Week 6/7

April 15-25th, 2016

It’s my first week in the campo!! I already have a hard time writing in ingles!! It’s so hard I want to write everything backwards. I am currently in Roca for 12 more weeks with my new compañera Hermana Roman!!! She only speaks Spanish and I have been learning soooo quickly. It’s super hard but it will be so worth it because everyone else got gringas to train them in español and I got a Latina who doesn’t speak ingles. Haha all day every day the only thing I can speak is español and ask how to say things in español in español and get taught about how things work in español.... hahahaha its sooo fantastic and I’m not being sarcastic. I know the Lord has blessed me so much. I had to bare my testimony in español on Sunday to the whole ward and I did it with ease!! After they were surprised that I’ve only been a member of the church for a year and said that my Spanish was very good. It’s not perfect and I can’t say everything I want to without asking como se dice? but!! its sooo Awesome to be able to understand what’s going on at the lunch table when all the latinos are talking and I can chime in because I know what’s going on for the most part. I don’t understand everything but I understand more than I thought I could. I LOVE the blessings I’ve been getting. It is cold here (like November back home) it rains a lot too. Here there are grape vines in everyone’s backyard. no joke they are everywhere. They love apples here. apple juice too it’s like the fruit that is on every block in the summer here and apparently they are soo tasty. I’ve had an apple at least once a day if not more and I will tell you there are the best (so good with dolce de leche!!) My fist day my companion made us pancakes for breakfast which was soo sweet of her. she also made me a drink kinda like hot chocolate which was tasty. Here everyone drinks mata but we can’t because what they do is they spend hours just passing around a cup and drinking this herbal water from the same cup. we aren’t aloud to drink it because it takes sooo long and because we most definitely will get sick and here we get sick easily. I haven’t been sick yet but everyone I know has had problems with the food. Oh we can’t drink the water and in our apartment we have about 6 giant jugs of water and we use about one every two weeks and its purified and clean just like the jugs you can buy back home that are blue , yeah we have a ton of those and that’s all we drink. The roads are dirt mostly here and my shoes get filled with sand and rocks every day. We walk EVERYWHERE and the area is pretty large. Each day we take more than 20,000 steps. I’m glad I have my watch that counts that because it’s so cool to see how many we have at the end of the day. Me and my companion have 3 investigators ahora (can’t spell in ingles). One is Fabian who goes to church reads his scriptures and prays!! He has been an investigator for about 4 months or more and all the other missionaries couldn’t get him to pick a baptism date because he doesn’t feel ready. He tells them that they were all young when they were baptized. That’s where I come in. I’m a convert and I was baptized a year and a half ago! He was so surprised and I’m out of time and I have to go soorrryyy!!! I'll finish the awesome story next week!!

Week 5

April 8-14th, 2016

Hola Amigos!

It´s the last week guys! I wont be writting next week because I´ll be catching a plane to Neuquén on Tuesday and I´ll be starting my journey out in the field!! I´m so excited! It is totally going to be a culture shock for me, I just know it. Here they try and make it as easy as possible for us to transition to the field but it will still be a lot different. Everyone will speak Spanish around me and mostly likely absolutely no ingles. Here we get away with speaking English all the time. I´m so excited though! I know the Lord will bless me and I learn pretty quickly. I just can´t wait to get out there and start serving people!!! Till next week


-Hermana Jarvis

Week 4

April 1-April 7, 2016

Hola Everybody!

Conference was so good last weekend!! My favorite talk was by President Dieter F. Uchtdorf when he talked about creating new life from ashes and how no one is too far gone. It was super inspirational! I also loved when the prophet Thomas S. Monson said, "Choose the harder right, not the easier wrong." LOVE IT! It has rained a lot here lately. The thunderstorms shake and rattle the windows and I think it’s so cool. Every day (except Sunday) we do actividad fisica for about two hours with everyone outside. There is always a group playing soccer, volleyball and catch. On Friday the sisters all got together and decided to go play volleyball out in the pouring ran. It was so fun and we were all laughing and sopping wet. A new group of Latinos this week. Now all of us are leaving at the same time. We have one more full week left! It´s crazy how much I´ve learned and yet I still don’t know so much. We´ve learned por vs. para, past subjunctive, present subjunctive, imperfect, future, conditional, present progressive, past progressive, and commands! My weakness is definitely vocab. I try and learn a bunch of new words everyday but it isn´t easy. This week I memorized 3 Nefi 5:13 , ¨He aquí, soy discípulo de Jesucristo, el Hijo de Dios. He sido llamado por él para declarar su palabra entre los de su pueblo, a fin de que alcancen la vida eterna.¨ It´s basically my purpose, in my own words to sum it up.... I have been called by Him to declare His good word to his people so that they can have eternal life. I love it so much. We go proselyting again Saturday! I´m stoked to go speak with the natives again! Last favorite thing, our cook here is so funny he walks around while were all finishing up eating and passes our ice cream or whatever the dessert happens to be and says no joke, ¨Ho Ho Ho, falice navidad¨ We love our dessert here haha. Every time he sees me in for him to serve us food or any other time throughout the day I am eating a snack. So he always jokes with me about how I´m always eating and he´ll be like ¨Cada día¨or¨¨siempre¨with a big smile on his face. haha I love it. I feel like we’re pretty good friends. He showed a group of us his photo album of all the apostles and the prophet that have visited this MTC and eaten his food. He has so many awesome photos with them, his job is so cool! He gets to hang out with us, cook great food and meet Apostles of the Lord!! How much better does it get?? haha well Chao for now!

