Karen's Got Sass 6/13/17

I´ll begin this week by reassuring you all(mom) that the picture of the X-Ray is certainly NOT my arm!! But isn´t that a crazy X-Ray?? The thing is destroyed. That is the arm of a less active man who completely messed up his elbow/arm playing soccer. I think, from the way he described it, his elbow/arm completely broke and collapsed inward toward his body…. (that´s a jimmy fallon EW!). Well that happened like 2 months ago and they did surgery on it and put 6-8 screws in his arm with a metal brace to hold everything in place. Felt bad for the guy but we talked to them and like I said found out they were a less active family. We asked them what happened and they just said that they just slowly stopped going; the husband started playing soccer on sundays and just lost the motivation to get out and go to church. But now that his arm is destroyed, he wont be going to soccer on sundays now!! Wo-ho! But they still didnt come to the district conference this past Sunday :( So we will be paying them a visit this week for sure.

Well, as you may have noticed from the pictures I uploaded, we went to El Potrillo this past Fridayand Saturday for the first time in like 9 weeks!! There is a lot of work out there and we will be trying to make weekly visits there to help teach and get the temple trip organized for them. But I will tell you, it was quite the trip. We left Ibarreta on a bus at 4:30pm on Friday and made our way up to a city called Juarez, where we stayed the night in a hotel called ´´El Parador´´. We arrived there and checked in at 9:30pm and then walked into town and ate at a restaurant called ´´Karen´´(Yes I thought of you gma Karen). But we walked in sat down and ´´karen´´ came and took our orders, or should I say, told us our orders. It was kinda funny, I will write the dialog of the short conversation:

Karen: ´´Todos quieren el lomo, no?´´ (Everyone wants the lomo right?)

E´Freeman: ´´Tiene un menú?´´ (Do you have a menu?)

Karen(waitress): ´´sí pero, vos queres el lomo´´ (yeah but… you want the Lomo) **with some argentine sass** 

E´Freeman: ´´ok, tiene más que el lomo?´´ (ok, do you have more than just the lomo?)

Karen: ´´Escuchame, vos queres el lomo´´ (Listen to me, you want the lomo!) **even more argentine sass**

E´Freeman: ´´…...ok´´

**10 second awkward silence**

E´Keicher: ´´puede ser una coca?´´ (can I have a coke?)

Karen: ´´por supuesto!´´ (Of Course!) **said with a smile**

Forgive me for putting the spanish in there, but those that have served in Argentina will be able to understand the situation better with the ´´Vos´´ conjegations in there by Karen´s mom. But as you can see Karen ordered for us. Haha It was an interesting experience and I will admit, the lomo was very good and came with very good side of fries. Probably the best fries I have had in Argentina. Then we went back to the hotel and spent the night. Saturday morning bright and early we arose at 6am, pack our things, ate hotel breakfast(croissant and warm milk) and left for El Potrillo which is a 3.5 hour drive from juarez. The problem though, was that the guy who took us, only had room for 3 missionaries inside the truck, so Elder White and I opted to sit in 2 plastic chairs in the bed of his truck for the trip…. 

And it was a humid 10°c driving like 40mph . I was freezing my butt off back there and actually had numb toes for a little bit! I never thought I would get cold down here but I did. But when we got there we split off and a member came with us on visits to be our translator because the main language there is Wichí and Nivaclé. We taught 1 family, a guy, and gave the preisthood to a recent convert. That took 2 hours and the other 2 elders did temple recommend interviews for members and then we left to make the 7 hour trip back. We got back to the city of Juarez at 

6:45pmand the next bus for Ibarreta didnt leave until 11:30pm. 

But we soon found out that we had an issue. We ran out of money in Juarez…….

Since our zone is way out in the middle of nowhere and 6 hours from resi and 4 from Formosa, we have a monthly travel fund to use for divisions and trips to multi zone conferences and trips to potrillo. Well this was my first trip to potrillo and I didnt know how much money to take and so for this reason we ran out of the money I brought in Juarez. So I had to go to a bank in Juarez and take out money from my personal card. We then found a place to eat called ´´El Aleph´´ in Juarez which is by far the best restaurant I have ever ate at since the panda express I ate in Atlanta. And it was cheap. I took a picture of what I ordered and will attatch. SO good. So that was the Potrillo experience this week.

On Sunday we had District conference with Pres Franco, the assistants, and the district of Ibarreta. There were a total of 150+/- that came. It was such a good conference and was super relaxing. Kinda bittersweet to see the last talk by Pres Franco, luckly I will see him one more time on the 20^th of June when he comes to Formosa to pretty much say good bye to everyone. Fabiana and Damian Cano came to the conference and we learned that the birth certificate of Celedonio should be getting to the mission office today. So things are starting to get real with them. This Saturday we have a baptism set for Malvina, a 9 year old from the Colony.

