I Knew It!!!

Monday March 31, 2014

This week has been probably the funniest one of my life. i dont think i have ever laughed so hard before. 

my new comp is the funniest kid of all time. we just joke around and its the funniest. we quote movies, A LOT. we have a few favorites. 

I knew it!! is my favorite. 

yo ma!!!! meatloaf!!! ha

lookin like a fool right now!!- we use that one a lot. 

or the other we use a lot is, thats a bold move cotton. haha

its been a good time. but we are also working like crazy, we are contacting a ton and actually finding a lot of new people. we have a two families that we are working on. we found a less active family but the dad is the only member and all the kids are of baptism age. he wants to come back. but mother nature is a little stinker and it poured rain saturday and sunday. so in total we were 8 in sacrament. but my talk was awesome. had a lot of eyecontact. ha not just the look in the back of the gym and everyone thinks youre looking at people. haha 

but this week is going to be general conference, well obviously, but if ya didnt know, now you do. but we have to ride the worst bus of all time to get to where we are going to watch it for like an hour and a half. so who knows if we will have investigators. one said he will totally go. but we will see. we are working hard with him, he is an eternal and i really want to go to all the sessions. we cant go saturday night if we dont have an investigator. but we might be the exception since we live really far away. 

uh, man, there were too many funny stories. we hate dogs. they just bark and its terrible. my comp stepped in more doo doos. haha he even stepped in a goose one outside our house in his flip flops. haha we lost it when we saw that. he came inside, saw it, ON TOP of his sandel and just yelled, what is my deal!!!!!! hahaha man it was good. 

event of the week. we got antied. that was super fun. it was a call back and they were super prepared. we went inside and away we went. they are seventh day adventists so they think the sabbath is really on saturday. and that the bible is all we need. well we got to work on that and i think we took down a couple barriers but we will see what happens. they are a really cool family though. 

oh and we have an investigator, luis and his daughter Romina. they are awesome. he told us from the second we started teaching that he believes what we are saying is true. so who knows. we just gotta get the weather to cooperate and get them to church so they can get baptized. i am doing my absolute best to get my comp a baptism. he is really worried, he has four almost five months and hasnt had one, so we are doing what we can. 

well im done rambling for the week. i will try to write down specific things to tell you guys next week. 

have the best time ever listening to a living prophet of god. 

Elder Whitaker

-- 

Elder Whitaker

Mision Argentina Rosario

7935 Blv Argentino

Rosario Santa Fe 2000

Federal!!!

Monday March 24, 2014

So i told my mom i was going to write more this week and just realized that yet again i am going to lose time. so i am going to really focus and write fast. 

so this week was really fun. i gave my first district meeting and it was awesome. i just kinda winged it cause i dont know these people yet but i gave a pretty fun one and my comp said it really helped him so i felt good about that. then we worked like crazy. my comp is wasted all the time and i love it. ha we contacted like crazy and tripled everyone else in the district. 

remind me if i didnt tell you guys about last week and i will work on it. but just so everyone knows, i am totally doing those video journals on my camera every night. and then i write about it later as a back up if my camera gets stolen. 

but this week was good. we worked a lot. and had a lot of really funny things happen. 

first, my comp had about the worst day i have ever heard of in my entire life. yes we were together the whole time but every bad thing that happened hit him square in the face. first we were walking and looked down and there was a large.. fecal matter, ON TOP of his shoe!! hahaha dont ask me how but wow, it was funny. then we were contacting, and i have a new theory about contacting. 

tell all missionaries this about contacting. there is no trick, there is no secret thing you can say, and here is why. 

we were TRYING to contact this guy. me and my gringo comp who just got done training, and the guy looked at us like, i dont understand a word you said. we explained it like twice, what we do, who we are all that. at the end, i just said as clearly as i know how, we share a message about the family. 

