Elder Eli Christensen in Uruguay: Hello

First of all, have you guys seen my dad's new beard?! It is super sophisticated looking. I always tried to get him to grow a beard and he wouldn't until now. One thing about Uruguay is that it seems to me like a lot more people wear facial hair than in the states, especially profesional people.

And yeah things are good here. This week I did my first set of residencias, which is where we take the missionaries who are just finishing up their three month tourist status to the legal office so that they can keep being legal. One thing I have learned from being the mission secretary is that life is a lot more about faking it than I had though before. You just kind of show up where you need to be when you need to, with the right people and documents and an official demeanor, and hope that everything turns out all right.

But yeah so it has gotten really hot and humid here lately, but that is nothing to hold back a Spirit driven Servant of Christ with souls to save and the gospel of repentance to preach. We have been trying to work a lot in recent weeks with with our investigator Carolina. If you don't remember who she is refer to my earlier communications. Anyway we had this ridiculously spiritual lesson with where she commit to pray to know if she should be baptized. Right after that she started having a bunch of trials. First we couldn't find her and then her house got robbed, and they started having a really difficult time in their appeals to get her boyfriend out of prison, but we are really proud of her because in all that time she only decided to pray harder and come closer to God. She decided that she wants to wait until things calm down a little bit before being baptized. But her pareja who is in prison has a copy of El Libro de Mormón and is reading it and apparently also desires to become baptized. The reason we know them is because his mom is a member of the church.

So we saw the funeral of President Monson this yesterday. It was really inspiring, really faith and testimony building, really motivating. These last couple of weeks have been really confirmed and strengthened my testimony of living prophets.

So fun things that happened this week. Earlier today we were in Shopping Portones to eat subway and we heard someone say "Hola Elderes" And it was this guy with a huge blonde beard and his wife and suegra, and he started talking to us and we thought that he was just a local member of the church but then he told us that he was from the states and we were very surprised. Turns out he is from Calfornia, served a mission in Chile, is espoused to an uruguaya, is a spanish professor in Wisconsin, and is currently visiting this beautiful and pleasant nation. But I write this because I now have renewed hope that it is possible to have a perfect local accent even though I am a gringo. Although I think it must help to make spanish your job and marry a Latina. Also I really need to learn portuguese and Elder Araújo really needs to learne the english, so we have been doing this cool thing where every night we read a chapter together in the bible. He reads my english bible and I read the portugueses bible he gave me a few months ago. We are currently in Mateus 4. Verb of the week: Apolillarse- to get moth eaten