Hastening the Work in the Argentina Mendoza Mission : We were homeless

Well hello family! Happy graduation/birthdays/anniversary to whoever it applies. That's exciting stuff.

Well this week was really interesting here. It kind of started with p-day. We played basketball! And I felt completely destroyed afterwards. It's been a long time since I've played basketball. But yeah. It was a blast. It was p-day, so it obviously took most of our day. We got a couple hours in the area.

And this is when our week got crazy. On Tuesday we usually have district meeting. And so we all went to district meeting, and I think I had the world record for the largest district meeting. We had the assistants (who are part of my district), the sister training leaders, the zone leaders, the district leader and his comp (that's me) 2 more elders, and 4 hermanas. 2 were visiting from out of town because they were doing intercambios with the sister training leaders. So we were 14 in total. That's the same size as a couple zones here in our mission. That was fun.

Then afterwards we had intercambios with the zone leaders. We went back down to my old area Perdriel/Lujan, and I went out with Elder Cheney. About 2 hours into the intercambio I get a phone call from a number I didn't know. It turned out to be Elder Romero, who told me that him and my comp just got assaulted with a revolver. No harm was done, but they took Elder Romero's phone and camera, and the guy who robbed my comp took about everything from him that didn't have any worth, including his jacket, name tag, and his scripture bag. They were all okay though, thankfully. We kept working, and then I get another phone call from a different number. It was this random guy who found my comp's agenda and both of their wallets. He saw in my comp's agenda that it had "our number" written in it, so he called it and I answered. He told us who he was, what he found, and we coordinated to meet up with him later that night to get the stuff. We seemed like a trustworthy fellow. And he was. We found him and he gave us all the stuff he found. It was quite the miracle. The robbers didn't end up taking my comp's debit card out of his wallet, thankfully, so that was even better.

The bad part was, one of the things in my comp's scripture bag was the keys to our apartment. That was quite the problem. Especially because Wednesday, when we ended the intercambio, just so happened to be the 25 de Mayo, the day of Argentina's revolution. So naturally nothing was open. We couldn't go anywhere to get our key replacement, and the landlord didn't have a copy of our key. We ended up getting stuck in the office for Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Finally around 7 on Thursday we were able to get into our apartment. So half of the week we weren't in our area basically. It was pretty lousy getting stuck there in the offices.

It made me think a little bit about the talk Elder Stevenson gave in this last conference, when he had a similar experience about losing his keys. On the bright side of all this, I suppose I learned how grateful I am that we have the keys of the priesthood here on the earth. Without them, just like what happened to us, we can't get back home. And not having them sucks. So that's my spiritual thought for the week.

Well, I love you all! Have a good week!

Elder Bingham

Well, part of getting trapped outside of my apartment meant that I didn't have my razor. So I grew a 4 day beard. It's better than that one that I sent a couple weeks ago.

Also if you can't tell I was way bummed/bored to not be in my area.