Splits and Sick and Cemetery - February 20, 2012

Dear Family and Friends,

I feel like I have several weeks to summarize and recount and I am going to try my best to get it all in.

First things first, our companion exchanges went well. Barrio 1 is a different world! Coming to this area from Goya felt like coming to the BIG city, but spending a few days downtown in Barrio 1 made me realize what it really means to have a city area. They are right downtown with all the shops and plazas and..TRAFFIC LIGHTS. I think there are 3 traffic lights in my area. There are tons in barrio 1.
Hermana Sweet is great and we learned a lot together. It really is nice just to see different teaching styles and different ways of working with members and different door approaches.

So exchanges were great, but I have to say after 2.5 days I was happy to come home. Mostly because in the sister´s apartment i Barrio 1 they do not have air conditioning. That was torture. I hardly slept. Also, although last week I thought I was almost recovered, my stomach troubles continued through our exchanges and I was barely eating and finally when I got back Hermana Hobbs "put her foot down" (she literally said "can I put my foot down for a second? You are not well and this is not normal") and called sister Heyman and we were instructed to stay in the apartment for a full 24 hours to rest. Hermana Hobbs did a little nursing checkup on me and gave me good sound medical advice and was very kind to me (you know, turning on fans and off lights and on music and off music and bringing me things when I needed them). Let me just say that I feel so blessed that the one time I have gotten legitimately sick on my mission I´ve had a nurse as a companion. She put her foot down at the exact right time too because that day I only got worse. I will spare you the details. But now, really and truly, I am better. We hardly worked this week, so there is not much to share in terms of missionary work. But I am back in tip top shape.

There was ONE great thing that happened while I was in Barrio 1 is that our investigator Matias agreed to live the word of wisdom and told us he wanted to be baptized. He even handed over his pack of cigarettes! It is going to take a little more work to keep him tobacco and alcohol free (he is pretty seriously addicted to both) but we are going to work hard to help him and I know that if he has true desires and turns to Jesus Christ for strength in the atonement that he can do it. Yesterday at Ward Council several people offered to come to our lessons with him because they themselves had to overcome smoking before getting baptized. So we have high hopes!

As far as Karina and her kids go...well the story has gotten more complicated and we are going to have to see how well they continue to progress until baptism. I will keep you updated when I know more. But, even if there are some bumps in the road I still can´t say enough how special this family is. We scheduled to have an FHE with them on the same night as Hermana Hobb´s birthday. When they found out they prepared everything: empanadas, a homemade cake, balloons! It was so sweet. We sang and ate and Hermana Hobbs and I taught a little lesson about the Plan of Salvation and we brought over this giant life-sized board game that we found stashed in our apartment one day when we were cleaning (complete with a giant die!) The idea is that you start off standing in the pre-earth life and then take turns rolling the die and moving forward through birth, baptism, confirmation, etc and confronting life´s obstacles and whoever makes it to the celestial kingdom first wins! I am not sure how much I agree with the principle that teaches when you think about it ("earning" exaltation. competition for salvation. the fastest/strongest/smartest one wins, etc) But it was fun nonetheless and no one thought too hard (thank goodness!). Plus, we couldn´t pass up the chance to play with a giant die.

Speaking of our giant die, Hermana Hobbs and I were talking the other day about the quirky little details we will miss about our area once we get transferred. As we shared, we discovered that we both had some favorite graffiti from around town that we wanted to remember. My absolute favorite is scrawled HUGE across one of the brick walls in green spray paint and it says "Mi Dios No Juega Dados" which could translate to mean something like "My God Doesn´t Roll the Dice" which I feel like is something that Albert Einstein once said? I am not sure. But we decided that as long as we had a giant die we might as well take pictures with the die and the sign. There is another place in our area that says "Hasta mi sombra brilla en esta ciudad" which means "until my shadow shines in this city" which I find endearingly poetic. The last one is right by our stairs to get to our apartment and it says "Nacidos y Malcriados en Barrio Provincias Unidas" which just means "born and spoiled in neighborhood Provincias Unidas." Not too special or profound but it was the graffiti that helped me remember which stairs to climb to get to our apartment. Also, it is a nice shout out to the little neighborhood we live in. There is one more piece of graffiti I will have to snap a photo of sometime. When I first saw it with Hermana Griffeth I shouted excitedly "Oh!!! YODA!!!" (pause) "...or, Satan." I didn´t see the horns at first and it looked a lot like Yoda. Unfortunately I think it is the devil and not our friend from Star Wars. I am fond of it anyways.

