Hey!

Ready? Here is the week´s lowdown :)

1. Ingrown toenail. So my companion, Elder Benson, has had an ingrown toenail four times on his mission now. For the past few weeks, his toe had bugged him almost every time we ran in the morning, and eventually he couldn´t even walk without a limp. He really, really didn´t want to go to the doctor especially since it had happened three times earlier in his mission. We both decided it was necessary though. So I had the adventure of going to the hospital here in Rosario with my companion. After a quick synopsis, the doctors noted that the badly damaged toe needed surgery, and they scheduled it for the next day at 11:00 am. That day, I accompanied Élder Benson to the hospital, through the waiting room, and off into the operation room. Everything felt kinda strange, but the doctor was cool and spoke really good Spanish. They gave two huge, numbing shots into Elder Benson´s big toe before starting the procedure, just to make sure he would feel almost nothing. The needles to the shots were like two inches long and penetrated almost all the way to the bone. Benson is a tough dude! With the chemicals in his toe, he couldn´t feel anything afterwards, which allowed the doctors to go on with the surgery. I had never seen an ingrown toe before, and I couldn´t believe my eyes. The two doctors worked together with scissors and a scapula to cut his toe nail and unfold the skin. 45 minutes later, they had opened up both sides of his toe and removed two huge pieces of ingrown toenail. I couldn´t believe the size of the pieces they cut out, which both were about half the size of a penny!!! NO wonder his toe hurt so bad. At times, I felt a little queasy but didn´t faint or anything haha. So then we limped back to the mission home, and we haven´t been able to leave for a couple of days. He should be able to walk with a pretty heavy limp starting tomorrow. It was quite the experience for me.

2. Divisions with the Assistant. I left and worked with one of the assitants, Elder Artunduaga, this past week. He is from Columbia and really cool. I´ve known him my whole mission, and I finally can talk to him like a normal person. At the beginning of my mission, I struggled to communicate with him since Spanish was so hard! I really enjoyed the divisions, and it is always great to work in another area. We taught a couple of lessons, and everything went really well.

3. Milk Incident. So people ALWAYS borrow (without permission) other people´s food here in the mission. So let the games begin. One of the assistants got really upset because someone kept taking his milk, a pretty expensive drink here. We don´t drink milk anywhere near as much as in the states due to the price. So anyways, the assistant kept saying and accusing people, but everyday someone drank his milk as if nothing had happened. Three or four days later, he couldn´t stand it anymore becuase he went to the fridge and someone had drunk a half liter of his milk. . . AGAIN. It wasn´t me, by the way :). So he just left and didn´t talk to anyone for a while. But then, guess what? he took his next milk box and urinated in it!!! Nobody knew about it, and then he put it back into the fridge. HIS OWN MILK BOX. Technically, he didn´t do anything wrong. He just urinated in his own milk liter box that nobody should drink except him. Later that night, the victim was discovered. I shouldn´t have to describe the details, as I´m sure you all can imagine. He poured the milk on his cereal and ate it all, only to hear afterwards of what had happened. I gotta give props to the assistant. It was a good idea and pretty clever. haha. People probably won´t drink his milk now for a long time.

4. Baptisms. We have three baptisms this Saturday. One is a husband and son. The other one is a young lady who listened to us for about five weeks. We have some other quality investigators, so I will probably donate a section to that in my next week´s email since there isn´t tons of time right now.

5. Ward we serve in. As far as my ward goes, we have about 80 people every Sunday, which is a blessing for Argentina. Remember how in my last area in Parana, we only had about 8-20 people each Sunday? Our Bishop was really excited when he found out that we have three baptisms this Saturday. We have a meeting with our ward mission leader this week to plan out the details. I really like serving here in this area. I will give more details on this next week too.


I will write a little more later today if there is time. We still haven´t left for bowling since the financiero has to get some paperwork done before we head out.

Your missionary, son, and brother,

Elder Jones