I'M TRAINING!!!

Hola a todos...


How is everyone?  So to answer your questions first... my CTR ring fits great, thanks.  I haven`t received any packages from the Dodge family.  And where I am.... I`m currently serving in a little town(actually the smallest area in the mission) Pan de Azucar. We are about 15 min. from the beach here and everyone from our area leaves all the time to go to the beach for the afternoon.  But for being the smallest area in the mission we do have the tallest point in all of Uruguay in our area. 

And I`m training in a WHITEWASH here.  My new companion`s name is Elder Thompson and he is from St. George, UT.  He is a really good missionary and we are already working really hard.  Although our area is very small we do have 4 little towns that are about 3 to 20 kilometers outside of Pan de Azucar that are also part of our area, so I have to travel in a bus to get to all the parts of my area.

ELDER GARDNER & ELDER THOMPSON

In one week here we have gotten to know about half of Pan de Azucar and we are still getting to know all of the members.  We don`t have a chapel here yet but they have the property bought and are making plans to start building a chapel here.  Sadly, the elders before us didn`t keep very good records of the investigators and left the house REALLY dirty.  So we spent our entire Pday cleaning the kitchen which is now safe to cook and eat in.  Our house is really big and nice it just needs some cleaning.... There are about 30 active members here (our branch president told us that they had about 60 active members before the last elders) so we are now trying to build back up the branch and find people to baptize at the same time.  The members here are super nice and the people here are generally open and nice.

This is how dirty our bathroom was when we got to our new house in Pan de Azucar ...

The bedroom didn't look quite as bad as the bathroom and kitchen...

My house in Pan de Azucar, the largest 2 elder house of my mission.

We had a miracle happen on our second day here.  We went out knocking doors in an apartment complex and a grumpy old man answered the door and asked us... ¨What do you want!?¨ but then his daughter came to the door and said, "ELDERS, how are you?"  She was a member from the next closest branch named Piriapolis and she said I was just talking to my neice about the Book of Mormon, could you teach her.  So we had a lesson on the porch with our first investigator, Maria Buela and her member aunt. She is a very nice girl who is 17 years old and we taught her the Book of Mormon and put a baptismal date with her for the 29th of January and she came to church on sunday and we are going to have a Family Home Evening with her at the branch president's house tonight.  The branch was very excited to see an investigator in the church because it`s been about 6 months since that has happened and we are really excited to start working more with the members this week to find more people to baptize.  The First Counselor was so excited that he told us that he wanted us to go out to a little town called Gregorio Aznàrez about 20 kilometers outside of Pan de Azucar (which the missionaries have never set foot in) with him and his wife on Wednesday.  It will be a great experience to be the first set of missionaries to have ever talked with these people. 

We are all very excited and working hard to bring people to Christ here in Pan de Azucar.

I love you all and hope you have a great start of 2011.

Elder Gardner