To close, I wanted to write a little more about our experience in the cemetery a couple weeks ago.

It was a BLAZING hot day. The kind of day where you take 5 steps outside and you are already dripping with sweat. We left the apartment right at 11 and started our journey to the cemetery which is on the far side of our area. On the way we bought a huge bottle of grapefruit juice (our favorite drink here, and they sell it everywhere!) and we downed it all as we walked among the towering graves. We both felt the slight irony and ridiculousness of celebrating a birthday among the dead--but I have always loved cemeteries and it really was quite a beautiful and serene and new experience. There was an eerie peaceful feeling walking through the cemetery in the midday heat. We rarely saw another living soul. There were large crosses and stained glass windows of Jesus with his crown of thorns or the virgin Mary. Here, rather than burying everyone underground they have these little family tombs, that just look like little houses with shelves inside where they stack coffins and little tables or altars in the middle where they put pictures and candles and flowers. There were also endless rows stretching out as far as the eye could see of these little memorial boxes where loved ones leave pictures and flowers and trinkets and dedications and burn candles for those who have passed on. As we walked we often paused to read the inscriptions. So many people, who, on an empty afternoon such as this, seemed a little abandoned or forgotten by the world of the living. But, as we walked, the truth dawned on us, that even if it was an insurmountable task for us this day to pause and truly reflect on each and every name as a real person, a human life--that each one is endlessly loved and remembered and accounted for by God and that is a truth that is both hard to comprehend and so so beautiful.

Anyways, I was touched by our little trip to the cemetery and I hope that some of these photographs we took capture that feeling.

That is all for this week. Wish me health!

Love,

Hermana Brooke Parker

Photographs - February 13, 2012

Dear Family and Friends,

Lots of photos this week and not a lot of time. That seems to be how it goes.

The first photo I sent is just of Hermana Hobb´s and me sitting out on our front porch one night eating dinner. All you can see are our faces but I wanted you to get a sense of how incredibly TAN I am getting. This picture captures it and even other people are starting to notice. We visit people sometimes and they tell Hermana Hobb´s that in just a few more months in the sun she will be tan like me.

Next, you have photos of our groundhog celebration placemats. Aren´t they lovely?

As I mentioned in my email last week, last Monday was Hermana Hobb´s 22nd birthday. Mom sent me some great birthday party stuff in one of my packages so we celebrated with party hats and party blowers and a nice Happy Birthday tablecloth. We also made french toast with bananas and peanut butter syrup.

Alright, you can hold off on posting all the other photos until next week because I want to have more time to explain them.

This week I came down with a little stomach bug and we haven´t been working full days. It is a little discouraging to have to slow down so much but I am feeling much better now. Tonight we are doing our very first ever sister missionary companionship exchanges!!! At 6:30 today I am heading over to spend a couple days with Sister Sweet in Barrio 1 (in the very CENTER of Resistencia) and Sister Sweet´s companion, Sister McCown is coming here to be with Sister Hobbs. I am excited to see a new area and learn from other missionaries.

More next week.

Love,

Hermana Parker

PS. Oh I wanted to mention that this week I got a package from ITALY!!! I was very excited and I opened it up and found out it was from a certain Sorella Laws (Hi Lauren!) and she sent me the most amazing light green skirt with pockets which she used on her mission and I LOVE it! So thank you, if you´re reading this. :)

Feliz Dia De La Marmota de las Americas! - February 6, 2012

Dear Family and Friends,

It has been quite an eventful week and I hope I can get to everything in this email.

