Jordan's February 1, 2010 letter

Dear Family,

Thanks for all your letters and everything that you wrote me - I always look forward to writing to you every week, so I can tell you about the great experiences I´m having here in Argentina and all the things I´m learning, and also to hear about all the many blessings that Heavenly Father is showering you all with. I am so grateful for Him and His mercy towards me and you all, and I´m very grateful He is blessing you as much as He is. I love you all so much! And I´m so happy to be on a mission!

How are you guys doing? Man, it´s so hot over here!!!! I´ve been roasting!!!! It was like 38 degrees Celsius all last week, and holy cow - literally ten minutes of walking outside in the morning and I was already drenched, literally, on my face, my garments, my shirt, everything. It is HOT!! How is it over there?

The work is great! It´s amazing! Damian was baptized two weeks ago (I´ll send pictures too of this :) and now we´re working with an Hermana Fernandez, who´s like sixty years old and of gold! She came to church and liked it a lot, so that´s way good.

There was some sad news this week - Patricia Luna (a recent convert who is the coolest member in the ward - she´s the one who has absolutely nothing, basically, and who the Bishop is trying to find a better house and more healthy living space for her and her four children to live in) had a baby this last week (the only one who knew she was pregnant was the Bishop), but sadly the little girl passed away just two days after being born. It was a really sad time for her and for me, and I wrote a letter to her with scriptures about this and she said that reading them really helped a lot. Thankfully she is more peaceful right now, and I had the privilege of giving her a blessing of comfort yesterday to help her through these trials. I am thankful for the ability to give blessings, and I pray that her and her family will be alright. Thankfully they´re doing just fine right now :).

And right now, we´re just teaching the Restoration a lot and passing by everyone we´ve talked with to see if there´s a future with them. Most of them no (but that´s okay, because that helps me narrow down who is good and who´s not). Right now we´ve talked with an Hermana Fernandez that is way good, and she came to church this last week, we´ve taught here lesson one and the Book of Mormon, and we´ll be passing by more this week. Also a kid named Patricio seemed really good when we talked with him and his mom the Restoration, and we´ll be visiting with him more this week too. Teaching is going great! Elder Reyes actually lets me teach a lot!

I´m running into another problem - all my long-sleeved shirts are totally yellow in the armpits right now, and I´ll be trashing them soon because they are horrible. My short-sleeved ones are okay for now, but they´re starting to do the same thing. What should I do? Is there a remedy for this? I might be needing another batch of shirts in like a month or two if all of them do this. I told the laundry people to put Clorox on all the shirts from now on to try and slow down the yellowing. My comp uses Speed Stick (bar kind) that´s white (not clear), and he says he loves it and doesn´t have any yellow armpits. And his mom sends it to him from Panama - do you think you could stick a couple of them with my package? And with shirts - I talked with the President and he basically said that the shirts down here are pretty "trucho" (means fake/bad quality), and that it´d probably be good to have them sent to me here. If that means I need to wait a while until you have the money, that´s fine - my short-sleeved are good for now.

Besides that, everything is alright. I´m not too terrified of dogs anymore - sometimes there are "horse dogs" that are super-huge dogs, but luckily they´re almost always behind a fence, and like you said Dad, at least they´re not the dogs that are mixes between Huskies and wolves. That would pretty much be crappy to have those roaming around here.

Thanks for everything! I´m grateful to be in Argentina and serving the people here. It might be an oven, but I´ll take Dad´s advice and drink more water and stuff like that to deal with the heat. And definitely keep putting sunscreen on so I´m not a tomato at the end of each day. I love you all so much and I can´t wait to talk to you more this next week about all these great experiences! Enjoy your week and we´ll talk then!

Love,
Elder Nuttall