Word of the week: ¡Che! (translation: Dude!)

This was an AMAZING week! The Lord truly blessed us this week as we saw miracle after miracle. I’m still so excited about this past week! I’ll start with Zoe. Zoe is an almost 11 year old girl whose mother is a returned missionary and her father is not a member. Zoe has been taught the missionary lessons a bunch of times by a wide variety of hermanas and elders. Her past two recent baptism attempts fell through at the last minute, when the day before, she got cold feet. So, Hna. Goddard and I are taking her on. We talked with her mom to try and figure out what was going on—as if maybe her parents didn’t want her to get baptized or something. In talking with her mom, with Zoe and seeing them interact…we’ve figured it out! Zoe is almost 11, but looks like a 16 year old at least. Her mother is TINY TINY TINY!!!! As a result, she treats Zoe like an adult, or like she should be able to make big life changing decisions without the help or support of her parents. As a return missionary, Marcela (the mom), wants to make sure that Zoe is absolutely prepared for her baptism and that it is 100% Zoe’s choice and nobody elses. The problem is, Zoe is 10 years old! I was chatting with Zoe yesterday while Hna. Goddard talked about books with Marcela and Zoe told me that she just feels a lot of pressure from her mom. In essence, Zoe feels like she doesn’t know enough because her mom keeps telling her that she needs to be preparing. In 10 year old girl mind, the equals knowing more. Zoe is so sweet and can answer all the baptismal interview questions without problems. So, now we are in this awkward position where we need to talk to Marcela and tell her to lighten up on her daughter and to tell her that she thinks that it’s a great idea that Zoe wants to get baptized, rather than saying to Zoe’s response that she wants to get baptized, “well, that just surprises me. You better start working really hard to get ready then…” Zoe is struggling to read that as a loving message. Needless to say, Zoe and I (as well as her 5 year old sister) and I have become best friends. Saturday night, in preparation for her coming to church again on Sunday, we went over and straightened her LONG dark hair (note: her mother took a picture afterwords of all of us, but Argentines aren’t good photographers, and thus the photo has been causally withdrawn). It was a lot of fun and helped Zoe be that much more excited to come to church. Her non-member dad who hasn’t been to church since I’ve been here in San Luis, came to church as well! It was a real miracle! The miracle of the week will be in talking to Marcela and getting her more on our side. Miracle number 2: Evelyn So, Evelyn is so amazing! This week, her kids have all been sick with weird allergic reactions, colds, coughs, etc. which translated into a week of not really reading in the Book of Mormon, except when we went over the visit her. That was kind of a let down from last week, but she took MAJOR steps forward in other ways! We taught her about the Word of Wisdom on Thursday, not anticipating any problems seeing as we’ve never seen any evidence of things that would pose as problems in her home. She first told us about how she loves drinking tea, though that one was rather easily overcome by telling her that she can just drink more mate (traditional Argentine hot drink like tea, but using a grass like herb). Then, right as we were kinda finishing up, she told us that she is a social smoker, but lately with all the medical stresses from her children, she has started smoking more. Thankfully, the most she smokes (from what she told us) is 2 cigarettes a day. As we were teaching at 7pm, she still hadn’t smoked all day, so we told her that we would bring her over cookies the following day if she didn’t smoke for the entire 24 hours. When we got to her house the next day, I was, to say the least, a little nervous, especially when she didn’t come to the door. We called her, and sure enough, she was at home and just didn’t hear us knocking. So, we chatted with her….and…..she hadn’t smoked or drank any tea!!!! We were thrilled. I made sure to cheer extra loud and make her feel a little embarrassed. I was so excited!!!! We ended up chatting for a few more minutes, and she gave us some more details about her life, because, in her words, “we’re friends.” I really feel like Evelyn and I are friends and it’s great! Evelyn was just full of great miracles this week. We got to church early to wait for Evelyn outside, because she said she was coming and wanted to make sure that we would be there. So, we waited outside in the Spring sun. We waited, waited, waited….I started getting really antsy and nervous….and more antsy…..and then…..there she came! (wearing my cute blue blouse with the tie in the back). I was THRILLED! We gave her big hugs and walked her into church. The talks were SO PERFECT, as if we would have told the members what Evelyn specifically needed to hear. She was just beaming after the meeting ended. It was incredible! To make a long story short, after church, we walked her outside and de-briefed for a moment with her and she told us that she just absolutely loved church and the spirituality of it all. She followed it up by saying that she wants to keep coming to church and learning more! We were speechless! We are hopefully going over to visit her tonight! I can’t wait! Needless to say, we’ve been walking on cloud 9 for the past few hours and counting our many blessings! We still have lots more work to do, but the Lord is doing the hard part. This week, Hna. Goddard and I are going to Mendoza for an afternoon for some follow-up info for the new training program. Should be a fun little break from brown San Luis, though it does mean that we won’t be able to see our investigators. I’m just hoping that we can sneak in a trip to Subway for a yummy sandwich… Hope all is well…and things have stopped shaking and flooding in the home land. Love to you all! Hna. Pelton