Atalaya Week 1!

Hola everyone!

Well, I´m in Argentina now! My first area is a city called Atalaya and my area is half of the Atalaya Ward, the other half is covered by the Elders. My companion´s name is Hermana Abbott and she´s just great! She goes home in three weeks though so that´s sad. She´s probably the best companion I could have had for my first companion in the field. She always inspires me to do my best and to improve every day. She also knows the struggles I have with being a tall white girl in the middle of Argentina because she´s also a tall white girl.I´m pretty sure we get asked where we are from at least 10 times a day, if not more. 

Castellano is strange. I can now understand about 70 percent of what people are saying. Sometimes less (like when they have no teeth) sometimes more. I´m very glad they give you a filtered water bottle in the MTC because the water here is no good to drink, it has to be filtered. Almost everyone here is named Maria, Roberto, Angel, or Milagros, I swear! It gets so confusing when we are planning our lessons! Also there are a million people with the last name of Gonzalez. We have at least two Gonzalez families in the ward and across the street from the one family lives another! 

Now for the work,

We have a familia we are teaching and the mom and daughter have a baptismal date for the 30th! We are trying to work with the dad, but he´s a little stubborn and likes to get off track during the lessons. However, the other day when we went over he started really paying attention so that was good. I´m excited for them, they´re a great family! 

Also, the other day, we were in the barrio 20 de Junio and we saw this family sitting out on this grassy spot so we went and talked to them and they let us sit down with them and teach them a lesson. So yeah, we taught The Restoration to about 10-15 people all at the same time. They also said we could come back and teach more so that´s good!

We´ve been working with a lot of less actives and they´re great people, we´re just trying to strengthen their testimonies so that they will feel God´s love for them and return. A lot of them are little old ladies and pretty much the reason they don´t come is well, they´re little old ladies who don´t get around very well. They do appreciate it when we visit them though.

Every week I´m going to teach everyone a word in Castellano (I´m sure at some point it will just be Spanish, but I´ll start with Castellano). This week´s word is Factura. A factura is a donut here. It´s also a bill though ... you just have to go by context. I had my first factura this week though and it was delicious. It was more like a pastry with dulce de leche inside and powdered sugar on top.Hermana Abbott had a sweet potato one though. (I´ll teach you the word for sweet potato later.)

I love you all!!!
El Evangelio es la verdad y Dios les ama!
-Hermana Kaitlin Cheever