Things started off a little rough. The beginning of the week it rained a lot, and my umbrella broke, and everyone looks at you like you're crazy when you go tracting in the rain or show up for scheduled appointments (rain means everything is automatically canceled).Hermana Hobbs was feeling a little down about the language and we were both tired and there was one day in particular where it seemed that despite all of our best efforts and planning ALL of our plans and back up plans and back up back up plans fell through. That night we went home determined to do something to keep up our spirits.

So, naturally, we decided to have a celebration. It was February 2nd so we celebrated Groundhog Day... in the most traditional way we know how: eating riccotta raviolis with acorn squash on handmade Groundhog Day placemats. We each tried our hardest to draw what we think a groundhog looks like, but neither of us could really remember. We decided it is a brown animal...with four legs...and a tail...that lives in a hole. Someone should mail me a picture of a groundhog so I can do a better job next year. Anyways, since we are in Argentina we decided we should write Happy Groundhog Day in spanish on our placemats, and to our delight the word for groundhog in spanish is "Marmota de las Americas." Anyways, things started looking up significantly after our "Feliz Dia De La Marmota De Las Americas!"

The next day we were out tracting. A few of our plans fell through and we were sitting outside the chapel trying to re-group. We said a prayer together and afterwards we both felt impressed that we should go back to visit Carina (we had stopped by earlier that day and she was not home). Before I move on with this story I have to tell you about Carina. She has an amazing backstory.

When I first arrived in this area Hermana Griffeth told me a little about Carina. She told me she had been meeting with the sister missionaries for years and that she had read the book of mormon 3 times and that she had a testimony of the church and her oldest daughter had even begun to do personal progress on her own. The big problem was that the father of her four children (with whom she didn't have the best relationship to begin with) was entirely opposed to his family's involvement with the church. He would NOT give his permission for his children to be baptized and he and Carina fought and there was just generally a lot of strife and hard feelings about the topic. So, eventually, to keep the peace, Carina had kind of dropped the idea and even stopped pursuing it herself.

This is what I knew about Carina when I got a letter from my trainer Hermana Da Silva. She served in this same area at the very beginning of her mission. While she was here she also met with and taught Carina (like I said, she has been taking the missionary lessons for a long time). In the letter Hermana Da Silva told me that she had been thinking about me here in Resistencia, and she had been looking through her planners from her time in this area and that she had felt impressed to send me several names and addresses that I should look up. More than anything though, she said, I HAD to go find Carina. "FIND HER HERMANA" she told me seriously, "She needs you to visit her. She is prepared."

Well, from what I knew Carina was somewhat of a "dead end" but I figured it couldn't hurt to at least go and meet her. Hermana Griffeth and I passed by several times and met her, introduced ourselves briefly, but she was always busy or on her way out or something. Finally about two weeks later we found ourselves sitting in her living room for the first time. She began to talk to us and to tell us what had happened lately. "I am not sure if I told you yet that the father of my children died. About two weeks ago."

We were shocked. We had NO idea. He was older and had been sick in the past, but it was still a bit of a shock even to the family. I was impressed that Hermana Da Silva had received revelation to visit Carina on almost the exact same day that the family was passing through this tragedy. Carina was very thankful for our visit and over the following weeks we tried to offer words of comfort and to help her and the kids in whatever ways we could. We also, slowly, started teaching them the gospel again. I changed companions and Hermana Hobbs and I started focusing even more on Carina. Hermana Hobbs, especially, has been inspired as we have prayed and planned for how we can help Carina and her family and how we can invite them to grow closer to Jesus Christ and heal from their heartache and grief.

These past few weeks we have made some great progress, and last Thursday as we sat outside the chapel we felt inspired to go visit her for the second time that day. When we went to the house we found her at home with her 4 children. We asked if we could share a message and her and the older two girls listened as we shared about the Plan of Salvation. It was a beautiful lesson. Everyone participated. Hermana Hobbs shared a sweet testimony about the resurrection and how we can all be healed and renewed through the atonement of Jesus Christ. At a moment in the middle of the lesson when we felt the spirit was especially strong we paused and invited them all to be baptised and....THEY ACCEPTED! We were ecstatic. It has been a long road for this family towards joining the church and I feel so blessed and privileged to be the one here to witness them take this important step.

