayed Raid on it...yeah didn´t die just ran out of it´s hole and I had to kill it, so I stepped on it (with shoes, on thank heavens) it sounded like cracking an egg it was awful, I killed it at like 4 am so needless to say I didn´t sleep the rest of the night. Our washer is so loud, it literally howls on the spin cycle, we can´t hear each other scream super loud when it is on. Our bathroom definitely has bidet (one of those things that squirt your bum to clean it) we don´t use it. And our ¨shower¨ is just a spout and there is a drain in the middle of the floor so if we shower too long the water leaks out from under the door into the hall, haha. We don´t have AC. We have 2 fans one is definitely broken and only works if we point it like straight at the ceiling.

So a little bit about our investigators, Moira we have had for a while. She is super great and loves everything we teach her but she isn´t married and her husband isn´t interested anymore, so he´s not really in any hurry to get married, so she can´t get baptized yet. But they really want to get married; they just want to wait until they have enough money to throw a big party, so it´ll happen, just maybe not soon. We had an awesome lesson with her this last week though but I got super confused and lost, but I bore my testimony anyway and after Hermana Zubeldia said my testimony was amazing!!! The gift of tongues is so real, sometimes I don´t even know what I am saying! It´s super cool to see the Lord´s hand in the work! Anyway, her son Enso is so, so cute, he reminds me so much of the boys, he really likes the lessons too and wants to be baptized but we don´t know how his real mom feels about any of this and he hasn´t asked her permission to be baptized and she has to approve him being baptized. Oscar, he is like a 65 year old man who went to church for a year 10 years ago then just stopped and never got baptized, so we are working a lot with him right now. We have him committed to the 6th of December!! Super exciting! And then our new investigator is like 30, recently divorced and has an adorable 4-year-old daughter; he is committed to the 13th of December. The work really is under way here in Argentina.

For anyone still reading my blog, please, please, please go watch the Mormon Message ¨Good Things to Come¨ by Elder Holland. It is my favorite.

Thank you for all your support.

Love Always,

Hermana Barker

xoxo