We had transfers, again, Sunday night and not much changed since 3 weeks ago. I will stay here with Elder Freeman until at least the 14^th of August. This is the start of the long 9 week transfer. I am doing super well and I am really excited to get things done this transfer. I am glad everyone is doing well and is happy. 

This past week when we were visiting with Malvina, her older sister came out of the house with a SLOTH!!! at least thats what my first impression was. The animal was so small and moved so slow and was so adorable. But after looking at it some more it started looking like an anteater. And I later found out it was indeed an anteater. But still so cool! I had never seen one before and got to hold it and it ended up sleeping on my chest. I will attach that photo as well. To be honest a lot happened this week and I dont know if I am forgetting anything. I am not as fortunate as those state missionaries(cough cough Patrick Foresight) who have iPads to write their weekly emails throughout the week so you´ll have to bare with these sporadic and thrown together emails.

I am learning more everyday both spiritually and temporally. I know that this work is true and indeed difficult. But it does bring true hope and happiness to everyone who truly searches it. I hope you all have a great week and focus on the things that matter. Keep a good perspective and count your many blessings because you are all so incredibly blessed with what you have in every aspect(temporally & spiritually) and remember that the mass majority of people have problems worse than you. We dont have room to complain, but rather to give thanks for what you have in front of your eyes. If you dont believe me, ´´just watch the news´´. I actually cant watch the news but you guys can and I promise you will be humbled. I love you all.

Corbin Keicher

Argentina Resistencia Mission

Pre-Mature Year Mark 6/5/2017

Well here we go,

Kinda reached my first real mile stone in the mission… exactly one year from right now I will be eating McD´s in the Buenos Aires airport awaiting my flight to the promise land(USA)…. Hahaha but I am not trunky… just making observations. We had an interesting, basically normal week. Nothing too exciting happened. Probably the most exciting part of this week was our trip to Resistencia for leadership council. It was the last council meeting with Pres. Franco before he goes…. If anyone is trunky here it has to be the mission president. But we left for Resistencia last tuesday at what was suppose to be 2pm but there was an Indian protest where they blocked the highway preventing any sort of travel. And our 2pm FlechaBus bound for Resi turned out to be a 5pm Flechabus bound for Resi. Pres. Franco invited the 2 branch president missionaries and their companions to the council meeting as well so Elders Moreira and White came with us. Thanks to the Monopoly Deal game I have, we were able to wait out the delay by playing some games of that in the bus terminal. On our way down, the Argentine ´´military´´ boarded the bus at the boarder of Formosa and Chaco and checked our iD´s. Luckly nothing transpired from that and we made it safely to Resi by 11pm. The leadership council was great and was centered on Ch.9 of Preach my Gospel, which talks about how to find new investigators. President combined that with Alma 26 which talks about Ammon and the sons of Mosiah. It was really good. Then we packed everything up for our Zone afterwards and headed back to Ibarreta. So I got the package from Mom that had the long awaited SlapChop inside. That thing is a life saver. I appreciate that thing so much and now my cooking time is literally split in half. What a luxury! But I read the list of what was suppose to be inside the package and customs took out the Popcorn seeds:(… but that is okay because I just found out that the local china market here sells popcorn seeds...(yes there are Chinese people in Argentina).

The work in our area is starting to pick up. A big focus President Franco talked about in Council meeting was how effective it is to work with Less-active families and partial families. So we have been putting a lot of effort into finding all the less-actives in Ibarreta so that we can activate them, hopefully find their unbaptized kids, and get to teaching their friends and family. I recently just got off the phone with the mission office and they are working on getting the updated birth certificate of Celedonio Cano and they said that that should be getting here within 2 weeks. So we are happy to hear this and excited to see this family enter the waters of baptism together.

Last night we were leaving a lesson with a recent convert when I completely threw out my back. As some of you may know, I have a pretty bad lower back that gets tweaked every 6 months or so. Well what happened is I bent down to put my boots on after the lesson and just felt the sharpest pain in my lower back and had to wobble back to our place. I am pretty sure it is the same exact injury that dad had about a year ago when he was working on the wall and hurt his back. It is really incredible that I have an injury like this even though I am 20 years old. But I am fully convinced that the 4 years of weight lifting with Mr. Boley of Legend High School gave me the back I have…. Too many back squats will do that to you. So now I do my studies knelled over my bed like dad was knelled over the ottoman because frankly, that is the only position that will not hurt.