I also wanted to mention how great the members are here in Barrio 4. I haven{t said enough about them yet as I have been writing home. Seriously, my companions and I are consistently impressed and feel overwhelmingly blessed by many of the amazing memebers in this ward who do so much for us. Earlier this week we invited one sister, Sandra, to come to us to one of our lessons. She works full time taking care of an elderly woman but she said she could try to rearrange her schedule so she could come. We thanked her and told her the time of our appointment and she said she had a dentist appointment but quickly decided she could postpone or reschedule it. We told her not to worry about it but she insisted. So we thanked her. Then, to our disappointment, we walked all the way to the investigator's house with Sandra that day and she wasn't there (this was during our discouraging half of the week). Sandra was so sweet about it though, she insisted it was no problem and even said she would love to come out with us again. So, this Sunday we decided we would invite her to our FHE with Carina. She said yes and then realized this meant she would have to postpone the dentist AGAIN but quickly decided she would do it. We told her not to worry about it and she just looked at us and said very earnestly "No, Hermanas, the things of the Lord are ALWAYS first for me. I can cancel the dentist. I am going with you." We couldn't argue with that.

Another member, Luis, is the Stake Mission Leader. He is, in an expression, the SALT OF THE EARTH. He comes with us to appointments at least 4 times a week and also spends a considerable amount of time out tracting with us. He lives in a very small house with a very large family and they don't have much but they are always so giving. Yesterday when we met Luis at the chapel to go out to visit one of our investigators he surprised Hermana Hobbs with a birthday cake! Today is Hermana Hobb's birthday and at what must have been considerable sacrifice for him he bought her that cake. We were so grateful. We are going to share it tomorrow in district meeting because we can't eat it all ourselves.

Anyways, today we have just been celebrating up a storm once again but this time for Hermana Hobb's birthday.... but I will have to write more about it next week because we are out of time, as usual. Just as a preview, we decided that the best way to celebrate 22 years of life would be to put it all in perspective and ponder the meaning of life and death as we visited the local cemetery. Maybe a strange choice but there is this HUGE BEAUTIFUL cemetery in our area and I have always wanted to go inside and we actually had an amazing morning walking around and looking at all the graves and talking.

More next week. I love you all!

Love,

Hermana Brooke Parker

One of These Emails - January 30, 2012

Family and Friends,

I hate to have to send one of these emails, but here it goes:

I just wrote a wonderful, beautiful, eloquent, spiritual email full of interesting details and then BAM the power went out in the whole internet cafe. I was writing in a word document because the email window was being glitchy so I lost it all.

I am including an excerpt from Hermana Hobbs email because hers automatically saved on myldsmail.net and that way you can know some of the things we have been up to. We´ll just think of it as having a guest-poster on my blog this week! :)

Here you go:


I decided to get more serious about this language learning business. One night I was talking to my district leader (he calls every night to ask us about our lessons and investigators), and Elder Garret told me what he did, so we copied his genius idea.

We made a language contract, and it says,

"We hereby declare that the days of Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday shall be dedicated to the speaking of the castellaño tongue. Any who dare to violate this contract by polluting our ears with the foul sound of the english language shall be punished with three lashings to the back, and one minute off of their weekly epistle to their beloved for every paragraph spoken."

Needless to say, my email this week is only 55minutes....Starting tomorrow we are modifying the contract to be every day except Monday (our preparation day and day of rest!!). I will learn this language if it kills me!

