Hello familia,
How goes everything at home? Sounds like life is going good for everyone. Summer is starting to wind down and you will all be busy once again. It is still very much winter here and we are FREEZING!!! Everyone here kept talking about how cold it is, but they always talk about it in Celsius so i never really grasp what they´re saying. i mean, I know that "diez grados bajo cero" means cold, but I don´t know how cold. Then i found out that we have a translator for temperature in our phone (super random feature for a super ghetto phone, pero bueno) and it has been like 14 degrees here. Whenever we complain about how cold it is, I always think of missionaries in Russia that walk around when it´s like 1000 below zero, but then my head starts to hurt and I can´t feel my fingers and I just say to myself," I couldn´t be a missionary in Russia. I guess that´s why i got sent to argentina." Probably some other reasons too. Also, the pipes of everyone in Toay freeze when it´s really cold so people just stop showering for a while. Or they sleep until 12, eat lunch, go back to sleep until 5 and then shower. We´ve been showering at night because the pipes are always frozen in the morning when we wake up. Last night, the hot water didn´t come out either so we might have to think of a new idea for showering so that we don´t stink.
Well, our mission had a conference last week with all the leaders of the mission (zone leaders, district leaders, and trainers) in Bahia for four days. That basically never happens so it was a big deal. When they got back, they had a lot of stuff to tell us about what they learned at this conference. Our district leader told us that they were going to cut Pday to only four hours. Turns out that it was a joke. Soooo not a funny joke. Our president also sent us an email this week that said that we have really good missionaries in our mission, but we are basically baptizing no one (like 30 people for the whole mission last month) so we have to work to improve this. I think the ideas came from the area authority or algo así. We´re going to hear about these ideas a lot in the next two months. I don´t know a lot about them right now, but it´s something like teaching baptism the first lesson and helping them get to that point quickly. I am totally ready to accept and apply the new ideas because we haven´t really seen much success with what we´ve been doing so far. It should be interesting...
This week, we worked hard to visit all our investigators, invite them all to church, pass by to walk with them to church, call them to remind them, and still no one showed up. Hna. Sommermeyer thinks it´s the culture of this little pueblo or something because none of the other areas she´s been in have had so many lazy, lazy people. Dario ended up not being able to come because he worked late Saturday night, but he told us that this week it´s "segurísimo" that he´s going to come with his wife and two kids. We have also visited a lot of menos activos lately, but the members of the ward really need to start visiting them too. They´re not convinced that people really want them to come to church if the missionaries are the only ones who ever go to visit them. There´s a new plan for the barrio that we´re going to bring to ward council tomorrow to help the ward leaders understand better what they need to do so their barrio doesn´t shrink even more. Hna. Sommermeyer got the full blast of a Sunday in Toay and how depressing it can really be this last Sunday when no one came and there were very few members there. Also, the teacher of our gospel principles class and a ward missionary that comes to the class didn´t do a very good job at hiding their joy when they saw that no one came so we wouldn´t have class. That kinda added to the disappointment. Por lo menos, Hna. Sommer and I get along well and we´re still having fun. We´re going to make some banana bread this week. Although, we did go to the farmacia in town again (because it has a scale) and left depressed again because we´ve both gained some kilos since she got here. She said that people always get fatter in winter though and then we lose weight in the summer because it´s too hot to eat anything (I can´t really imagine a heat hot enough that I wouldn´t want to eat, but we shall see). Hna. Sommer seems to think that I´m a little girl and lots of things that I do or say are funny and childish so she always says," Esta niña!" in an exasperated voice probably ten times a day. I think that´s what i´m going to entitle this transfer (in my mission book in my mind because I probably will never get around to scrapbooking my mission. I´m learning more and more every day how important it is to go to church and how much the gospel blesses your family. Also, we watched Charly again this week and all the elders cried. I focused on writing my letters to avoid smearing my mascara. :) Well, familia, espero que todo esté bien. I love you and am always grateful for your support. i didn´t get the package you sent yet...anxiously awaiting though.
Love you so much,
Hna. Seegmiller
P.S. I don´t remember what all these pictures are, but there are a bunch of me and Hna. Sommer, one of my zone in Santa Rosa, one of the activity that we did with the youth, and one of our lovely little Barrio Toay on our pioneer day activity. Disfrutá!
