"Being sick isn't as fun when you don't have a mom to take care of you..."

Hola mi familia y mis amigos! 

Hopefully all is well with all of you. Im laughing right now because i just accidentally typed all that in spanish without thinking. So weird. I´m not saying that to be all like " im way good at spanish" but its weird and a little funny to me that im thinking in spanish a lot of the time now. We have english class that we are teaching and i tried to say a prayer at the beginning of the class in english and i couldn´t. I would get a couple words and then a spanish word would leave my mouth. I havent prayed in english in almost 5 months so its super hard fro me now. I cant even pray in my own language. How weird is that!

Well this week was a hard week but I also learned a lot. Sometimes it takes hard things to learn the lessons you need to learn. The reason it was hard was a combination of the fact that I was sick last week and also that it was impossible to find people to teach. A lot of last week consisted of just walking around sick in the sun and i was getting down on myself. Yeah some good things happened but overall i was just thinking about how many hours were left till it was time to go back to the panch for the day. What changed me around was a video. Villa Montoro B had a baptism and we watched one of those videos from the life of christ. A direct translation of the title from spanish is "I have resurected" or "he has resurected" but i think in english it is "I have risen" of "he has risen" As I was watching the last days and sacrifice of our savior my mind was changed. I was reminded of a talk from president Holland about missionary work to the missionaries. Basically what his message was was that, "Our path as disciples of Jesus Christ isn´t easy, because the path of our savior never was" I felt the spirit testify to me of the divine mission of our savior, Jesus Christ, and of how much greater his sacrafice was than my hard week. I felt motivated by this testimony to push harder and work harder because even if I´m not having all the sucess possible I´m helping the burden of Christ be a little lighter. The next day I was doing things with that in my mind and it gave me strength. I got a blessing of health from my comp and the other two Elders and then next day I was good to go. 

The good parts of the week: We finally taught gustavo the word of wisdom and we are helping him give up smoking and drinking right now and he is willing but it will be hard for him. Also we found a lady, Elba, that read the whole Book of Mormon, and has a testimony of it which is insane because a lot of people dont read here. The first lesson we had with her went super well and during the part where we talked about the book of mormon i had her read a scripture from it that talked about baptism and we commited her to be baptized march 15th right there so that was sweet. If all goes well we will baptize 3 people on march 15th.

Well hopefully this next week will be a good one! I love all of you and love hearing from you! keep writing!

Elder Whitaker

p.s.  It's so nice to see Ty is maturing a little/getting a little smarter.  He used to sneak up to an abandoned water tower when he was here.  We used to tell him not to, because he could get in trouble for trespassing, or get hurt.  Now Trey wrote him and asked him for the key...below is his response, plus a little more of our letter...

How are you all doing? It was good to get letters from you all this week! Trey you cant have the key! Now that I'm on my mission i realize how stupid that was. I i got caught i wouldn't be here right now and i don't trust you guys. plus the last time i took you there you freaked out

!I love all of you so much. (especially the pandas) This week was a hard week for me because of a lot of trials and i was sick and i had to make my own soup ;) nah who are we kidding i cant make soup. but being sick isnt as fun when you dont have a mom to take care of you.

"Finding people and bringing them closer to our Savior"

Hola mi familia y mis amigos!

Elder Whitaker- Buenos Aires temple February 2014

Ty & Elder Cavallo

Ty & Mari- first person he gave a Book of Mormon

This week was awesome. It started out slow but it ended up really well. My new comp is pretty cool and the area is going well.

At the beginning of the week I was kinda bummed out. Elder carvallo had to leave which was sad and getting used to a new companion always takes a little bit. Also I´m acting like the senior comp because i know the area. Without my extra studies for my training i have more time to work to so I was feeling like I didnt know how to fill the extra time we have with less people to teach. Some of the first couple days were a lot of walking in the sun not feeling productive which is a terrible feeling. 

I knew that i needed to keep a positive attitude and not get down on myself and luckly we picked it up. I started making better friends with my new comp and we got towork. We focused on finding new people and we found more this week than any other week in my mission. We found 6 new people and taught them with 4 others that we have appointments with this week that comes. We set a baptisimal date with one of them the first night we taught him which was awesome and we also found a lady that had been taught one lesson in the past but didnt have time to hear the Elders but she felt like reading the whole book of mormon which here, is unheard of because a lot of people in our area dont read very well. You could say we were feeling pretty good at the end of the week!

Well thats my week. Finding people and bringing them closer to our Savior. Love you all! Keep writing!  

Elder Tyler Whitaker

Ty & his comp soaking wet!

Movie night!!

