Hola!

Mom, please add to the list of emails you forward to: monnytabonita@hotmail.com (my comp Hna Mora)

Well first of all I made it back to Ushuaia on Saturday! All is well thankfully. My new companion is Hermana Rivera. She is from Santiago, Chile. She was in Vicente López with Hermana Tejada before I got there. I met her once in the north at a conference. We even did a practice together once. She is very nice and we are already having lots of sucess! Yesterday we found 6 new investigators and 5 of them accepted baptismal dates for the end of the month! It was a great day! I am very pumped right now to continue working and have lots of success in this transfer. I think it will be my last transfer here, but we will see!

Rio Gallegos was also a great experience. I love Hermana Lyons and Hermana Salas. They are great. I already miss them and was only with them a week! It´s funny because Hermana Lyons and I both lived in chipman hall freshman year and have a lot of things like that in common. Hermana Salas is new, but she is amazing. She teaches very well. I learned a lot from both of them! We knocked a lot of doors and had some fun and some good experiences. New years we went to bed at 10:30. Supposedly there were lots of fire works but I slept through it all!

Saturday my companion arrived a little bit before me, and Silvia picked her up and took her to eat lunch then they went and picked me up. We took her bags to our apartment and then went to work. She asked a lot of inspired questions and has a lot of good experience. She has about a year in the mission.

The fotos are the baptism,
lamb (yes that´s a awhole lamb at a members house), I have eaten lamb various times. It is very tasty here because it´s lamb from the patagonia and so supposedly it´s the best lamb in the world.
The airport returning to Ushuaia - Hermana Lyons and Salas
Christmas with the sombrero from Mexico Hna Mora gave me
Today with Hermana Rivera!

Kasey - thanks for the email, send the letters to the mission office, I don´t know how much longer I¨ll be here. Thanks! Enjoy those skis for me! Good luck finding an internship!

Monica Mora - Gracias por su email! Espero que disfrute sus siestas! La extraño un montón (a full) también! Voy a escribirle por carta, no se procupe! Siga escribiendome y digame de todo! Le quiero mucho hermanita! También mi mama va a mandarle mis emails cada semana a mi familia.

This week I read some conference talks in the liahona. I recommend the one by Elder Uchtdorf about how we need to slow down in life and not be so busy! I think I will try and apply that to my life more after the mission :)

Love,
Hermana Jones

Ushuaia semana 12 y Rio Gallegos semana .5

Hola!

Well, still here in Rio Gallegos and guess what!? There´s not flights out of here til at least saturday! Woohoo. So I´ll be living here until at least saturday. The secretary is trying to book flights for saturday, but isn´t sure if he´ll even be able to get that. So as far as I know I´m stuck here until then. Not that that´s a bad thing, but I miss Ushuaia!!! It´s hard to keep the investigators progressing when the only method of communication is by phone! haha. Despite not being there Sunday and having to call them all, 3 made it to church and a less active that we´ve been visiting every week that hadn´t gone once since I´ve been in the south went to church!

Christmas and Christmas Eve went well. We spent a lot of the tie getting Hermana Mora ready to fly to Buenos Aires and then home. She went up to my first area Vicente López. She called sunday night to ask me the numbers for the week and she said she met one of my converts Miguel and he is doing awesome! Saturday, Christmas day, Hermana Mora and I were on the same flight and the plane stopped and I got off at Rio Gallegos and she continued on to Buenos Aires. I miss her a lot.

Now, I am with Hermana Lyons and Hermana Salas. Hermana Lyons has about 6 months more than I do in the mission and is training Hermana Salas. Hermana Salas is from Chile and Hermana Lyons is from Colorado Springs. Both of them are great! Turns out Hermana Lyons lived in Chipman hall the same year I did but on a different floor, so we probably have seen eachother a million times before and didn´t know it! She went from being Junior companion and having like 11 months in the mission to training. Crazy. Both of them are great. I wouldn´t be suprised if one of them is transferred to Ushuaia with me, but so far we don´t know who will be my companion. They had 3 baptisms on Sunday which I go to go to. A mom and two of her daughters. Almost everyone is on vacation right now. In church we had less than 10 in attendance in the branch! I think there´s 4 branches here and 4 companionships of missionarys. One companionship is like 3 hours away in calefate.

I already wore all my clothes that I brought, so I will have to do a little wash today I think haha. I now have served in all of the areas of my trainer, Hermana Tejada! She started here in Rio Gallegos, then went to Ushuaia, then Vicente López. I just did it in reverse order.

I like Rio Gallegos. It´s nice and laid back like Ushuaia, but it´s all flat unlike Ushuaia and kind of ugly. There´s not really any trees, mountains or anything. It very windy here and seems to be similar to Ushuaia as far as the temperature, maybe a little warmer.
There´s also penguins here, but I don´t think we will have time to go see them. They showed me pictures of a few weeks ago when they went and saw them!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas! Hopefully next week I´ll be writing from Ushuaia!

Love,
Hermana Jones


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Hola todos!
Feliz Navidad this week! Thanks for all the emails too! I will do my best to respond asap! Still no mail... hopefully this week we receive mail! That´s the one bummer about being in the south, we don´t receive mail very often and it´s very delayed.