I had an experience this week, that I didn’t love, but I learned from. Let me start off with saying that I am gawked at, yelled at (good and bad things), chased by dogs, laughed at for my terrible Spanish on a daily basis. I am used to it. I can handle it, but this one day was a little different. We were invited to sit down with these girls and we were teaching them lesson one about Joseph Smith. They were being pretty rude and giggling and just completely uninterested. I wanted to go right away, because it was pretty clear that they did NOT care about what we had to say. I was dreading talking, and I figured that maybe sis. parker would just teach the whole thing because it was not a wonderful teaching environment...and then she turned to me. I start talking and the girls could not contain themselves, just laughing a ton, one of the girls had to leave because she was laughing so hard. ugghhh....it was painful. I am used to being laughed at for my terrible accent and language skills, but in a nice friendly way...they weren’t being friendly. In that moment I remembered the Apostolic Blessing from elder Cristofferson. He said that every trial, heartache, rejection, door slammed in your face will be swallowed up in the joy of Christ by coming to truly know Him and by truly becoming His disciple. I knew that everything would be ok. For a second, on a very small level, i felt like a got a glimpse more of what the savior went through in His mortal life. Being laughed at and ridiculed. Anyways this other girl comes over and starts asking these really antagonistic questions, and is just really rude....there is no way we will get anywhere with their attitudes. And then they started asking us about where we are from, what we do here, if we can have boyfriends in our church, and if we can date here, do we like it, do we miss our family...this was my chance. Sis Parker told them that yes, our church allows you to date, but we don’t date while we are on missions, and then I said that "we left our families, we left boys we were dating, we left jobs (my little boy!!), we left our lives for 18 months because I know that our message can change your life if you let it. We gave up everything to share with you this message because it has blessed our lives so much, and we want you to have the same joy that we do." In that moment it really felt like everything changed. The girls were nice and calm, and one of them said that anytime we want to come and teach we are welcome. I know it was the spirit carrying the message to these girls hearts, because nothing else could have. And really the apostolic blessing was fulfilled...my little bad experience was swallowed up in the Joy of Christ!

Mom, you asked how people say my name. They say every name but Hobbs..They cannot say the letter "h". That much I figured, but I didn’t know that they couldn’t say the "b" either. They say "ops". Almost like "hops", but with no H. They also say "ohps".

We taught one of our investigators, Karina, the commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy. She said she would try it...she was testing God to see if she really would be blessed like we said she would. I told her a story of Yvette (love you Yvette!) in nursing school ,and for our very last test in nursing school how Yvette didn’t study that Sunday. I had told Yvette that she would feel so much better and refreshed and that the Lord promises to bless us when we keep his day holy. In nursing school it is sooo hard to not study on Sunday. But Yvette didn’t study that Sunday and she told me how great she felt taking a day of rest...and then of course she rocked that test (God helped)! So Karina said she would try just like Yvette and see how she felt. Karina loved it! She felt so great. Her kids loved it because usually she makes them clean on Sunday. She said that someone had owed her money for years, and they just happened to pay her this week out of the blue, and she knows its because she kept the Lords day holy. Isn’t it kind of funny that the Lord gives us a commandment to rest--and we fight Him over it!!! Shouldn’t we love to take a break? There is this scripture that i found in Isaiah..and of course I don’t have the reference, but it says that when we keep the lords day holy he causes us to "walk upon the high places of the earth"...that’s beautiful. It shows that he helps us to live happier, better lives by keeping his day holy.

We had an investigator, Martin, and we had to drop him. Its sad when you drop your most promising investigator. He would come to church every week, he was always there when we went to teach him. I bet all of the Returned missionaries are yelling, NOOO! Well, we realized that he was in love with my companion (Editorial Note: This is Brooke. I wouldn´t say he was in love IN LOVE with me. But he might have a had a small...crush...and we slowly gathered that he didn´t have one hundred percent pure interest in the message necessarily...), and he would keep every commitment that allowed him to see her (like church and appointments), but he wouldn’t keep other commitments like reading and praying because he wouldn’t see her by doing those things. He just wasn’t progressing. we went over there to tell him that we need to not see him anymore. Sis. Parker said she was going to tell him, but as soon as we got there she gave me the "help me" look. I am very familiar with that look because I give it to her at least 26 times every day. For the first time I got to bail my companion out!!! It was a great moment. Dont judge...but it felt like a break-up. Because he was saying no, no. I told him that we liked to teach him, but it just wasn’t going anywhere, etc, etc. It was really sad. As missionaries we have a very specific purpose..invite others to come unto Christ through baptism....and if it is never going there, then we really need to move on and go to the people that are ready to make covenants with God, because there are people out there that are eagerly looking for the gospel/answers to life questions.

