Argentine companion

With the Franco family. You can see a silver mug of mate on the table, with the bombilla (filtering straw) sticking up out of it.

With Gimena (the former sister missionary) and the bishop's wife and kids

At the city bus terminal on transfer day

Elder Romero, Eric's new companion from Buenos Aires

Hey family!!! How is everyone!!! I hope everybody's doing good!!! It sounds like Marisa had a fun birthday celebration and that baby Maya and everyone is doing good.

I'm doing very good here as well. My new comp is awesome. His name is Elder Romero and he's from Buenos Aires!!! It's a city called Nichocheo in Buenos Aires. He's an awesome comp and a great worker, too. The only thing that's hard with him is that we can't get contacts! (I think a contact is someone they speak to briefly and arrange to come back at a later date to have a lesson with.) Yes, I said we can't get contacts, because every time we talk to people, all my comp has to say is that he is from Buenos Aires, and the people get all excited and always let us in their house to talk!!! It's awesome!!!! As soon as the hardest to talk to people in Rincon find out my comp is from Buenos Aires, they will let us in and want to talk immediately. It's not like that for Americans!!!!!!! So that has been awesome and we work together great. We got the Standards this week, despite it being a short week! (It is two days short of a full week because of transfers.) We actually overshot the requirements for teaching 20 lessons, and almost doubled it, teaching 35 lessons!

We're helping a lot of people work on getting married here, and also some others who need help to stop smoking. President Villalba was actually very happy with us and told the assistants that we're "capos" which is pretty cool, because I've never heard him say anything like that, or even close to it before, (capo is slang for like stud) because he's always very formal and what not.

Anyway, the blessings of all the work came when Evangelina came to church for the first time. She told us a few days ago, "Elders, I want to be baptised!" We loved her enthusiasm but she didn't realize she had to be married first. So now she really wants to get married, but her husband not so much. We're working with them, and hope to get them married and then baptised. Eduardo is stopping his smoking. I don't like to talk about baptisms before they've actually taken place, but Alan should be baptised this Saturday. We have a lot of other good people that we're helping now and I expect many baptisms this transfer. Although, guess what, this transfer is only 5 weeks!!!! So yeah, 5 weeks only, and the next one will be 7 weeks!!! Crazy!! But that is because there will be an Apostle coming to the area in October, and so that change was made by the area president.

We have lots of good things lined up now, we also have a Family Home Evening tonight with Marcela and her family! I'm excited to learn more Argentine Spanish from my comp, and help lots of people. It's nice to be the experienced one here now, because I actually get to choose basically what we do, and we can work in the areas that I want to work in.

Okay, to answer your questions. The water tanks that you see on the roofs of many people's homes is so that they can have water pressure, because gravity is the only way to get water pressure here. Without a tank on the roof, you can't have pressure here.

The mosquitoes and bugs are coming pretty fast with the changing weather, and this area (surrounded by water) has a lot!!!! I may have to take out a little personal money, but will try to hold out. It's kind of hard when you receive 150 pesos for the transfer and have to spend 500 pesos for the bus card and electricity.

Yes, lots of people use the buses here, but lots of them have horses, and there's lots of horse drawn wagons and what not, it's kind of cool. We use the bus daily and we walk A LOT!!!!

Well, I'm glad to hear everyone is doing good up there and enjoying the weather while it lasts! I love you all very much and will write you again next week!

Love,
Eric

______________________________________________