"My brain is all mix up (sic) from Spanish" :)

Hola mi familia y mis amigos!

i cant start my letters without writing the first sentence in spanish now. My brain is all mix up now from spanish. I cant speak a whole sentence of english without spanish jumping in. Well, this week was difficult in the fact that im working in two areas that are super far away. Basically my mission is a lot bigger than i thought. From the capital where most of the mission is, to where i am, is like the drive from where i live to vegas. 4 hours in a car and there is nothing in that 4 hours in between. Then when you get down to my zone it's super spaced out. The two areas im covering for the next two weeks are like 30 min away from each other in a bus and i have to make that trip like twice almost every day so you can imagine that its pretty hard to get a lot of work done but hey, thats life. 

We have been having some really good progress with some of the people. The people we are teaching are going slow but they are actually learning. Its super common to find people that arent active in the church down here because some elders taught them really fast and became really good friends with them and then they got baptized for the elder specifically. Then when that elder leaves they dont go to church because they werent converted to the message. My goal isnt to baptize a ton of people but to actually convert people to this amazing gospel. If i get a bunch of people in the way i won't complain. Thats what we are doing down here. The people we are teaching are moving along really well. They didnt make the date that we set for their baptism, but they have told me that they are going to be baptized they just have to take the time to study and apply our message to make the baptism real in their lives. Luis y Nahuel are studs!!! They are so bad off  but they dont complain and they just keep moving forward. We teach them in the sand out front of the tent that they are living in and we have had some super powerful lessons. It was so awesome to hear him say that he is going to be baptized this last lesson we had. 

We have had some fun adventures too. Today my comp elder Falke got chased by this giant pitbull that was the size of a bear and it tried to bite him in the leg
but he hit it in the head with his bag so that was pretty legit. Today i got to celebrate my birthday a little bit early and we made some tacos. One of the guys in our district, his family is from mexico, so we made some most excellent tacos. We had interviews wioth the president the other day which was awesome!. I also got my letters and stuff. Thanks to all of you who sent me a letter for my brithday! well i have to get off but yep that was how my last week of being 18 went. Wow im going to have 19 years. i dont want to get old. hahaha i hope all of you have a good week!

Elder Whitaker

Ty's taco bday celebration with his companions.

Ty'c companion.  He says it is starting to get very cold, and veery poor heating systems.