Suggestions for Mailing stuff to Argentina

It's another superb Monday with our next email from Elder Merrill. He talks about the passing of time and foreign keyboards:

Hi ya. How is everyone doing? Whenever I think of something to write home about, I put it in my planner, which I have open in front of me right now. I am always excited to hear you guys.  I have found a surprising switch here with time. I have really fast days but really slow weeks. It feels like forever since I wrote you, but the days themselves have been so rapid. I know that seems strange, you'd think with fast days would come fast weeks, but that's not how it is right now. Well, maybe that's just because I'm new at the moment...I have a feeling that the weeks will feel faster as I go along here.  It's funny, as I'm typing, the computer spell-check is on and so every word I type has a red squiggle line under it to show that I've spelled it wrong, because none of these words exist in espanol.

He also gives us some warnings and advice about mailing items to Argentina:

If you ever want to send me a package for something like Christmas, my year mark or I don't know...my birthday or something (cough)...I have some instructions for you. When you send packages here, there's a danger of 2 things happening. The package gets lost or some of the contents get stolen by the people in the post office.  There's nothing to do if it gets lost but if you want to get a package to me around the time of a special date, you may want to send it about a month in advance. Now, to prevent it from being stolen, wrap the package in tape nice and tight, to make it too hard to try and open it. The final thing is to put 2 pictures on the package and make sure they won't fall off. Put a picture of Jesus Christ and a picture of the Virgin Mary. That may seem a little weird but the Spanish people don't want to get on the wrong side of the virgin and stealing from missionaries that might (or might not) be from her church would probably look bad.

He talks a little bit about the local culture:

I have to take a bus to another city every week for a meeting and the buses are all double-deckers. It's so fun riding them! You would think, being in Argentina, that this place would be more hispanic-like but a lot of people (and I agree) have told me that this place is a lot more like Europe instead.  Dogs litter the streets like cacti do back home in Arizona.  Not a day goes by without me seeing more than 30 different dogs. Naturally I like animals but the problem is that a lot of them don't have any homes, so they are wild, and wild they are nice to humans and make me want to pet them, they probably have fleas and mites and ticks, so I'll have to refrain from touching them at all. Not a whole lot of cats here.

Then it's a few words about the weather before he signs off:

September is when spring should start, so things should start warming up a bit.  I'm not thrilled to be going through another summer, but that's all good really.  I made it through South Carolina walking all around there and that place was so  humid, I could feel the water particles on the air as I walked around.  We had a lightening storm here a couple of nights back and boy was it LOUD! It felt like the storm was right above our heads and then moved off...I wonder if we'll be in store for any more? The stars here are awesome by the way. I bet I see a couple of different constellations then you do in Arizona, makes me wish I'd paid more attention to what constellations there are in the night sky.  Don't worry about food here. It's all good. I just wish they had a bit more variety. I eat pretty much the same things for dinner every week, but like I said, it's all good, so I can't complain.

What a great letter this was from our dear son this week. We are glad he is doing well and he sounds like he is adjusting nicely to Bolivar.  Keep up the good work Elder, we are keeping you in our hearts and prayers!

Saying hi from Bolivar

It's August 20, 2012 and our next email from Elder Merrill has arrived! Moms all over of course worry about their kids eating right and that perhaps gets multiplied exponentially when they go off to a foreign country but Elder Merrill puts our mind at ease about that and other areas of responsibilities:

Nothing new this week really, I am just doing work and continuing with the training. I haven´t caught anything bad, in fact, I feel fine really. Thankfully, it hasn´t been too much of a climate change, more from really hot to pleasantly cool. Although I don´t have peanut butter, they do have alot of other really good things here. And I´m keeping a well balanced diet of fruit and bread and meat and all that stuff. I also created a budget with the money that I automatically receive each month too, so I shouldn´t run into any problems during the month or have to borrow money from home to survive. I live in an odd place really, where everything is really nice or really run down. No real ´´middle ground´´ to the living conditions really. I live in a city surrounded by fields, so when I´m working in the city, I forget that I´m in the middle of nowhere, and when I´m in the fields, I forget that there´s a city right next to me.

 He gives a little insight into traffic over there:

P-day is just finishing up now. Nothing much to do around here for fun really... Nothing fun that´s missionary appropriate anyway. We just stayed in our apartment and took a nap. Not that that´s a bad thing really, after all the walking that we do, we´re glad to have a day to sleep a little and rest. It´s been a hectic week for us, we had to go to a missionary conference and then we had to work in some other areas, all of which required taking buses. I don´t know about the rest of the foreign countries, but traffic outside of the U.S. seems to be pretty crazy. Stop signs don´t exist here, and stoplights only appear in the very center of town. Funny enough though, there haven´t been any crashes or anything. I guess that they want to keep the car in a best condition as possible, as it´s costly to replace and they really don´t have much money in the first place.

Elder Merrill finishes up with some comments about his work and the weather:

I just got back from an appointment with an investigator who said he was going to read the Book of Mormon, and asked if we could come back. Naturally we did, and he told us that we were pretty much like every other religion and that he wasn´t interested. Man, things get tough sometimes, but the important thing is to keep on trying and enduring to the end, right? This town is small, so a lot of people have talked with the missionaries before, but we find a bunch of new investigators anyway, so we´re kept pretty busy for the moment.

I hope that the heat hasn´t been too bad over there, I know that it can be rough; walking around in South Carolina was no picnic, but at least you guys get some rain right? It´s pretty much the end of winter here, just beginning to turn into spring for us. It´s not to terribly cold at all, I think that we just missed that part here. It´ll be weird listening to Christmas music during the middle of a hot afternoon in December. I hope that I get to Skype home to you guys then. 

 Yes Elder Merrill, that would be pretty awesome if you could Skype home! Guess we will find out in a few months.