Love you all!

Hermana Jarvis

Week 3

March 25-31, 2016

Hola Mis Amigos!

This has been another great week! We had a great Easter weekend. Saturday we went out for our actividad de proselitismo! At first it was so hard for us to talk with people or to get them to even look at us and we were totally scared. But we had faith.  After a few times of failing I turn to my companion and said, “Our message is worth hearing. These people son hijos de Dios (are children of God) and they ALL deserve salvation. So let´s just do it, I know we can. The Lord is with us." It was really to inspire myself to get to work but I knew that it would help lift her spirit too. So we pressed forward and found 4 people who wanted to hear our message. They were all individually awesome. We taught the plan of salvation to this wonderful lady whose mother had died in New York in a drunk driving accident. We told her all about how families can be together forever and that Heavenly Father loves her. She thanked us a million times and I was like NO THANK YOU. Our day just kept getting better. We stopped for lunch at this ice cream shop and I had some delicious banana split (it had dulce de leche in it!) it was sooo good. Dulce de leche is everywhere here. It is kinda like a carmel sauce. Then we went out and had another amazing lesson with this man whose son had been taugh by elders (male missionaries) before and so he had a Book of Mormon, but he was Catholic and doesn´t currently go to church. I was all excited about this one because he was telling us how he believes God loves all of us and that he prays for his neighbors. I bore my testimony of God´s love for all his children and how each of us is a child of Heavenly Father. I told him that because Heavenly Father loves all his children He sent His son not only to Jerusalem but also to the Americas to establish his church all over the earth and for everyone to have his gospel. My companion was steller and asked him if he thought that there was more truth than what he knew and was taught and he said yes! He was so awesome and our lesson went very well. We committed him to read Moroni chapter 10 in the Book of Mormon and he wanted to learn more so we said we would come visit him again next time! We are handing all of them off to the missionaries who are assigned here. We are just learning here and then getting sent to our specific area once we’ve kinda learned Spanish. It was such a good week. Easter was great and so spiritual; I´ve never felt closer to Jesus Christ and His resurrection. I just teared up every time we sang about him and every time someone spoke (like 30 times.) I love our Savior, Jesus Christ. I know that He lives! I hope that you all had a great Easter and I´ll write again soon.

Til next time,

Hermana Jarvis

ps. The more I learn Spanish that harder it is for me to spell and speak in English so I apologize if my emails get a little hard to read. 

Week 2

March 18-24, 2016

Hola Everybody!!

Yesterday we got to get on a bus and take a ride into the city! There are 9 million people who live there and it was so crazy. Busses and scooters were going everywhere and we were like 2 inches from them at all times. So not safe! There were also like 6 lanes of traffic on each side. Apparently Obama was here that day in Buenos Aires at the embassy to make the passport and visa system easier. We were all there to get our permanent visas and I never saw him but I think he was in the building across the street that was shut down. There were so many people walking around and the city is so cool here! There are a bunch of thick plain apartment buildings and they look so odd then all around them are tons of regular trees and palm trees! It is the coolest thing. Back home the city is bare and life less. Here it’s full of nature and they have gardens growing on walls! It is actually very beautiful. This week me and my compañera have been learning about preterit vs. imperfect in Spanish. We also took a big test over everything we’ve learned and I aced it!  We had to greet someone in Spanish and ask them all about their lives and tell them about ours. Then we had to ask to share a scripture in Spanish, read it, and explain it. It was fun. We also had to recite all the things we´ve memorized. So far that’s the Joseph Smith first vision, Moroni 10:4-5, the baptismal invitation and our purpose all in Spanish. (I aced that too) then we had to write our testimony about Jesucristo and uhh I was on fire with the Spirit. I enjoyed that test so much. I know why too, it’s because I’m so excited to teach the gospel in the language of this people. Their native language. I´m so excited to feel the spirit touch their hearts. I think there is a reason we don’t call them tests we call them Fiesta de conocimiento. Party of knowledge!!! We get to go out this week and teach real people and go tracting! We each get assigned an area and it’s going to be so awesome! Teach the hearts of the people and you do that with the Spirit and their native language! Wish us luck!! Love you all!!