Con AMOR!!

Hna Ops, or Ooops, or Ohbps. or Hobbs ;)



Hermana Parker again. Here is one detail from my lost email:

I was electrocuted for the first time this week! It was weird. But I am fine. Plus, Hermana Hobbs is a nurse and she studied electrocution in nursing school and she said as long as I don´t have blood in my urine or kidney pain then I should be good to go. I am just trying to scare you. It was just for a moment but it was intense.

Here are a couple pictures to make up for the lost email.

Love,


Hermana Brooke Parker

All Is Well - January 23, 2012

Dear family and friends,

I got the computer with the awful keyboard again, but this place is full (mostly of adolescent boys playing internet computer games, drinking orange soda and smoking) and there is no computer to switch to, so I am going to just deal with it again. Excuse any missing letters or apostrophes.

My second week of training went well. Hermana Hobbs is fantastic and we are already growing to be good friends.

She grew up in a whole slew of little towns in Southern Arizona because her parents are adventurous sorts that liked to pick up and move every few years. They would often move to one small town, spend a few years building a house there, then sell it and move to another. Once they even lived on an Indian reservation in the little town of Havasupai in the base of the Grand Canyon.

Anyways, Hna Hobbs is bringing a great energy and spirit to the work and it is fun to be with her as she is learning Spanish and discovering Argentina and South America for the first time. She’s really cute too and I would send pictures but I keep getting old defective computers! I will send them as soon as I can.

The work is going well. We are trying to involve ward members more in our teaching and this week we taught a lot of lessons with a lot of different ward members. We have some great investigators, but progress is slow. It still feels like a unique joy and privilege to help people learn more about their Savior Jesus Christ and draw closer to him, even if it is with little baby steps.

This week I gave my second talk in church here in Barrio 4 and my 3rd talk in Argentina. It went well. After teaching impromptu lessons in Spanish all day every day it hardly makes me nervous at all to get up and give a prepared talk. Which is crazy because before my mission giving talks made me quite nervous.

Sorry to keep writing short emails without many details. I always have a list of interesting things I want to share but these computers are really slow and buggy and the keyboard is terrible. I am going to hunt for a better internet cafe so next week I can finally write a better email.

I hope all is well at home. I would love to hear from more of you! My contact info is on my facebook.

Love,

Hermana Parker

It's A Girl! - Jan 16, 2012

Dear Family and Friends,

It has been a very eventful week. It is still incredible to me how everything can change from one day to the next in the mission. Transfers were on Wednesday and as a result Wednesday morning I woke up with Hermana Griffeth, helped her lug her suitcases down three flights of stairs and waited with her at the bus terminal as she went off to her next assignment in the province of Misiones. Then I headed to the mission offices and met up with all the other missionaries who are training this transfer.

So...I´m training! I feel kind of like a teen mother and I am still a little shocked but things are going well. A lot of elders arrived this transfer but not too many sister missionaries. There were three new sisters and, interestingly enough, the other two sisters training arrived with me in September, so I don´t feel too alone in my young motherhood. It seems that Pres. Heyman is choosing a lot of younger missionaries to be trainers.

My daughter is Hermana Hobbs. She is from a little town in Southern Arizona. She is actually here to be the mission nurse, but for her first 6 months she will just be a normal missionary as she practices and improves her Spanish. After 6 months she will probably still function basically as a normal missionary but carry around a special cell phone and take calls and consult sick missionaries. Before her mission she worked as a nurse for children with terminal diseases. She is amazing. She is still struggling to speak and understand Spanish but she is learning very quickly and I know she is going to do great.