and he let us in. he didnt understand, didnt know what we said, but let us in. so moral of the story, if they are prepared and looking, they will let you in. now that is not to say you can just walk up and say whatever, but yeah. oh and also, make them say no to your face two times that they dont want to hear more. make sure they know who they are rejecting. =) 

ok. so then after we got in that house, (we set a baptism date) we left, and after a block my comp was like, dude im cold, imma put on my sweater, and then his face went white. haha it was gone!!!! haha i of course just started laughing. cause i had told him earlier, dude, tie it onto your bag, its going to fall. which HE DID!! then he UNTIED it cause he thought it looked dumb!! hahah well we never found it. so that was awesome. 

then he stained his shirt and broke his tooth brush. just really funny all of it. i loved it. 

then contacting a little dog came running out when they opened the door. well it wouldnt come back to the lady, and here all dogs love me, so i called it and it ran over, well i picked it up and stood up, (it was TINY) well the head started to fall forward, so i thought, o i will toss it up a little and catch it again. haha well i missed...... the little foofy dog landed square on its back haha. 

we didnt get in the house. 

this week was just really funny. we had a blast. we are finding cool people and working on finding new people. the branch is really cool. all the members are super fun. way better than the ones in casilda. ha if were being honest. 

well i hope this was long enough for you. 

Whats important to you is important to Him. 

-theme of my mission. 

Elder Whitaker

March 17, 2014

I just realized that i forgot to write again. ughh.

we are leaving too. uh this week was good. i am learning a lot. i took apart a chicken with a pocket knife so we could eat. i will teach you guys how to do it when i get home. its fun. but yeah i am doing great. 

i also got in the worst rain storm of all time. i broke my third umbrella.... uh, my new area is called federal. there are like four paved streets and the rest is dirt. but yeah. well i gotta head out for real. i will write a sweet letter next week. 

love you guys. 

this is me and my new comp. he just finished his training. 

this is me and the two greatest people on the planet

and this is the monument to the flag in rosario. 

we went there for my last pday and it was really cool. 

but have a great week. love you all

Elder Whitaker

Monday, March 3, 2014 Amazing Story...

Hi!

so this week was pretty crazy. relatively unproductive cause we had to work on a massive project for the branch and our numbers were awful, but some funny stuff happened. actually a lot of crazy things happened too. 

it feels like a life time ago but its actually been less than a week still, but Elder da Silva left haha. he got transferred to his real area. he was sad. but yeah he is now with his trainer in some far away place. 

it is getting cold down here. i feel like it was just a couple weeks ago that i put the sleeping bag away cause it was too hot and now i had to bust it out again. i havent started totally using it but a couple nights ago i needed it as a last resort and didnt have it. but yeah. oh and mom, can i buy a hoody. i need to wash the other one but since its cold it takes like a week for stuff to dry now... 

thats beside the point.

ha apparently i am changing more than i thought. yesterday as we were eating hermana ruiz was like, elder whitaker your like the most serious one here. hahahaha if she only knew. but yeah that was kind of a funny moment. i laughed. but yeah i have for sure grown up and learned a lot. i now understand what you meant mom when you said it doesnt matter if you want to go to the activity or not, you go to support the people doing it. 

so we had a wicked awesome activity set up that i wanted to send pictures of but the USB port on the comp i am using has disappeared so.... but long story short, i built an airplane in the hallway of our church!!!!! haha yeah. and it was legit!!! what it was was a thing of the three grades of glory, youre flying on a plane, plane explodes, you die, then we go on the trip through the plan of salvation. really cool. well we worked like crazy people to get this thing going. and literally every one of our members who volunteered to help, bailed. the members that we got to come, one of em got sick like ten minutes in. ha it was funny. but yeah. and we had a total of like five members come. thank heavens we have some awesome investigators of the sisters, my unmarried couple who is awesome and a random contact that was invited, other wise it woulda been terrible. but yeah if nothing else, i have learned exactly who i am going to be as a member when i get home. 