Manuel, the Bishop's son

Ty captioned this pic "Merica"

Holiness to the Lord.  The House of God.

Ty & comps enjoying dinner at a member's.

The family Zarate

"I'm starting my 4th of 16 transfers on my mission...."

Hola mi familia y mis amigos!

This past week was crazy, but it was a super good week and a good way to wrap up my 2nd transfer in Argentina. Now that my first two transfers are done,  I can do anything now. Its weird because time is going super fast. I´m starting my 4th of the 16 transfers I have in my mission. Its pretty weird but I love life down here in Argentina.

Well this week we were ridiculously busy. We got to make a trip to the temple with the other missionaries in my district this week which was super fun! The temple is awesome and so beautiful. I have a bunch of cool pics but the computer I´m at wont let me send any. The only thing was that we had to get up at 430 in the morning to get there on time!

Also this week we planned a ward activity. It was a movie night in the capilla! We went all out so it was pretty sweet. We made a make shift screen and borrowed a projector from a member so it was pretty much regal cinemas of Argentina. We had popcorn and all that good stuff as well. One of the Elders mom sent him Ephraim´s Rescue which is a super awesome story about the pioneers. It like a 2nd part of 17 Miracles if any of you have seen that. It is an incredible story and I recomend that you watch it. We had a good turn out so it was good.

Saturday we had the baptism of Mari! She was so excited it was awesome. We had some really good lessons with her this week. It was the best to hear her tell me that she is never going to forget the feeling she has felt as she has been learning and taking steps to follow the Savior. Thats about as good as it gets when one of the people you are teaching promises you that. The baptism was awesome and right after the ward had a temple trip so we took her to that. Baptism and temple in one day. pretty awesome no?

The weather was crazy this week. We thought at one point we were going to get flooded. There were certain penches in the mission that had 40cm of water in them. I was riding my bike through water calf deep on friday which was a pretty cool expirience. 

We had transfers this week. Elder Carvallo got called up as zone leader in another zone. I´m going to miss him. He taught me a lot. Im still with Elder Myers and Elder Perterson which is awesome though. My new comp is also from chile, And he seems pretty cool. Im excited to see how this next transfer will go. 

Well I love all of you and love to hear from you. Write me and let me know how you are doing. I realized how out of touch I am with everybody when i tried writing somebody the other day and I couldnt think of very many things to write. Crazy i have already been out 4 months. Hasta Luego.

Elder Whitaker

I wrote a note to Ty telling him how happy we were about Mari's baptism this was his response:

It was really awesome. I know what it means in D&C 18 when it talks about how great your joy will be to bring a soul to god. With her it was more than just a baptism where she is going to go inactive in a couple months. I feel like she will be strong throughout her llife which is awesome.

 I love you mama!

"how awesome it was to see that the gospel had changed her life..."

Hola mi familia y mis amigas!

Sorry im a couple days late but things got messed up this week with having a trip to the temple so  my P-day is today. I dont have a ton of time to write today but I'll stick to the things that were important.

This past week we had so many things going on I dont even know where to start. I'll start with Mari. We had her baptisimal interview thisa past week and she passed. She was so nervous about it because she she was worried it was like a test even though its not, just to she if she has a testimony and knows the significance. I had to go teach another lesson before the interview was over with another missionary but when i returned and asked the other elders about her interview they told me what happened. When she got out she had passed and she has this smile that only Mari has and translation, " I'm very happy hermano, very happy" my comp as a joke asked if she was happy enough to jump up and down and she starteed jumping and clapping. If you knew mari you would know how funny it was but also how awesome it was to see that the gosple has changed her life that she is that happy. 

A story thats really cool is that she was the very first person I gave a Book of Mormon to in Argentina. Then she was a person in a hard place that didnt believe God was there to help her in her trials and that He didnt exist. In my broken, fresh from the MTC spanish, I told her that The Book of Mormon can help her because it has helped me. In that moment I didnt think anything had really gotten through to her. we stopped passing by her because she didnt want to hear our message, but what she told me the other day is that, that moment was a really big moment for her and she knew that she could find the answers in our message. Crazy to think that the Lord can work through a teenage boy, that couldn't even converse with the people, to touch the heart of sombody. Now Mari is a completely differnt and more happy person. She still has more trials than you guys can imagine but she is happy because she knows her purpose.

I just realized im am about out of time buty thats my cool story for the week. She chose me to baptize her so that will happen on sunday which will be pretty cool! 

Elder Whitaker

Ty wearing his Christmas present- Superman socks (I'm hoping he's polishing his shoes more often).

Ty & his companion, and two other elders

The Rondon family from Peru

Ty and his companions acting silly