Her first days in the mission have been quite eventful so far. On her very first night proselyting it was raining and all of our appointments fell through on us and then I got us hopelessly lost and we walked around in circles for about an hour. I didn´t realize before Hermana Griffeth left how much I was still relying on her to make our way around this area. I have most of it down but there is this part in the middle with tons of apartment buildings that is hard to navigate. But I am proud to say that I am getting better at reading maps and I haven´t gotten us lost again since that first night.

She also was almost robbed by this punk kid on a bike on Friday. He started grabbing at her backpack and then she pulled it back and moved away quickly. I was a little ahead of her but when I realized what was going on, I turned around and yelled at the kid in Spanish for her and he ran away and everyone was fine. In crisis situations I tend to lose my ability to move but I still have my voice and thankfully in this instance it managed to scare him off. I just yelled "QUE ESTÁ HACIENDO?! NO TENEMOS NADA!" (translated: what are you doing?! We don´t have anything!)

Then this morning she woke up with a nasty stomach bug and was throwing up all morning. But we called the elders and they gave her a blessing and after sleeping for a few hours she woke up good as new. It´s been a rough start but she is quite resilient and excited to work and I think we´re going to have a good transfer together.

Wish me luck!

More next week with pictures,

Hna. Parker

Passing - January 9, 2012

Dear Family and Friends,

First of all, this key board I am typing on is AWFUL and has lots of stuck keys and cannot do apostrophes. Sorry if there are more typos than usual and if my email is short.

I am sad to hear the news of Grandma Truitts passing. My thoughts and prayers are with her and mom and her other kids and grandkids as they make funeral preparations and commemorate her life. I love Grandma very much and after getting your emails and reading moms tribute I have been reflecting a little on my memories of her. I remember going to her house as a little girl and I remember that she would buy me colorful hair ties and do my hair up in a high tight ponytail and it made me feel fancy and special (and it made my scalp hurt!). I remember going to visit her when I was a little older and going to the store with her and how she would show me off to all her friends and acquaintances ("this is my granddaughter!") and how she would treat me by buying me a magazine at the cash register. I remember her sweet Virginia drawl. I remember how she always remembered my birthday and her birthday card was often the first one I would receive any given year. Including this past birthday when her card arrived just a week or so after my birthday (but about a month before any other birthday greetings from home arrived). I love her and will miss her.

As I think about grandma and my mission experiences thus far, it really strikes me how powerful and important and sacred these relationships we form here and earth can be. There is one old woman we have visited on occasion here in Resistencia who is in her late 80s. She had 16 children. About 8 years ago her youngest daughter died of lung cancer at the age of 33 (the same age as Jesus, she reminded us more than once). She was so shocked and traumatized and saddened by her daughters early death that she went into a state of emotional shock and for TWO years she sort of walked around in a daze and spent most of her time shut up in her house in bed. Even now, when she speaks of her beloved youngest daughter she speaks with a sort of reverence and longing and lingering pain. Part of the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the testimony we shared with her, is that we can be with these people after we die and for the eternities. These beautiful relationships we form here will continue to grow and flourish in the world to come. I know this is true and look forward to the day I can be reunited with loved ones:
D&C 130:2 "And that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy."
More thoughts and experiences from the field next week. It is HOT (in case you forgot) but I am well. Just a little (or VERY VERY) sweaty.

Love,

Hna. Parker

Happy New Year! - January 3, 2012

Dear Family and Friends,

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a great Christmas break and that all is well. All is well in Barrio 4. Life is moving right along and, if you can believe it, another transfer is almost over. I still feel like I am settling into Resistencia and I am just starting to feel in tune with my life and the work here. I am also still making wonderful discoveries and meeting great new people.

One of my best discoveries this week is that not only do mangoes and grapefruits grow wild here but so do POMEGRANATES! This is great news. I can´t tell you how excited I am about this. We also walked by a house yesterday that had an entire shaded canopy made of grape vines, full of delicious ripe purple grapes. Also, now the mangoes are just dropping off trees left and right and people often hand us big grocery bags full of them to take home. We can´t keep up! So the other night Hna. Griffeth took a few precious minutes to peel and juice a bunch of them and we have been putting that into smoothies. So fruit-wise we are doing very well here.

