Elder Levander is pregnant!

Hello everyone! Happy Easter! 

Maybe I should actually say happy semana santa. Nobody actually seems to celebrate Easter here specifically, just this whole week they've been doing things with the semana santa, or the holy week. Is that what we say in English? It's a lot like Spain, Mom. They celebrate a lot, but they celebrate everything except for the day that Jesus was resurrected. Especially día de Calvario, or the day Jesus went to Calvary. There's a gigantic Catholic church here in our area and everyone came to it that day to celebrate. It looked like fun... But 2 mormon missionaries going to a gigantic catholic gathering doesn't seem like the best idea to me. So we didn't get very close. :)

It was a good week though, for the most part. Unfortunately it was the semana santa. Nobody seemed to want to talk to us. About half of our investigators who our super catholic were too busy to see us this week, getting ready for all the celebrations. And about all our future investigators as well. So there was about nobody to talk to this week! It was kind of awful. I'm glad the holidays are over for that reason. Either way though... It was a great opportunity to remember and think about the Atonement and remember that Christ does in fact live! He was resurrected and he lives today. It was a good week for that reason basically :)

Now getting to the subject line... Elder Levander is pregnant! What? Lemme explain. We got transfer calls last night, and it seems that I will be training this transfer! Elder Levander is going to give birth to my son! :D I got this subject line from that time when Amaya sent the same thing home when she trained a new missionary, by the way. But yeah... I guess I'm training. I've got a mixture of emotions right now... I've always wanted to train. But recently I've wanted less and less to train. When I got that call from President a few weeks ago with the "special transfers" that I was going to be getting a new missionary who was going to try out my area for 2 days before deciding to go home. When I got that call I felt a lot of responsibility getting put on me... And that's when I realized that I didn't really want it as much. It's going to be hard! Hopefully my hijo won't be on the verge of going home when I get him, but I still feel like this is going to be REALLY hard. I'm excited, but I just hope I can do this well. 

Funnily enough I'm pretty sure there's a new Elder Bingham that comes this transfer. It would be SO HILARIOUS if he was my son! I don't know where he's from or anything, but I'm pretty sure we're not very closely related. 

So we arrive to the end of the transfer. I'm sad to leave Elder Levander... We really had a good time together. 

That's about it for now though. Next week I'll let you guys know everything about my new little hijo! Love you all!

Elder Bingham

Aleluya!

Hello people!

Glad to hear you had a great week. It's crazy that the Provo temple is already dedicated! And congrats to Beccy and Austin on the sealing of Bruce! That's way cool. 

So this week was even better than last one! In my opinion. We just saw all kinds of little miracles again! Let me share. 

So on Tuesday we were planning on dropping some investigators of ours. Their names are Elena and Huberto? I don't know how to write it. We knocked their door awhile ago and they let us in. They're really nice! But like TOO nice. Every time we've gone they start feeding us fruit and Coke and whatever the heck. And they talk a lot. And we have a jolly good time. But they don't really have any intentions of changing religions, they say. They just want to chat and share ideas about our religions. And we can't ever share what we want to share because they talk so much. They're Catholic, of course. So we went there on Tuesday with full intentions of going by quickly and dropping them, explaining why we couldn't keep going by. And we went, but Huberto dragged us in after telling him we had to go in a greet his wife at least. She's blind. So we're like, "ok." And we went in, and they close the door! And they start talking and giving us food like always. And then one thing led to another, and we're talking about something, and then I just felt that I had to change the conversation to the Book of Mormon! And they all of a sudden became way more interested than normal! And so we taught about what the Book of Mormon was, and committed them to reading it. So the Lord had other plans that day. It was cool!

And then Wednesday we had another interesting experience. We found this old guy named Ricardo last week. And we came back this week. Ricardo also talks A LOT. It's a common thing for old people. It's almost impossible to teach him as well. But we went in there and started teaching the Restoration. And sometimes he'd get a little side tracked and start talking about random things. And I started to get frustrated a little bit! It's such a common thing here, for people to get talking about things completely unrelated to what we're teaching and it's impossible to cut them off. But then I just got this impression that everything was fine! I realized that even though he was talking about everything except what we were teaching, he was understanding everything we taught. And he was really receptive. We left the baptismal invitation with him at the end of the lesson and he said he'd be baptized if he received an answer that it was all true. So it turned out great! 

Just all of it came back to our new Easter Initiative we're doing, #Aleluya. Or #Hallelujah in English. The invitation that we're giving to people this Easter is to "Follow Jesus Christ and find a new life." We've been sharing it with about everyone and their dog recently. We went to Ward Council on Thursday night and the bishop asked me to share the spiritual thought, so I just went ahead and shared it with all of the ward council right there. It was great! We're waiting for the references to start pouring in from the members from that. But anyway, it's something I've seen a lot this week. We're trying harder than ever to find people to teach, and we've had a lot of success. I've kind of found a new life in the mission again. We're no longer wandering around aimlessly looking for people anymore, but rather teaching so many people! It's weird how many old people we've found recently, (we're teaching like 7 different old people!) But we've definitely been blessed here recently. And for that, the subject of this email is "Aleluya" this week. So I invite all of you to share this video on Facebook as well! Or whatever. 

