A December to remember!!

Hola hola!! ¿Como le va??

Sadly today I don't have as much time to write because we are leaving this afternoon for Salta Capital WOOHOO!!! Tomorrow is our conferencia de Navidad with half of the mission and I am so stoked!!!

But this past week was pretty good!! One of the highlights of my week was getting to do some service!! This month for Navidad all of the zones in our mission were invited to do a service project together to ilumina al mundo! Our zone decided to go caroling to a nursing home in Tartagal. When we got there they were so excited to talk to us because I don't think they get visitors that often. Ahh all the elderly there were the SWEETEST!!! It was fun to get to know them and tell them about myself and missionary life. We also made them all some cute Christmas cards :) It reminded me a little of Autumn Grove (an Alzhiemer`s home in Texas) but was a little different from a normal elderly home in the U.S...They let their patients basically roam free and leave when they want, which I thought was interesting and a little dangerous haha... When we left after singing Christmas carols one of our friends Fernando tried to follow us, but we made sure to send him back inside before he like crossed the street or something. 

As far as teaching goes, this week we met some AWESOME people and had really great lessons!! One thing that I love about the culture here is how welcoming most of the people are! They invite us into their hogares and listen to our message after only just meeting each other. This week we met this sweet old man named Catalino while contacting. When we came back to teach him his wife invited us in to come sit with her and gave us mate (a really popular drink here) and bread. She made us feel at home and was so sweet and welcoming! Then Catalino and their son Dante came out and started chatting with us. We asked Catalino if he had read a little out of the folleto we left with him and he told us he had read the whole thing!! He then started talking about the Santa Cena and how he liked and already believed a lot of the things he read. Ahh hearing this just made my heart so so happy!! I know that none of the people we contact and visit are by accident. God really has a plan for all of His children and if we follow the spirit and His will, He can lead us to people who are ready to hear our message. Finding is the easy part however. The difficult part is actually getting our people to progress and come to church!! My companion and I are still struggling with getting our AWESOME people to actually change and take action haha - so if you have any suggestions for this please let me know!!! I think this week Hna Folau and I will focus and work really hard yet again with our people to get them to come to church. Hopefully with Heavenly Father ́s help eventually they will come!

Haha this week we also had some interesting contacts and funny things happen to us. Lol embarrassing story - in one of our lessons with Yamila, a sweet 21 year old and her 4 year old son named Juaquin we were talking to them about what they normally eat for Christmas (most people celebrate with a huge lunch on Christmas and then sleep the rest of the day) and Juaquin was telling us his favorite food and saying a lot of words I had never heard before. Haha so I just did what I normally do and nod and smile and pretend to understand. Then I remembered how to say pig and so I meant to ask "¿Le gusta chancho?" but... accidentally said "Le gusta chango?" (which sounds like practically the same word to me haha but whatever). Haha I didn't notice I had said anything wrong but then Juanquin looked at me confused then Yamila made a weird face. My companion then realized what I had said and started laughing and apologizing for me... haha I guess chango is a word they use to talk about men here so I had just asked our investigator ́s 4 year old son if he liked MEN.... and not pig lol. Haha thankfully Yamila is super sweet and knows my spanish is pretty mal ahora so she laughed after I explained what I meant to say. Lol agradecido I haven't really said anything too bad during our lecciones todavia to offend anyone or anything but I do have my moments. Lol trying to UNDERSTAND the people is one thing, and then trying to COMMUNICATE and speak Spanish is a whole different type of challenge. Pero con tiempo espero podría aumentar poco como poco :)) 

Other than that we just had some old drunk guys kiss our hands which was nice (when we said we said we couldn't give them kisses on their cheek like we do for all the girls - gracias a las reglas missional) and almost got run over by a couple of 5 year olds on horses. It's still strange to me to see little kids doing things that would normally be dangerous in the U.S. like its no big deal here - riding on horses, riding solo on mopeds, riding in the front seat of cars etc. But this is pretty normal for Mosconi :))

Anyways I hope you all are doing well and lighting the world wherever you are!! I know that this church is true and it is the ONLY church sobre la tierra contiene la plenitud del Evangelio. Estoy agradecido cada día por este oportunidad que tengo ahora para compartirlo con la gente de Argentina!!! Love and miss you all!! Tengan una LINDA semana!!! 

Con amor,
Hermana Tate

 Me and my comp found some Christmas lights and made our own little Christmas tree!!! haha you guys have no idea how hard it was to actually find Christmas decorations here so appreciate our hard work lol 

some pics with my new friends at the elderly home!! One of the men had his shades on inside so i decided to put mine on too lol :))
 
 

Me with our go to meal here - Lomitos!!! basically like Argentina's version of a burger

Ana Paula (the daughter of the President of our Rama) turned 3 when we ate lunch w her family so we got some torta YAY!! she is the cutest!

some pics on the plaza with the only decorations we've seen for Christmas lol


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