Dat Boi in Argentina: The 2nd Week Here

Happy birthday to America and no one else. (@Holly)

Hope everyone had a #lit 4th of July because we sure didn't.

Utah loves their fireworks because almost every night this week we are laying in bed and hear non stop explosions. In a sense it's kinda magical because as I lay in bed I think of two things: The early original patriots literally celebrating their freedom with loud bangs and then it also makes me think of gun shots and explosions and all the people that sleep with war around them. It's two sides of the spectrum but it's interesting to hear. We didn't even realize yesterday was the 4th because the MTC celebrated it on the 2nd. And we "celebrated" it by having a world celebration devotional about Christopher Columbus coming to America so we could eventually have religious freedom. We didn't even sing patriotic hymns. Ekblad was beyond bummed out and so were most people in my district.

Last Tuesday we got to hear a devotional from Mervyn Arnold himself! I told everyone in our district about you, Mom, and how he would always cry. Well guess what? He cried in his talk. He bore a ROCK SOLID testimony that was so powerful. I think the word that comes to my mind most in the MTC is "powerful". Like in every situation I could insert the word "powerful" and it would work. On every level. "His testimony was powerful." "My spike was powerful" "That lesson was powerful" "that verse was powerful".

Remember how last week the food was good? Well now that we are on a normal schedule we're back to the normal cafeteria food and it's v average. We always get lots of food so I'll take it without complaints. If all else fails we have cereal for back up on every meal. It comes in handy sometimes. Except for Fast Sunday which honestly wasn't bad at all. We were so busy I didnt even think of food with all the church we went to. My first 24 hour fast and I could've waited longer. We all had a district fast for El Don de Lenguas y our teacher Hna Barlow because she's having a hard life right now. She doesn't tell us or show us directly but we picked it up over time. I also promised myself that I'd bear my testimony every fast sunday so now I'm 1/24 done. I just talked about counting our blessings and how life gets really good when we do it.

I ran into Amelia Oross the other day and now my district will CONTINUOUSLY say "O-Ross wants a slice of our Ross" and it's super funny every time they say it. Now whenever they see her they point her out to me and say that I had better watch myself because I'm a missionary now. Estoy Muerto.

Our lessons with "investigators" are going pretty well. Ekblad and I throw it down and we work so well together. Our spanish is above average for our expectations so we get through it enough. We got two new ones to teach yesterday. Hely from Guatemala and Trinidad from Mexico. We only had like 20 minutes to teach them (Which is actually nothing at all) and Hely was telling us about the unfairness of her life and her daughter has paralysis and will never get married and her family back in south america has such a hard life compared to people in America. She was all crying and it was so tough because Ekblad and I were struggling hard for answers. I told her to pray for miracles and blessing. She cried more because no one in her life has told her to do that and I could tell she knew and could feel the spirit. I think. Anyways right as it was getting good our time was up and we had to leave. We meet with her again tomorrow so if anyone has answers to the ""why do bad things happen to good people" "why is life unfair" questions, we could use them now.

Learning Spanish here is non stop. This week we finally started to learn how to conjugate verbs and stuff. So actually lessons for once. I already know the basics but I NEED the review. I feel bad for the Elders that had no idea how to teach without conjugating verbs but el don de lenguas es real. Learning spanish keeps me awake I LOVE it. I'll be dead tired in class and then we'll talk about "poder" or "tener" or something and I'll sit up and listen more. It's weird.

We did the tie draft on Friday because we figure it wasn't respectful to wear our ugly ties to church. I lucked out again this week with a sweet zip up tie that's black.

I'm gonna talk about our missionary schedule here. We wake up everyday at 6:30. We go immediately to play volleyball, basketball, and today we even played Horse shoes for a change. Then we come back to shower. Remember how last week I mentioned district showers? Well it essentially happened. We are all in seperate showers but then Ekblad will be like "so how did everyone like volleyball?" and then basically a huge group message opens up and we have convos and we all joke and laugh while showering. honestly it's super funny in itself. then we change, go to breakfast, and then go to class. Each class is about 3 1/2 hours or more so we have like 12 hours of class a day but broken up three times. In the first block we usually have "ciclo" which is 1 hour of personal study, 1 hour of companion study where we plan for our lessons that we teach, and an hour of language study to practice spanish. That whole process is one "ciclo". Then in the afternoon we usually have a spiritual lesson or we practice ways to teach effictively to each other. Then after dinner we usually have a spanish lesson. Of course the spanish lesson is all religiously based. Sometimes the order is switched so we can have ciclo at night and spanish in the morning or some other combination.

In personal study I've decided to read the Book of Mormon. I printed out a schedule I found on LDSSCRIPTURETOOLS.com so that I'd finish by August 1st. I'm already on Jacob 7 so everyone in my district is jealous. It's honestly a good time. Of course it's a whole hour of solid reading but it's my goal and it's a good time.

I've decided to take pictures of missionary life at the MTC to help explain what we do for 16 hours a day.

Ok I forgot to talk about the devotionals. It's easy to sleep in them. I never have because I just have a hard time sleeping in public and in uncomfy chairs but this one devotional on Sunday had me knocked out and apparently the whole district too. I literally fell asleep before they talked and I woke up right as they said Amen. I heard afterwards that it not only wasn't a good talk in itself but that it was delivered horribly. Some say they wished they had slept more and some say I did the right thing. I feel less bad about it.

Life's good, hope yours is too.

Love Elder Ross

Ps Here's some homework to do this week.