Love you all! Have a great week!

Elder Bingham

We're too lazy to get off the floor after praying sometimes.

Wine fountain!

We went out to lunch at this American food restaurant for Elder Cheney's birthday with them
 and Elder Solomon and his comp.

Delicious gigantic hamburgers :)

So after eating with the zone leaders and Elder Solomon and his comp, Elder Romero and Solomon decided they wanted to try the EXTREME hot sauce they used for their spicy wing challenge. They use like a tiny drop of this stuff for each wing mixed with other hot sauce apparently. And they both decided to try the sauce. Poor guys. They about died. 

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We did good

Dear people:

So it seems that everyone thinks I'm done with my mission now. Guys! I'm still here until August! Calm down. It's great to hear that Joci's home, but I've got a little ways. I'm pretty sure I'm just going to stay here in Argentina forever. Yep. That's what's going to happen. 

Well... It was a great week! I enjoyed it so much! Cause this week I didn't spend just walking around knocking doors for the entire day! I think we've finally reached the point in our area that we actually have many things to do every day and lots of people to try and visit. It's taken a TON of work. And talking to tons of people every day. But we're now seeing results. And that made me really happy! Wahoo! 

I don't know how these numbers seem to the rest of the world, but we had a total of like 10 lessons this week. And 3 new investigators! But we had a couple lessons with less actives, 1 with member, and the rest of them were just other lessons. (that was rather unfortunate, the fact that they weren't able to be with members) But hey, It's definitely a lot better than these last few weeks, where we ended with about 4 or 5 lessons or less. I think the trick is to just be patient, to not get discouraged, and keep working hard. So I thought that was a miracle this week. We're killing it here, in my opinion. 

And our investigator Maria is now reading the Book of Mormon on a regular basis! And that makes us happier than anything else. She had a hard time remembering to read every day, and so she wasn't really getting a clear answer to everything we're teaching. But now we send her scriptures to read every night, and she reads them, and she feels great when she reads, and now we're just hoping that she can use this new excitement to get her husband to read. He's a little trickier. So, we're working on that. 

And that's really about it. But it was a nice change. We were blessed this week. We did good!

Love you guys!

Elder Bingham

Milagritos

Hello everyone! 

We had a decent week this week. Not too shabby. It was a little slow, as always, but this week I tried looking for little miracles every day. And this is what happened!

Tuesday: I kind of thought my district meeting was a miracle this week. It wasn't that great, but it was a miracle for me. So this week the meeting was on making committments with our investigators. I chose to take this to a really weird level and relate this whole principle to a rather odd story in the scriptures: When Moses sent all those plagues at Egypt. What? I like to relate things I teach to stories in the scriptures. And this was the best one I found. Moses had to make a direct question to Pharaoh, promise blessings (or plagues in this case), testify, and verify. It was a rather odd relation, but I thought it was a miracle that I was able to relate the story at all. :D

Wednesday: I pulled off my first successful intercambio as district leader. For some reason we do intercambios differently in our mission now, and now all the missionaries go to the area of the leader and do splits instead of changing areas. So me and Elder Levander made a crap load of plans and split up in different parts of the area. Me and my comp Elder Vejar had an interesting experience... We found a taught a Buddhist! There's probably like 150 in Mendoza. Not very many. He was really nice to us... He's really willing to listen but he says he's not going to pray or anything because it's against what he believes, but we just decided to testify to him about how God is literally our loving Father in Heaven, who loves us, and wants the best for us. It was an interesting experience, but one I treasured all the same. 

Thursday: Had a successful ward council meeting. That doesn't happen very often. I think that's a miracle. Nuff said.

Friday: Zone conference! It was really great! Basically what I got from it was a bunch of new ways we can work with the members, and new ideas to help our investigators read and come to church when they don't. And that's like all we need right now! So that was a huge miracle for us. All our leaders came to that meeting with the exact thing we needed in our area. It was cool :)

Saturday: Had a family home evening with an investigator and a family in our ward. We brought Elder Levander's copy of Meet the Mormons and we had a really nice spiritual experience. Even the extremely rebelious daughter of the member who thinks all the movies that the missionaries bring are super boring stayed and watched it with us and liked it. "Kind of liked it..." She said. But it was great all the same

Sunday: Our investigator Maria that we're working so hard with made it to church this week! And that basically topped it all off. And her husband should be able to come next week she says, because he's not working. So... That's cool. 

So that's really all I had to write about... I guess when you have just kind of average weeks you've just got to look for little miracles every day. And then everything's better :) That's my sermon for this week. Love you all :)

Elder Bingham

So for pday today we climbed up Cerro Arco! And it was incredibly cold and it was raining and really fun! We didn't quite make it all the way and it was so cloudy we couldn't see anything, but it was great all the same.