November 20, 2017

Thanksgiving and Being Poor

Well, a lot of you have asked me if I have Thanksgiving and if you can believe it, Argentina doesn't celebrate pilgrims surviving in America. It's a real shame but what'll you do? Today is a holiday though. Don't ask me what it's called or why they celebrate it but no one is working or going to school today. That's another fun thing about the culture here. There is literally a holiday every other week and no one ever knows why but they know they don't have to work!!

Last P-day was pretty interesting. We went to the city so my comp could by some souvenirs before going home this next week. While there we got really hungry but couldn't find a restaurant anywhere. Eventually we found one and just sat down without thinking we were so hungry. Let's just say when they handed us our menu we knew we were out of our league. They charged us 40 pesos just to use their silver wear. But yeah, we stayed and ate there all the same. It was funny to see 4 poor missionaries eating in this super nice place. Everyone kinda looked at us funny but whatever. I don't have any more money to buy groceries, but the experience is worth it right? When else am I going to buy a 200 peso Milanesa?

The best part of this week however was seeing some of our long time investigators finally start making some real progress. It's happening because they're finally reading the Book of Mormon on their own. Let me just remind you all that the key to spiritual development is consistent daily acts! 

It's a great time to be alive people! Go out and do some good in the world today :)

Con amor, 

Elder Nixon

HURRAH FOR ISRAEL

One of us eating at Don Ferreros, another with a crazy ward member doing service 

November 13, 2017

Monotony

Well world I really don't have much to say this week. It was a super routine week but still really good at the same time. The heat here is starting to straight kill me and I'm told it's not even bad yet. I guess to fill some space I'll tell you all some more about the culture here cuz that's always kinda interesting to hear about right? Before that though, huge shout out to my sister Meghann for making me an uncle this week! Uncle Elder Nixon. I think it has a pretty great ring to it.

If you don't know what the siesta is, you're probably going to be jealous of it. Pretty much what it is is every day from 1-6 the whole country just goes to sleep. The businesses close and literally no one is in the streets. We ususally do our studies then or meet with members. Um, men think the world is their toilet here and seeing women breast feeding is nothing. Also last Sunday Boca played against River (a huuuugee rivalry) and literally no one would even answer the door to talk to us during it. So yeah, soccer is HUGE here and everyone wants to know who you support. For me it's Rosario Central or nothing....

Yeah sorry this email is so lame but I gotta run. We're going to Rosario for Pday today to do some souvenier shopping for my comp who is going home after this transfer so maybe I'll buy myself something nice :)

Elder Nixon

Here's just a pic of us outside our pension. Yes, that is some razor wire on our neighbors fence. Welcome to Argentina.

November 6, 2017

More drunks, pass along cards and Halloween

Hola mundo! Dang I won't lie to you all, language is at a weird point right now for me. I can pretty much understand what people are saying to me finally but I can't really talk back too effectively. And all at the same time it's been so long that I've really had a solid conversation in English that lots of times English feels weird in my mouth too. So basically right now I don't have a language I'm proficient in but what ya gonna do?? :)

       Well Halloween was depressing for me because I didn't realize it was Halloween until 6 in the afternoon but once I realized what day it was, Elder Gagnon and I switched nametags and I was Elder Gagnon for Halloween! We also went to a sweet shop and I bought myself lots of alfojores so that was nice.

       We met a pretty cool drunk dude this week. He yelled at us to come over and just started begging us to help him change his life. We told him we'd bring him to church with us and he loved the idea but when we came Sunday morning to get him, he was too hung over to be woken up by our loud clapping and knocking so we eventually just gave up.

       We had a hard day as far as the work goes. Our best investigador Angel straight up moved within a day on us. Like we had dinner with his family one night and during the conversation he told us "oh yeah, I leave tomorrow morning to go live with my dad in Santa Fe." So yeah, that was really hard but hopefully he keeps on learning and progressing!!

Also huge shout out to my mom for her birthday this last week. She's incredible and I love her so much!!!

Elder Nixon

The first pic is what happens on a p-day after playing soccer way to hard in the sun. You make a sofa out of your mattresses and buy a kilo of ice cream and put a fan in front of your face. The second pic is me and Elder Gagnon wearing each other's name tags. The dude's a stud and definitely a really good friend to me!

