Training in Castelar and more

Most every Sunday we get to attend church in a different ward.  We generally get to go to the three hour block.  The training is about 40 minutes during either the Relief Society/Priesthood hour or Sunday School.We love meeting the people and especially the Bishops.  There are some great Bishops down here! and Bishop's wives....some of them have been the gospel principles teachers and  wow! are they good! Bishop Mussi and his wife from Castelar are two of the best.  They invited us to come to their home after the meetings to have dinner with their family of 3 boys, 10, 8, & 5. We followed them to their home and went in to this little humble place with no living room, only a kitchen and bedrooms and a bathroom.  We had a great meal with milanesa, (kind of like chicken fried steak) and our favorite dessert, alfajores.  We sat around and talked for a couple of hours.  It was so good to just sit and visit and get to know them and some of the concerns he has for his ward as a Bishop of only about 6 weeks.  We got to hear how they met and about her parents serving a  mission in Peru.  We left to come home and our GPS did not work.  The Bishop directed us to get on the freeway, but from there we got lost and I think we hit 2 or 3 major freeways until we finally stopped and asked at a gas station how to get where we needed to go.  It was quite the adventure.  We decided that from now on, we will for sure take a map even though the GPS never takes us the same way google maps show!! at least we might get an idea of where we are...think of being lost in a city of 13 million people and in every little community the streets all have the same name but are never connected!  I'm thinking of Cameron on this one!!!

One of the really excellent parts of our work is getting to meet with General Authorities.  All 3 of the members of the Area Presidency are from the 1st Quorum of 70, President Walter F. Gonzalez, 1st Counselor Jorge Zeballos, and Counselor Francisco Vinas.  We had a devotional with them on Wednesday and then a PPI with Elder Zeballos later that day.  He really complimented us on our Spanish.  We seemed to think that the work we are doing is going well and the next day while he was flying to SLC we emailed back and forth a couple of times. 

Yesterday we went to the celebration of the Day of the Immigrant here in Bs. As.  This is where citizens of Argentina celebrate their nationalities by having little booths with food and other commodities to sell.  They also put on dances from their countries to entertain people while they ate.  It was really fun.  We saw dancers from Mexico, China, Bolivia, and the Mid-East.  We ate chocolate from Chile, tacos from Mexico, a saltena from Bolivia, empanadas from Chile, strudel from Germany, and cakes from Greece.  It was really good.

 Today we went out to do training in Berazategui and El Cruce Wards.  It was a good thing Darin's kids or some other angels were watching out for us.  We almost got smashed, seriously, by a huge truck and then nearly got rammed by two cars on a round-about.  But we were protected by our angels again.  The training went really well, but we have been feeling sad all day for a little family out there.  The first ones at church, in the rain were a little man and his 3 children and a teenage girl.  We greeted them and hurried inside as soon as the Bishop came to open the building.  The little family was obviously from very humble circumstances.  The Bishop later told us that 2 months ago an explosion in their home had resulted in it burning to the ground killing the mother, who was president of the Relief Society at the time, and 2 other children.  WOW!  How can I complain?  This little man was there with these clean, smiling little children, probably 7, 5, and 2 years old.  The teenage girls is a niece who comes to help with the kids.  It makes you appreciate the challenges you have in your own life, when you see someone who still hangs in there under such circumstances.