My living arrangements here are also pretty sweet. I can´t complain. We live on the third floor of an apartment complex and have a pretty big apartment and a nice view of the city. We also have air conditioning, which at first we tried to use sparingly but which we have lately been running full blast almost every minute we are indoors. I feel a little bad but it feels so nice after spending 6 hours in the sun. One of my favorite things about where we live are our pets. WE don´t really have pets but they practically live on our doorstep and on the stairs by our apartment so it kind of feels like we do. There are 3 cats which we have named Charles (the tabby), Hans (the black cat) and Fabrisia (the the fluffier black cat). There is also the cutest little dog that lives in the apartment across from us named Lola. She is always jumping up to greet us when we come home and she often escapes and tries to follow us out when we are leaving to work. She reminds me of a miniature Sego, for those of you who know Sego (Hi Elisa! I love you!)

One of our neighbors is this fantastic old man named Ismael. He has talked to many missionaries over the years and is pretty firm in his Pentecostal faith, but he also likes to read the Book of Mormon every once in a while and sometimes we stop to leave him passages or to talk for a moment about a scripture. He works as a metalsmith of sorts and is always making benches and planters and other decorative things with metal. The other day Hermana Griffeth asked him if he could make her a ring out of a peso coin and he agreed to do it free of charge! He is a great neighbor. He is also one of the only people I know (including members of our ward here) who can remember our names. Every time we pass by he shouts "Hola! Hermana Parker! Hermana Griffeth!" And it surprises us quite a bit because usually when we introduce ourselves people respond to our names as if they are some kind of impossible alien tongue and just laugh it off and call us "Hermana."

Just to summarize, Christmas and New Years both went well. Lots of fireworks and lots of Ananá Fizz (a fizzy alcoholic pineapple beverage). For Christmas this year Hna. Griffeth and I made these cool little origami boxes and went around to all our members and investigators and sang to them and shared scriptures about the birth of Jesus Christ. On Christmas Eve we came home a little early and made dinner and opened presents (as is the tradition here). On Christmas day the Patriarch for pretty much all of Northern Argentina invited us to have dinner with his family. Hermano Amutio, the Patriarch, is actually one of the coolest people I´ve met. When he called us to invite us over, I answered the phone and he said "Hermanas! What are you doing on Christmas Day? Well what I really mean to say is, whatever you were planning on doing, drop it, because you are eating dinner with us!" So, we accepted his invitation happily. Amutio is either the first or one of the very first people to be baptized here in Resistencia. He also served his mission here in Northern Argentina at the time when Elder Scott was the mission president. He works in some very intense top secret FBI job and is always traveling around the country and having adventures. He likes to go on adventures in the jungle and to bring back this special kind of rare wood and also different kinds of crystals and stones. For Christmas he gave Hna. Griffeth and I both a pendant made out of some of the crystals from his collection. Before he gave it to us he first gave us a very heartfelt speech about how life can be like these crystals. There are rough edges and there are hard times but it is our job to form and to shape our lives and to smooth out the rough edges and to make what we want of them. It was very nice of him. We also all sat together (with his wife and daughter) and read from the Book of Mormon together and he bore a powerful testimony of the Savior and of the Restored Gospel and it was all very sweet and very personal and powerful. It was a good reminder of what Christmas is all about.

New Years Eve we were also in our apartment early. We had a very laid back night. We went to bed at 11 as usual but set an alarm to wake up just before midnight to welcome in the new year. At 11:55 we popped out of bed, strapped on our party hats (thanks mom!) and blew our party blowers and looked out the window at all the fireworks! HAPPY 2012!

I hope the world doesn´t end this year, to be honest. But if it does, I will be a missionary and I will be happy.

Until next week i send my love from Resistencia,

Hna. Parker