Hola Familia,

It was another good week here in Argentina. It started with my birthday this last Monday. The day after was funny because for some reason the birds of the city didn´t like me that day. I went through 3 white shirts that day “porque me pegaron dos crapcitos” or in other words I got pooped on, changed my shirt later, then got pooped on again and had to change my shirt again haha.

We had interviews this last week as well which was good. I actually ended up having interviews twice this transfer because of the emergency transfer. This week was a little disappointing because we lost 2 people that were going to be baptized. Well we didn´t really lose them. One just said he didn´t feel ready and the other I´m not exactly sure what happened. We´ve been teaching a guy named Juan Carlos, he´s probably in his late 60´s. He was actually found right before I got to the area, so I wasn´t there when we found him.

But basically the story is that he was planning on taking his own life the night that we found and talked to him. Since then we´ve taught him basically everything and he was going to be baptized this next Saturday actually. But then he told us that he wanted to stop for now. He has a lot of problems with family in that they basically don´t support him in anything, and he said he feels like he wants to learn to write and to read better. Well I guess it´s easy to say that I´m still not really sure what the source of the problem is but we´ll keep working with him. He has really grown to love the church in that it´s like a family and the members really care about him. He seemed really sad when he told us he couldn´t progress any more for now, but members are passing by and so are we, so he´ll come around. In good news, we had a Stake Conference in Church yesterday, and we had 13 investigators come. Basically just because we have awesome members.

Oh so I´ll tell you a little more about what this area is like. It´s probably pretty typical for around here. There are lots of normal streets and stuff with pavement, and Argentine houses that are small and all connected. But you can round a corner and all of the sudden it looks like you just walked about 50 years further into the past. Dirt roads and cement houses with metal sheet roofs. Open sewage running through a little ditch in front of all the houses. Then you can go to certain parts of our area and all of the sudden you walked 50 years even FURTHER into the past. You´re walking down a little dirt road past horses and chickens and goats ( and of course dogs cuz we´re in South America). The houses are little shacks made of trash and chapa (scrap metal). This is where the people live whose job is riding around in their little horse-pulled carts and stealing trash that´s laying around.

Oh and I have something funny I wanted to talk about real quick. The other day we were eating those little Halloween candies that you sent me for my birthday. You know the ones that are like little wedge shapes and are orange yellow and white. (Editor's note: Candy corn is one of Cooper's favorite candies....it's funny that he can't remember the name of them now!) And there´s a Peruvian Elder here who has never seen them before. So he started taking them apart by the colors to eat them. And then I saw him later eating weird-looking pancakes and I realized that he put a bunch of the separated pieces of the Halloween candy in his pancake mix and made Halloween pancakes. Haha

Well on that note have a great week! I hope all is well besides the election madness that is going on right now. Good luck with all that! Love you all,
Love,

Elder Boice

-PS Pday is the 11th next week because of transfers