So, President Gulbrandsen called me this week and asked me if I would be ok going to Rio Gallegos (in the province Santa Cruz, find it on a map!) for the week until my new companion comes! My flight leaves Ushuaia Christmas day in the afternoon and the flight is just over an hour I believe to Rio Gallegos where I will spend a few days with Hermana Lyons and Hermana Chavez. Hermana Lyons is training Hermana Chavez. They are the closest Hermanas. We had arranged for an Hermana in the ward to be a mini missionary, but because it´s more than a day or two, President said he´d really like to give me the opportunity to experience Rio Gallegos! After being there, I will have gone to all the areas of my trainer! Hermana Mora also was in Rio Gallegos before coming here to Ushuaia. I´ll return here to Ushuaia the Tuesday after Christmas and receive my new companion. I have no clue who she will be, but we will see! So that´s kind of exciting. I am excited to see another part of Argentina and the other zone here in the south.

This week went well. We are working with lots of people that can get baptized, but they need to go to church more or get married or other various things that we will work out. Next transfer we are going to baptize a ton! We put another baptismal date with Rogelio yesterday and he accepted. He didn´t make it to his last date, but now he is working on his testimony so this time around should go better!

My companion goes home to Mexico next week! Saturday about an hour before I go to Rio Gallegos she flies to Buenos Aires, and then from there she goes home beginning of next week when we have transfers. I am kind of sad, because she has been a great companion and I have learned a lot from her. Thanks to her also, I can speak spanish much better than before! It makes me hope that my next companion is latina so that I can continue to learn spanish from natives! Also, a lot of times here in Argentina they speak funny or don´t speak grammatically correctly and so she teaches me to speak correctly and not sound like a hick or someone who doesn´t know how to speak well.

I hope you all have a gift that you are going to give to Christ this year for Christmas! I read the Book of Mormon with an emphasis in Christ, highlighting every reference to His name. Now I am highlighting references to His attributes and the Atonement. I highly recommend it. I have learned a lot focusing differently on the Book of Mormon.
For Christmas for myself I bought a small spanish Bible that is about 2.556 inches by 3.531 inches and has both the old and new testament. It will be very nice for carrying around all day, and luckily I have good eyesight and can read it! Also, I took my shoes to a shoe repair place this morning and am having the buckles/straps replaced for my Christmas present to myself! I am excited for that! I won´t have to worry about my shoes breaking at any moment with all the hiking and walking up and downhill we do here in the great city of USHUAIA!

Well if you can´t tell, I am very happy to be here and I am very happy to be a servant of Christ at this time of year! I hope that we can all remember Christ and His sacrifice for us and how central to the plan of our Heavenly Father He is! Have a great week all and Merry Christmas!

Love,
Hermana Jones

Hola!This week went much better than the last! Today it´s like a blizzard outside! We went to the National Park, which is why I am sending this later than normal. It was awesome, but very very wet haha. I´ll have to send pictures.I am just now today finally feeling completely better from that virus I got. Today is the first day that all of my food left in a normal fashion... If you get what I´m saying ;). My companion goes home in two weeks! She leaves for Buenos Aires Christmas day! Crazy! I´m not sure what´s going to happen because transfers aren´t until the tuesday after, and so my new companion won´t likely be here until the tuesday after, so I don´t know what President will have me do. Maybe they´ll assign me a mini missionary or maybe they´ll have me stay with a sister in the ward. I don´t know. Normally I would just go stay with other hermanas in the zone or whatever, but the closest hermanas are in Rio Gallegos which is not exactly close... you have to fly there! So, I´ll let ya know about that later... haha.As for calling on Christmas, yes you have to call me and I will be at Silvia´s house. Her number is 430847. The area code for Tierra del Fuego is 2901 and for Argentina is 54. I believe it would be 54-2901-430847. That´s a land line. If that doesn´t work for some reason, which I don´t think will happen, you can call 54-2966-15-350329 which is a cell phone. I hope that makes sense... If not let me know and I´ll clarify. I´m not positive about the time, because my companion has to be taken to the airport in the afternoon, but for now, let´s say 7pm here. I´ll confirm next week. I think here is 5 hours ahead? Not sure. Right now It´s almost 5pm. I can´t wait to talk to ya´ll!!!!This week, President changed our daily schedule and now we are shifted half an hour. We don´t go to bed til 11 and we get up at 7. He changed it because it´s light very late and there are more people the find and teach later. (People here sleep in insanely late). This week we found a great family that was a reference from some members. They are going to get baptized as soon as they get married! They have 2 kids that are older than 8 as well! I´m excited for that. We have a lot of investigators that are leaving to Bolivia for the holidays. I think that in January and February we will see lots more baptisms when they return and just the way things are going. My companion is very excited to go home. We have to keep the focus, which is not always easy, but has to be done so we can keep having success here! We are teaching a lady right now that has a date for Christmas day, but she also still has to get married, so we will be working hard with her. I´ll keep ya´ll posted on that. :)I am almost done reading the Book of Mormon. I am in Moroni 8. This time in spanish. I love the Book of Mormon! I love Moroni 7 that talks about the attributes of Christ (faith, hope, charity), that we should all strive to develop in our lives. I am personally working on patience right now. I recommend having an attribute every week that you can focus on developing in your lives!Love,Hermana Jones