anyway=)

yesterday we were in church and my comp and i had blessed the sacrament and decided to just stay up there. well that crazy guy with the white hair came again!! so my comp ran back to sit with him. well after all the testimonies president stood up and said, we will now have a baby blessing. said the name of the baby, who will be blessed by..... Elder

Ponce. hahaha if he woulda said me i woulda cried. but i look in the very back and his head pops up above everyone else, completely confused and surprised. hahaha 

so he comes up, some random lady, WHO WE HAD NEVER SEEN BEFORE, just walked up and gave him her baby. haha well i stood up like alright lets give him some sort of support, i can at least hold the mic. well the member that was with us motioned to my hand and pointed and it looked like he pointed to his shoulder, of my comp. well i put my hand there and he looked at me like, wow. what in the world are you doing....¨hahaha i ended up with like three fingers under the thigh of the  baby. it was terrible and just super awkward. we had no idea what we were doing nor how to bless the poor thing. the only prep we had was right before sacrament meeting started Ponce came up and randomly asked how to bless a baby, we GLANCED at it for like three seconds tops and called it good. hahaha little did we know....... 

hahaha but after that nothing really happened. just random things. i dont know. in a year and a few months we can all just read through my journal and find out what happened=) which i need to get better at writing in. =) 

oh and i became a real missionary ha so that was fun. 

well thats all i got this week. 

love all of you

Elder Whitaker

cool story from one of my friends that is serving down here with me. well he is in the resistencia mission. but yeah. 

From: Ryan Morrin <ryan.morrin@myldsmail.net>
Date: Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 1:26 PM


This week I really dont have that much time to type but I wanted to
share an experience that I had this past week that truly was
incredible. I wanna start out this email by telling my mom that
nothing happpened and that we are all good but I wanna testify of how
I saw that God loves me this past week. We traveled to Formosa Capital
this past Thursday for a multizone conference and we decided to rent
basically the equivalent of a shuttle bus to take all of the
missionaries in our zone to the meeting. We left our city of Clorinda
and we had been traveling for thirty or fourty minutes and we felt the
bus drop and we started to slide a little. At that same moment a semi
truck passed us and we were heading in the direction of a collision
with the truck. I have no logical explanation how this happened but
the minibus somehow got pushed to the right and we passed within 10
centimeters of the truck and continued forward in a straight line. All
of us in the bus thought that perhaps we had a flat tire and so we
continued onwards for a kilometer until the bus came to a stop. four
of us elder hopped on out to see if we could help the driver fix the
flat. When we got to the side of the bus we saw that we didnt have a
flat, but rather that the wheels were completely missing and that we
just had the bare axle. We walked a kilometer back to where we passed
the truck and found out that right before we passed the truck that the
wheels flew off and smashed the front of the semi and that by some
unknown force we didnt slide into the truck but instead continued
onwards in a straight line in the road. We looked at the asphalt and
the line dug into it could not have been any straighter. When we saw
all of these different things we started to realize how big of a
miracle had just happened. None of us can explain how we didnt get
smashed by the truck and the devestation would have been immense
because we were going 65 and the truck was going 60 in the other
direction. I want to let you all know that I KNOW that my Heavenly
Father loves me and I KNOW that he protects his missionaries. I have a
testimony that Angels are watching out for us and there is no
explanation for why the bus slid to the right other than that Angels
were watching out for us and helping us out. When we follow the
commandments and do that which God has commanded us then he has
promised us that we will recieve help and protection. I have such a
strong testimony of this and I know that I will never forget this
experience. I also know that angels are watching out for every single
one of you. Whether you are on the right path that God has for you or
not every single person on this planet is a son/daughter and he loves
every single one of them. He wants every single one of them to be able
to return to live in His presence (Moses 1:39) He sends his angels to
protect us and there are so many miracles that happen in our lives on
a daily basis (2 Kings 6) I know that I have a loving Heavenly Father
and I know that he is your loving Heavenly Father as well. I hope that
this story was able to strengthen your testimonies of this and I am so
grateful for all the support that I receive from all of you. Hope that
you all stay safe this next week

Love