-Watch the Mormon Message "Lifting Burdens" https://www.mormonchannel.org/watch/series/mormon-messages/lifting-burdens-4

-Watch the movie "Testaments" we did on Sunday and it's a good time (Rachel i found my dream movie role that's perfect for me! i can be the actor that is the guy that Jesus heals when his friends lower his bed through the roof! watch it, you'll see)

-Watch/Read/Listen to the talk "Flooding the earth with the Book of Mormon" https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1988/10/flooding-the-earth-with-the-book-of-mormon?lang=eng

-Watch/Read/Listen to the talk "Remembering Lot's Wife" by the man himself Jeffery R Holland. It's excellent.

https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/jeffrey-r-holland_remember-lots-wife/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obNlH5VZ_qg

alright I forgot to include like the most important thing this week.

so we were teaching our first investigator Cristian and Ekblad and I and the district were joking earlier that week about gettting asked about Gay people. No joke its the second lesson and Ekblad and I have a plan about teaching the Restoration and this bro literally asks us about the Church and gay people! THE SECOND LESSON!! we know no spanish, no idea how to even teach a lesson, and no idea how to explain it. I almost laughed because our worst fears and jokes had become a reality. He was saying "gays" and Ekblad and I assumed it was just some spanish word we didnt know so he says it again and we were like "gays?" and then he was like "si como Homosexuales" and we couldnt believe it. Our district was all teaching Cristian and he never asked any of them to explain it, just us. Well now everyone had a good laugh about it afterwards.

Well after like the fourth lesson with Cristian, all the rest were good, we are all sitting and studying in class and Cristian walks into our class with a white shirt and tie and a name tag on. He's our teacher!!! His name is Austin Ricks and hes from Meza arizona. Honestly he had us so fooled that he was from mexico. I assumed he mightve been mormon but never that he was our teacher or that he even spoke english. When he came in and talked to us and laughed at our basic teaching level. Ekblad complained about the gay thing and he just gets this huge smile and laughs super hard. i was like "estoy triste" .

Then we have Hno Moore who was teaching us for a couple days and then we went to meet with Trinidad yesterday for the first time. Well we walk into the room to teach Trinidad and of course there's Hno Moore!! but this time he is not interested in the church one single bit. We had to beg him to teach him and it was so hard. and the whole time Ekblad and I are laughing and even Hmo Moore is smiling. well "Trinidad" has an inactive wife and he is super catholic. He said he likes the missionaries but he hates our message. We asked him if hes read the book of mormon and he said yeah and that he prayed about it and he said its not true. of course Ekblad and I are struggling to even bear our testimonies and then Trinidad is like "cool but its not true" and it was sooo hard. He compared the book of mormon to like a bunch of apples and one is bad so the rest is bad and of course we had no idea what he was trying to say. We told him that Jesus was baptized by immersion and this bro literally logs onto his LDS.org account, transfers over to google and looks up "Jesus baptized by john by cup" and clicks images. Ekblad flat out said in english "You love this dont you? You love to make us feel bad" as Hmo Moore has the biggest smile on his face. Well our 20 minutes was up and we walked out of there defeated. And when we get back and tell the rest of the district what happened in there of course they all laugh because for them Trinidad was like praying for them and accepting an invitation to read the BOM. We are CONVINCED that we have the WORST teaching luck in our district. Like Ekblad and I are solid teachers and we know a lot of spanish and a lot about the gospel but the scenarios we are placed in are not easy or similar to the rest of our districts.

like i cant get over it. This bro literally pulls up a picture of Jesus getting baptized by sprinkling. Elder McCausland was joking that he needs to read the scriptures more because hes not sure if that happened to him if he'd still be mormon. hahahah

and then the Cristian bro asks us about gays on like the 3rd day of the MTC and in like the zero spanish we know.

"if you know how i feel why would you say something like that? you put me in such an uncomfortable situation!" - me all day

More good times ahead for Elder Ross

Me and Elders Hernandez, our Zone leaders. We call them Hernadez, HernanDos, and HernanTres. They left yesterday.

Elder Davis holds the box and someone reaches in and we count down "10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1" and then they pull it out. The hype is unreal. its basically Missionary Action.

some pics from the tie draft. elder Clawson got the kid tie this week

a typical meal here. The orange passion fruit guava juice is sent from heaven. This is breakfast but it all looks the same after a while.

And here my companion is doing something weird again. I swear hes not normally like this

We decked out our room with 4th of july decorations and threw a party. kinda. we bascially just sat in there and read scriptures + listened to MoTab. it got a little crazy.

Found Elder Packer and we took a pic for you and Tonya.

Not sure whats happening with my companion and Elder parke

Views from a Missionary (Peep the 11:11)

our friday night Call of Duty sesh. It was insane! 360 no scopes, head shot from across the map.

(JK it was some program called TALL to help us learn spanish. Just too good of a photo opportunity to miss out)

This is Elder Tualapapa from Laie Hawaii. He said he doesnt know Stephen and he didnt go to Kahuku. he went to some school with a P. He is chiseled out of his mind. Like he is ripped. He is going to play football for Virginia. Hes a running back but hes also super cool and he sings like an angel. hes always writing new songs and today in the shower he sang "Feeling good" which is like my fave so it was way nice. Hes going to Nicaragua

This is our room study place ft Elder Kochevar. My seat is in the corner which is way prime because I get the shelf by the window. We all read and study here and I write in my journal here. Its a good time.

Heres a candid of us teaching Elder Kimberling and Elder Jones about the Restoration.. but in spanish. We like practicing with them because they know the most Spanish than anyone else so its more real than just Ekblad and I practicing with each other.

This pic SUMS up the MTC. (I actually dont know what Kochevar was doing.)

"WHAT ARE THOSE?" ok these are my own feet and i took the picture in a mirror but this view is a common sight here. every mormon owns these and I love seeing them.