Serving Together Argentina

Buenas tardes!   Hope you are all having a great evening (it's evening as we write this) and had a great week.  As always time is flying by but the past two weeks seem to have gone a bit slower.  No big events or trips for us this week, just the day to day missionary work we experience on a normal basis. We started teaching Teresa and Dionicio about the temple and helping to prepare them to go to the temple. They are a great couple.  We've enjoyed getting to know them and their family.  The first lesson we taught was about the Plan of Salvation, or the Great Plan of Happiness.  It's a plan of happiness because we learn of our purpose in this life and the promise of eternal life with our Heavenly Father after this life if we live worthy.  Teresa speaks and understand Spanish only a little bit.  She mainly speakers her native language, Toba.  In the lessons it's difficult to know if she is understanding the concepts but then she shares her...

  On the road again! We've done a lot of travel this past week. It started with a trip to Ingeniero Juarez with Presidente Huels.  He is the branch president that presides over a group of members that live in Juarez.  There are about 12 members that meet together each Sunday for church.  We brought them some supplies and president Huels needed to conduct an interview.  Juarez is 250 kilometers from us, which is about a 3 hour drive.  The roads are not great and you have to drive careful.  It's not like flying down the 60 freeway at 80 mph!  Pot holes everywhere, animals on the highway, and scooters.  I hate the scooters.  They go very slow and when passing them it gets a bit tricky.   We also made a stop in Las Lomitas.  This town is about 100 kilometers away.  Again, we dropped of supplies and the branch president did an interview.  Los Lomitas also has about 12 members that meet every Sunday under the direction...

  It’s been a beautiful summer down here in Argentina.  Fortunately for us it has so far been mild with only a handful of days reaching 105 (with the “feel-like” temp close to 110).  Although this week the forecast is for a few days of 106 temps, ouch!  Luckily, we are traveling to Resistencia Monday-Wednesday so we will miss the super hot days.   Hot, hot, hot!! Our trip to Resistencia is for a senior couple summit. There are currently five senior couples serving in our mission. That is quite unusual.  Most missions of the church only have two or three couples.  The summit is something new our mission leaders are trying to help coordinate the efforts of all the couples and to provide a forum to share ideas and experiences to help all of us be more effective and successful in our work to strengthen the members and leaders of the church and how to better serve everyone.  We are looking forward to it.  This will be the first time for us to meet...

  Salta Temple We had a fun week!  We were able to travel to the temple in Salta.  It is a very new temple having opened in September.  We celebrated our 29th wedding anniversary on January 13th and decided it would be a good time to take a trip and celebrate.  There is no better place to celebrate our marriage than in the temple where we are reminded of our marriage in the temple 29 years ago.   The trip to Salta is a little more than 8 hours by car from where we are in Ibarreta.  But the drive is beautiful. We drove for about 4 hours through Formosa province until we crossed the border into Salta province.  By the way, almost all of the provinces in Argentina have a capital city with the same name.  To distinguish between the two they typically say “Salta capital” or “Formosa capital”.  The temple is in Salta capital, the city.   Sugarcane in Jujuy To get to the temple we drove through another province, Jujuy.  This place is ...