Radiant Missionaries

Hey everyone!

Well we received our changes today and I get to stay here in Argentina!! I am really excited, as I love it here and the people are great. My new companion will be Elder Opazo from Chili, and he supposedly has a year on the mission. I have heard that he is really funny and also that he speaks english, spanish, and portuguese. Pretty cool! 

Elder Raimundo is going to be a district leader in a zone called Artigas. I´ll miss him. He has taught me a lot about being a missionary and also about the language. To be honest, I was still pretty terrible at spanish when I left Las Acacias at 5 months (it´s a little tough when you live with 4 gringos haha) but I feel a lot more comfortable now that I have had a latino companion for two changes. Elder Raimundo has taught me a lot but I am also excited because I guess Elder Opazo speaks english pretty well and should be able to help me with more advanced spanish. 

The other thing is that sister missionaries are going to be opening up an area in the other half of Colon and San Jose. So that will be a huge help, as our area was pretty big! Also, we won't have to travel to Concepcion each week for district meetings, because we have a district of 4 here in Colon. Oh yeah, and something else cool is that Elder Good is going to be the new financier for the next change!

This week has been super great after Tuesday and Wednesday which poured non stop. I did have a funny experience though on Wednesday. Since it was rainy, we had been walking in super muddy streets. When we got to a part of our area that had normal road, I wanted to wash off my boots since they were so muddy and we had a contact nearby we were going to visit. I saw a puddle on the side of the road so I stuck my foot in to clean it off. Although it appeared very shallow, it was not... Lets just say my whole leg fell in, and I am just glad I was able to prevent my whole body from falling it because it kind of caught me off balance haha. 

Anyways, we have been having a lot of progress here, apart from a couple of down days. [...] accepted a baptismal date for April 29th, and I really think we will be able to make that happen, because she is a total capa (stud). It is pretty funny because she just turned 13 this week, and is about twice the size of Elder Raimundo. I always give Elder Raimundo a hard time :) Her parents aren't too interested, but they are really supportive and that she wants to listen to us. Her aunt [...] is still out of town, so we haven't been able to find her for a while.

We also followed up with [...], our new investigator from last week. We didn't have a whole lot of time, but taught part of the Plan of Salvation and it was awesome! She said she has been reading a lot of the Book of Mormon too. We are going to have to pass here over to the sister missionaries that are coming because she is in their area, but I am excited to see the progress she makes anyways!

A kind of cool experience that happened this week was with a contact we made named [...]. He was sitting on a street corner with some of his friends. As were were contacting them, he asked us if we had some special light because we were apparently ´iluminados´ or glowing. He said he felt that something was different about us and then gave us his direction to come by one day! So we are going to pass by this week, and I am pretty excited because he seemed really interested. It feels so good when people desire to learn more about the gospel. We have been finding a lot of new investigators this week and I am really excited for this next change with Elder Opazo! 

Sorry that makes kind of a long letter for this week, but there are good things to come here in Colon!! Love you guys all and miss you!

Elder Layton