Week 13

Hey family!!

This week flew by. it was pretty rough as far as success goes because most of our appointments fell through, but it was still a good week. ive been trying to think more positive haha. Every day should be a good day, even the bad ones. But anyways dad asked about the house i live in so i'll talk a little about that. My place is actually SUPER nice...compared to the other houses here in San Rafael haha. our place is huge. 2 stories, 2 bathrooms, 2 showers, bedroom, big kitchen about the size of the one in our house, and big living area...but it looks so empty because we have nothing haha. we have our table where we study and thats about it haha. i'll take some fotos to show you next week...and about the photos i dont know how to shrink em down. i could change the quality on my camera so they are smaller, but they look really really blurry when i do that and i want to keep nicer quality. sorry about that. but anyways, we live by this evangelical church. they are always playing SUPER loud music and it echoes through all of san rafael. when were teaching in houses, the music is always in the background...every night. and theres also a few other churches that play music a lot and its so loud haha. also the people who live below us blast american 80''s music every morning haha. its mainly really epic 80s love ballads. their favorite is the song is Total eclipse of my heart..or whatever its called, it goes "and i need you more than ever!" but they play that every morning almost so its been stuck in my head haha.

oh and random thing, for whatever reason everyone started dumping there trash just on our street about 50 yards from our house. it reeks. i dont get it, the dumpster is just further down and it would be so easy for them to throw away their trash there. makes me mad because we have to smell it in our house haha. i imagine that thats a little different from germany haha. Tuesday was pretty rough. ALL of our plans and back up plans fell through so we contacted for 4 hours straight...in the pouring rain. we only got a couple positive contacts, but hey its something at least. Wednesday was my 3 month mark...wow. i thought the first 2 months went by pretty fast in the MTC but compared to this last month they were like years. this month FLEW by. its pretty crazy how days go by so slow, but weeks and months go by fast. days feel like weeks, weeks feel like days. Thursday we had a little adventure. there was this giant wasp nest outside our back door. and a ton of GIANT wasps. so i put on my jacket and gloves, got a broomstick and knocked it down and then ran back
inside...unscathed!

 
Friday night was super rough; we had 4 dinner appointments. we met with a less active lady who gave us some rice and bananas and pork...the pork was gross and im pretty sure it was from the pigs that are always eating the trash down the street from my house. but it was a lot of food. then we went back to the house to eat our own dinner, but as soon as we got there we got a phone call from a family telling us that they made dinner for us and taht we had an appointment with them. so we ran over there and had some more rice, beans, meat, and tortillas. it was pretty good. then after that we went to pick up this member who was gonna teach with us that night, he invited us in to eat dinner with his family. we couldnt say no because earlier he said how some missionaries turned down dinner with him and he got mad about it. so we ate this weird mixture of sweet potatoes and uncooked chicken. i had to choke that down. at this point i was about to throw up because we had eaten SO MUCH. then on our way home this member told us to come in and she gave us a bunch of this pasta stuff that was pretty gross too...haha it was so much food haha. its funny though because we NEVER have dinner appointments, but for whatever reason they all landed on the same night.

Saturday and Sunday were awesome. conference was amazing. the morning session on saturday i had to watch in spanish, afternoon they had a gringo room where we watched it in english online, priesthood session was in spanish. the sunday i got to watch both sessions in the gringo room. its really cool watching conference as a missionary because you pay a lot more attention to all the mission stories.

Well thats waht happened this week! we have a baptism this saturday. La familia Andino. they were golden investigators. my favorite family so far. they really were prepared to hear the gospel. there wedding is saturday and baptism right after that. its tough because nobody is married and they have to use what little money they have to pay for it.

well i love you all so much. youre always in my prayers, thank you for your prayers. until next time!

con mucho amor
Elder Archibald