But anyway, that was my week. We will be having District Conference(like stake conference but a district) this Sunday and President Franco will be coming to preside over it and give his final talk over a pulpit as a mission president. I will end my email there and I hope that you all have a great week!  

UPDATE from Argentina 5/29/2017

Well I am writing again from rainy Formosa, Argentina. 

It has quite literally been raining all week and the streets here show it. There is one paved street in Ibarreta.... the main avenue and the rest of the streets are dirt. And it isnt nice compact sand type dirt. It is straight Idaho farm field completely loose dirt that, when wet/combined with water, causes your foot to get completely submerged in the deep thick mud. It has thrown an obstical in our way as far as the missionary work goes because we cannot move very fast in these type of conditions. It also makes it difficult to contact and find new people to teach(which is what we need right now) because nobody wants to accept wet muddy missionaries into their homes. But we are pushing on. We are hoping and praying that it
stops.... but apparently forecast says that it will stay like this all week. Yay!

But luckly we will be spending Wednesday and thursday in Resistencia at leadership council so will be able to escape the mud and rain of Ibarreta. Itll be nice to get out for a day or two and change up the routine. The work here in the area is hitting a road block. Our wonderful family that is set to be baptised is facing opposition right now. The dad needs his Birth Certificate from Salta, but the problem is, is that there is no one in Salta to send the birth certificate to us. So we will be going to the civil regesters office Tuesday to talk to them on what we can do. SO we will be focusing a lot on that and trying to get this problem resovled. I will mention this issue we are facing with Pres. Franco on Thursday because most likely he has faced a similar problem like this in his 3 years here.  But other than the Cano Family, we are teaching a couple other people that are mas o menos progressing and we have a girl in the Colony who has a baptism date for the 27th of June. But mainly what we need is to find new people.

On Thursday was like Nation Indepenence day here in Argentina.. so the branch here had a big BBQ at the church from 12pm-3pm. It was a lot of fun and like 50 people showed up... which is a lot!! It is kinda funny... 50 people show up to BBq in the pouring rain and 16 show up to church in the drizzling rain. Kinda a snapshot of the strength of the church in this part of the world. But the activity was a lot of fun. We had people bring friends and non members there that we hope will make them more open to listen to us. Not sure if photos will upload on these computers anymore..... the Internet has taken a turn for the worst. Friday we walked a lot in the rain and I was completely soaked all day and that made me kinda sick when I woke up on Saterday. So unfortunatly we didnt get to do much Saturday due to me being under the weather.

 We visited with a guy here last night named Gilberto. He is a 62 year old guy who has a bad heart. He is a relative of one of the members here so that's how we got to know him. But he is in a pretty sad situation right now. Last week his pacemaker stopped working. So he went down to Formosa to the hospital there and the docters barely looked at him. He got down there and after waiting all day, they looked at him for 20 mintues and told him he had to "Sacar Turno" or pretty much take out a turn to go back in a couple weeks to get properly looked at, examined and cared for..... then he came back to Ibarreta and is waiting for that day... just hoping that his heart doesnt stop in the mean time.  Really made me think and feel for this guy. Made me think of how blessed all you are that are reading this. One thing I can remember, from at least the campus life at a major university, was how everyone complained and got all worked up on how horrible their lives were and how messed up the health care system is and how unethical it is that the bakery down the street wont bake a cake for a gay wedding. The problems that we face with are all circumstantial. The better we understand the we are living in a fallen world and understand that it is being ran by imperfect people, the better we realize our relience or dependence in a redeemer. That leads me to a couple scriptures I used in my talk I gave this week.

2 Nephi 4:34

O Lord, I have ^atrusted in thee, and I will ^btrust in thee forever. I will not put my ^ctrust in the arm of flesh; for I know that cursed is he that putteth his ^dtrust in the arm of flesh. Yea, cursed is he that putteth his trust in man or maketh flesh his arm.

Romans 3:23

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;

This is something I am just now starting to understand, that our dependence/obedience to the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only thing.... and I mean ONLY thing that will move us safely from this life to the next. This thought leads me to Mosiah 3:17 where we are taught that,

And moreover, I say unto you, that there shall be ^ano other name given nor any other way nor means whereby ^bsalvation can come unto the children of men, only in and through the name of Christ, the ^cLord Omnipotent.

 

There I will leave you with that thought. That is something that became a lot clearer to me this week in studies and I hope you take time to ponder that idea. I hope you all have a great week and have a GREAT Memorial Day !! Love ya all

Corbin Keicher

Sent from my iPhone

Actually sent from Internet Retrasado que es tan lento como un caracol tirando veinte libras