October 30, 2017

Drunks, pass along cards and questions

Hola familia y amigos! Como andan con ustedes? Sometimes I feel like I need to write just a little bit in Spanish just so every single word isn't underlined in red so if you can't understand that just throw it in Google translate and it will probably mess up what it actually means but if you could find out what it means you'd realize it's super anti-climatic anyways so yeah....

Um it was another pretty basic week but really good too. I guess one of the highlights would be one day we were doing service for a member digging up tree roots (which felt pointless but we got blessings so oh well) and while we were digging this dude came by riding his bike. He was so drunk he fell off his bike and we had to go pick him up and he just laid in the middle of the road until someone called the police to get him. So yeah, that was kinda fun I guess.

We had divisions with the zone leaders this week again. They're super good guys and so that's always fun to have them come spend the day with us. We got pretty bored right before bed so we had a pass along card throwing competition. What resulted was we literally threw every single pass along card we own (which is a TON) at a balloon in an effort to pop it. We succeeded eventually but made a huge mess so there was a trade off I guess!!

On more of a spiritual note, we had a really good experience with Talia and Angel and everyone in la familia Loca. I dunno how much I've wrote you all about them but pretty much they are this ginormous family that is loud and proud and has pretty much every problem imaginable but we work a lot with them and they're really good friends. We had a lesson with them this week that was super powerful. We came by and they were all outside drinking mate so we sat around and joined em. What made the lesson so good was they had lots of questions and we just had more of a conversation than a lesson and we all learned so much more that way. So if you ever need to learn something, learn to ask questions and search for the answers. This gospel is built on asking questions and then finding the answers through God. 

Con amor

Elder Nixon

This is actually the only picture I took this week which is sad. It's what we made for dinner one night. What it is is a cake made out of egg and potatoes and yeah it's weird.

October 23, 2017

Tea Time with Elder Gagnon

Hello beautiful outside world! I had a real good week to be honest. My new companion, Elder Gagnon, is an answer to prayers. The guy is a stud. We know how to work hard play hard for sure.

       Last Monday was kinda like a blue moon for us missionaries. We had a holiday fall on a p-day which never happens. I dunno what holiday it even was but I do know there was a pretty neat little fair that we were allowed to go to and buy ghetto stuff we don't need so that was way fun. There was a man there who did something called spacepainting. What it basically is is he takes spraypaint and makes these insane landscape paintings with em. They made me think of you Jed and all your spraypainting adventures!! We couldn't resist so we bought two each for cheap and hung them up in our pension. We also found an old nature calendar and put all those pictures up too. So yeah you could say we're making the pension a home. We also put our weekly plans on the window in whiteboard marker and put up a ton of dots on our map. Oh yeah and Elder Gagnon burns incense. So yeah, definitely breaking in the pension.

     I think I had my favorite visit we have ever had this week. We were walking by this old guy and we told him "good day" and he quickly spat back "what's so good about it? I'm 85 years old and have already died twice!" So of course, we went back and talked to him. Imagine a stereotypical old sailor and that's exactly what this guy looked like and was! I dunno how, but we ended up going in his house and there was cobwebs and dust everywhere. I legit thought I was talking to a ghost. It was so dang weird it was awesome. He told us about his pact with the devil he made and how he wants to be the secretary in hell. Then he showed us a massive scar on his stomach where he had all his intestines taken out and cleaned then put back in. It was just straight creepy. We're gonna go back this week too ;)

Well, the thing I look forward to every day now is tea time. Tea time takes place from 10-10:25 each night outside our pension. We prepare light crackers and jam or some other snack and have mate cocido every night. (mate cocido is kinda like herbal tea). So yeah, we just chill outside and light up an incense and then just sip our mate cocido and talk about life and the mission and just whatever we want. It's so dorky that it’s fun. And it's such a change of pace that it has increased my mental health by like 300%. 

Con amor,

Elder Nixon

I didn't take too many pics this week. So here's two pics from tea time (one with and the other without flash :)) and the other pic is of the sunrise this morning which is nowhere near as good as Utah sunsets but is still pretty dang dope I think!!

October 16, 2017

Assassin

Well today is the day of transfers. I killed Elder Bareiro (means I sent him home to his house if you're not familiar with missionary terminology) and received my new companion. His name is Elder Gagnon and I'm super excited to be comps with him. He's from Tennessee and here’s the fun part- I'm going to kill him too, meaning he will finish his mission with me in 6 weeks. To have a trainee kill both of their trainers is almost unheard of, so we will see how it goes!