                                              __________________________

The temple was BEAUTIFUL! It was all in Spanish and we could have headphones but none of us got them. It was soooo amazing on the inside. I think I sent some photos but I’m not sure and now we aren’t aloud to until the field because it slows the computers :( oh well I’ll just have to send you a TON later. This week I got an awesome eye rash and I think it was from my old makeup buuuttt my eyes were all read and blotchy and swollen... I looked hot! Hahaha actually I looked like a dead person but it finally went away today. I took a picture of myself and I’ll have to show you when I get in the field. We are singing the EFY As Sisters in Zion/Army of Helaman Medley and we are singing the end in Spanish. IT SOUNDS SO GOOOD. I´m excited for Easter here. I think we are fasting that day too. We watched Meet the Mormons this week! Every Sunday we get to watch a church movie and its super relaxing. I love Sundays here. 

Week 1

March 9-March 17, 2016

This week has been crazy awesome! When I got to the airport I found out that there would be 23 more missionaries meeting up with me to fly to Buenos Aires. There are 16 Hermanas and 7 Elders (male missionaries) from all over the US with me. The flight was horrible because we got on the plan at midnight and arrived at 9:30 in the morning. I didn’t get a wink of sleep and I tried so hard. It is still summer here and there is very little AC, but we have a fan that moves faster than the speed of light in our room! Lucky us! We have been speaking tons of Spanish and my companion (Hermana Davis) and I have already taught 3 leccions in Spanish to an "investigador" She's really one of our Spanish teachers (my district has 2), but they set it up just like a real lesson and they never break character so you have to teach with the spirit or you look super dumb. We made her cry our second leccion because the spirit was so strong in "her house" and we committed her to baptism. I already have our purpose memorized in Spanish, two scriptures, and I say all my prayers in Spanish (like 20 a day hahaha.) we are expected to speak in Spanish all the time and ask our companion if we can say something in English. It's been a week and by day 3 we were totally speaking all the time.

 Oh and we are the guinea pigs! Sooo the reason why all of us got moved from the Provo MTC to the Buenos Aires CCM is because there are a few things added to the language learning program and Lane, the person in charge of training the teachers in the MTC´s, needed some new meat to teach here and they had to just be learning Spanish. So he called mission travel headquarters and asked for some of the missionaries that were going to the Provo MTC to learn Spanish to be flown straight out to the CCM here. The lady said all of us already had our temp visas and that it would be super easy to get us all here... so they changed all of our plans and flew us here! I couldn’t be happier!! If it continues to be easy for people to get visas then there will be more groups like us after us but for now we are a super special case haha. Everyone else that comes to this CCM (MTC in Spanish) is going to Uruguay, Paraguay, or Chile and most of them are Latinos so most already speak Spanish and they stay here for only 3 weeks. There are 53 Latinos here currently and 23 of us. Groups that are learning Spanish stay for 6 weeks. The Latinas are so fun and there are two in our room! Only one speaks English and they help us with pronunciations and which words we should use for our region of South America. btw (we are all Americans so I have to say I’m from the United States, not just America. We speak Castellano here and at first it was hard but now I love it! My hair is crazy curly because of the humidity. Argentineans don't like spicy food or beans but they love beef and chicken. I always have to tell the cooks serving me “poquito poquito” because they give you huge proportions of meat. Way bigger than Americans, but they are heathier and more varied. We are right next to the temple. No joke I walk 10 steps and I’m there. We get to go do sessions today!! We can see the South Star here but not the North Star. They leave fruit and bread out all day to snack on. We have to say “buen provecho” when someone is eating and we are not. It’s super polite. We will go proselyting not this Saturday but next Saturday. Most people either walk or take the bus here. There are a ton of stray dogs here and some are super friendly and others are not. They use utensils for everything even sandwiches and chicken legs. They have a siesta (nap) every day form 1-4 here. I am soooo excited to get out and love the people!! I want to tell you guys so much about this amazing place but I’ll have to wait till next time. Adios!! Buenos Dias!! Its 6:30 am here :)

Last day in the USA!

Today was my last full day in the USA!!!! Thank you to all the people who have made these past few weeks amazing!!!! I'll be set apart tomorrow morning at 9am and I'll catch my flight at 2pm!!!! NOTE: DON'T SEND ME PACKAGES. I WILL NOT GET THEM. Instead, email me while I'm gone because Argentina's customs won't let me receive packages or anything in an envelope.... If you feel so inclined to hand write me you may fold the letter in 3rds, tape one side and write the address right on the outside of the letter. I'll land in Buenos Aires Thursday morning at 9am!! A few weeks later on April 19th I'll be leaving the Buenos Aires MTC and heading to the Neuquén Argentina Mission