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
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