Two Letters are Better Than One

Living large in President's chair

Dear Family,
Thank you all so much for your e-mails and love and support!!! Today is a special day. Today is new car day! The VW Multivan is pretty much already here but the guy from the church who's bringing it from Buenos Aires is just getting it washed for us (which is really nice of him). This week for conferences we have been in the offices a significant amount of time. We had a late newbie who got here on Tuesday and had to be picked up. We had a missionary who got really sick a number of times and was really really bad this week. His companion had to basically drag him home over his shoulder and the sick elder (who's doing much better now) recounted "he poured like a quart of oil on my head for the blessing." This isn't the first time this has happened for him on the mission and the doctors here haven't figured out what's wrong with him so President sent him home to go to doctors in the states. They'll probably take care of it but he might not be coming back to this particular mission. So after picking up the newbie we sent the volunteer missionary home who was the newbie's companion's old companion and then we had less than 24 hours in which we had to go get the volunteer again so he could be the sick elder's companion's companion. Pobrecito. Then we had our own zone conference which was really amazing listening to President Lindahl and the Zone Leaders with the Assistents teach. I barely got the Aguas de Cuyo out in time and I'll be e-mailing those to ya'll so you can see them. We're looking for ways to make them better so if anyone has any ideas, by all means tell me. Oh, and we use Photoshop since Julie was wondering (although I used the Gimp too which we have on the Linux). This week was so busy though that President Lindahl called and told us to scrap the weekly newsletter for this week. President needs some rest too pobrecito. His birthday is November 4th so we (the office staff) are going to try and go all out so he has a good birthday. If you can imagine how hard it is for a missionary to get used to the mission, imagine that same missionary arriving and having to lead the entire mission (there's no such thing as being Junior Companion Mission President). I actually went to his house to help him with the T-1 he had installed for internet (for those unfamiliar with a T-1, all of Troy High School shared a single T-1). Unfortunately it was kind of a rip-off T-1 because it ran slower than our DSL at home. Pero bueno, es lo que hay. Fortunately it wasn't the cost of a real T-1 but it was fairly pricey. Well the car just pulled up so I'll be back in a little bit. I love you all!!!! Bye!!!
Love,
Elder Williams
P.S. I'll be back with pictures.

This is a VW Multivan that I found on Google. My guess is that the mission van is a little less shiny.

Dear Family,
So two really interesting things just happened: first the car got here which is amazingly awesome. We got to drive it around and it's a stick! It's a ginormous bus stick. It's a little longer than our van and just really large. The seats all move on tracks so we have more than enough space for everything. We had a good time driving it to go get ice cream for P-day. Also interesting though not exactly awesome: there was a huge car accident right on the corner of Cabildo Abierto and the calle San Martín. A BMW supposedly got hit so hard that it went airborn and slammed into a bus, a truck, and finally ended up close to the car that it collided with. There was a huge group of people that formed around the accident to see what was going on. It was pretty crazy but it looks like no one died. They took one guy out in an ambulance but I think everyone else just walked away. I guess there's something else I forgot to mention too. We've all been invited to a birthday party of one of Elder Pedersen's converts' son's birthday party. Elder Pedersen's already here and we're just finishing up e-mail before we go. He wants to drive the new car but we'll see if President lets him. President also discussed exchanging his Corolla for our van since he's worried it'll be dangerous with us driving the van. Either way we'll have a nice car (although the van accepts USB flash-drives and SD memory cards to play music). We actually found out he could link his Blackberry to the new van to take calls over the radio. Well that's about it for the up-to-the-minute news but I hope you enjoy the pictures :) . I love you all!!! Bye!!!
Love,
Elder Williams

More pictures, some at zone conference

Ok this is the actual picture from zone conference but the camera focused on the table instead of the people so I had to fix it with Photoshop before sending it. I also cropped out the table. Someone else in the office has a better picture though I think.