The language is coming along a lot better. I think I made a lot of progress with it this week but I'm not sure how having an American companion is going to affect all that now. As hard as it was to have a Latino comp at the very beginning, it forced me to use Spanish a ton and as a result I improved a lot faster so I'm going to have to be really disciplined this transfer to keep up the same rate of progress!

Honestly not much happened this week. I guess the most noteworthy thing would be because everyone knew Elder Bareiro was going home, they all wanted to feed us so we ate like kings this week. We had an asado (expensive argentine bbq) almost every day this last week. To give you some perspective, most missionaries have 1 or 2 asados per transfer and I think I had close to 8 or 9. So yeah to say I've put on some weight this transfer would be a fair statement. 

I'm not sure what more to put. I had more blood sausage this week. The first time I tried it, it was raw and not that bad, but this time it was cooked and as a result bled everywhere and my plate and definitely was not my favorite thing, but I choked it down to avoid offending anyone. So yeah that stunk. 

Dang all I can think to write about today is food and it’s probably cuz I'm starving so I'm gonna go find food. Love you all!!!!

Con amor,

Elder Nixon

HURRAH FOR ISRAEL BABY!!!

pics of me and Elder Bareiro leaving our pension, me with an asado y our last district meeting!!

October 9, 2017

Hola everybody! I hope you all had a great week and are enjoying your fall weather and all the changing leaves because it is heating up south of the equator. I have no idea how hot it actually is because everything here is in the metric unit, but it's really humid too. My companion tells me I haven't seen anything yet too, so come December when you're all in the snow, I'll be a puddle in the calle. 

I think the best day this week was probably Tuesday. We started the day with a district meeting which went really good! Then our Zone leaders dropped by for the day to go on divisions with me and Elder Bareiro. I went out with Elder Xavier. He's a Brazilian and is absolutely insane. He's super funny and energetic but can be super serious and spiritual when he needs to be. He's a stud and it was way fun to spend the day with him especially cuz he bought me a giant ice cream cone :) Anyways, during divisions we walked past a man and women drinking mate and smoking outside their house as is the custom here. As we walked past, we both felt like we should turn around and talk to them. At first, they kinda made fun of us and were really suspicious. Elder Xavier handled it so well though and they really opened up. When the conversation turned to how young we are, I took the opportunity to jump in. I told them about how the reason I'm in Argentina at only 18 years old is because I love God and know He has revealed his truth to the earth again and that we can find answers in the Book of Mormon. The spirit was really strong and the next thing I knew they let us in and we started teaching them. The first thing Rosana (the woman) did was tell us why she wanted to talk more. She told us about how her dad died and all she believed in know was death and suffering. You could tell she was pretty bitter to God and even had a Grim Reaper necklace on. Well, she wanted to know why her dad had to suffer so much. We started teaching the Plan of Salvation like clockwork and used so many scriptures in the Book of Mormon. We left them with the book and are going to return tomorrow to talk more. It was an awesome mission experience though. We didn't plan to teach the Plan of Salvation that day, but we each had so many scriptures and the right words to say come to mind when we needed them. It was awesome!

We had a baptism in Carcarana this week! Her name is Candela and she's one of the investigators of the other Elders in our district. So it wasn't my first baptism but it was still super powerful and the spirit was really strong. President Allred even came which surprised all of us. The service was super good and it reminded me why I'm here. It all went so perfectly minus the cake I tried to bake for it.....I won't tell you what happened to that.

The other noteworthy thing this week was our trip to Rosario for interviews. It went really good and I love President Allred so much. He was behind schedule, yet still made me feel like he had all the time in the world to help me. After interviews we went to McDonalds. It's nothing like it is in America. It's kinda the same taste but way better. Also they have like 25 employees behind the counter making the food and they just blast their music and have a grand old time. It's kind of the social hub of Rosario actually. Definitely not like the dumps in the states! So yeah that was fun to get a Big Mac in Argentina :)

Sorry this email is so long but we did a lot this week and it was definitely a good one! To close, I'd like to request all your prayers that Argentina qualifies for the World Cup cuz they might not and if the one time in my life I live in a culture that loves soccer, they don't play in the world cup, I might cry.

Con amor

Elder Nixon

The first picture is all 6 Elders in our pension having a lunch we cooked. The second is what happens anytime an Elder falls asleep on the bus-it must be documented. The last one is a pic from the baptism this week!!!