Hastening the Work in the Argentina Mendoza Mission : Well, that was unexpected

Well hi guys! Elder Bingham here, alive and in one piece. And sane still, actually.

Well, if you were wondering, after that scary email last week, I'm actually great! Really great! I'm not sure why exactly. I'm just going to share some of my thoughts... They're all a little jumbled up so sorry if it doesn't make any sense.

Before Elder Yugar got here I was trying to get a lot of information about him so I could be better prepared for when he got here. Mostly just specifics about the weird stuff he does that makes him such a struggle for other missionaries. And I heard a lot of stuff. Like "sometimes he might just randomly go to the other side of the street and you have to follow him" or "he spent all of his monthly allowance already on crap like chips and candy" or "he absolutely hates weekly planning session." It kind of set my expectations really low for him. I expected the worst. Sadly. And obviously I got a lot of information from President as well. So yeah.

And then we get to transfer day, I seem him get off his bus, and once he gets over to me with his bags I say "Elder Yugar! Hi! I'm Elder Bingham." Something like that. And I give him a hug, like we do as missionaries, and I get a very half-hearted hug without a response from him. My immediate reaction was "Oh goodness... This is going to be just as bad as I thought." But we continued on, we got back to the area and started working. And I soon came to discover this: He's a very odd duck. He just is. But what I also discovered is that what I had heard about him didn't seem to be true at all! Everything! Even what President told me. President told me that he didn't participate in planning, he froze up in lessons a lot and didn't say anything, but what I saw of him this week made me think "Did President send me the right Elder Yugar?" He participated in planning, helped in the lessons, (although he does stutter a lot and he's not the best at it still, but for now he's fine) And he talked a lot more with people than I thought he would. So to sum it all up, he completely surpassed all my expectations. My expectations of him were very low, so that helped, but I don't recommend that to anyone either.

And President called me this morning to see how I was doing and I was like "President! I'm great! Elder Yugar's great! We're all great!" More or less that. And President was really happy. That made me happy.

So yep. I can live with an odd duck. I'm an odd duck. That's what I've decided. That's about all though. I love you all, and hope you have a great week!

Elder Bingham

I found Elder Villatoro last week. Happy picture

These Elders of my district and I found a picture of a Catholic Jesus who does this with his hands like he's really confused or something. We don't really know why, but we think it's funny. So we took a picture.