Extra Long Letter

Dear Family,

Thank you all so much for your love, support, letters, and the package!!! I did indeed get one package, the one with the stockings for Elder Miles and me that had a tie and socks in it. The mail system here is a little on the slow side so don't worry about the other two packages. We only pick up mail on Tuesdays anyways so they'll probably be there waiting for me tomorrow. There's actually a pretty funny story about how I got the first package. So Tuesday morning last week Elder Quist took the Jarvises to pick up the mail. They were gone for a little while and we were all busy working in the offices. Pretty soon we got a call from Elder Jensen (one of the four assistants) saying that Elder Quist had gotten in an accident and we had to go pick them up. Well we of course race down there though luckily enough no one was really hurt. Elder Jarvis and Hermana Jarvis were a little mad at Elder Quist so they just wanted to leave and as Hermana Jarvis came up to me she handed me my package. When we got back to the offices she told me that the package was the first one in that day and since the post office had a power outage my package was 50% off (I did actually have to pay but it was like $10). Everyone's alright but we did have to do quite a bit of paperwork and things first to make sure we got the car back from the police and second to make sure no one sued the church. Fortunately our bishop of Trapiche is a lawyer and he just happened to be passing by when he saw the accident scene. He definitely saved us. Needless to say, we'll be traveling a lot in taxi for a little while. Well, it sounds like some people weren't sure about who my companion is and where we're working now. My new companion is Elder Salmon from Alabama. He was my district leader during my second transfer in San Martín when Elder Cabrera was my companion. If you look in the district photos I sent when Elder Cabrera was my companion you'll notice Elder Salmon in there. I'll try and send a photo of us now though pretty soon. He is the materialist which means he works in taking care of all of the missionary apartments, all of the materials inside like beds, fridges, and furniture, and manages the mission's store of materials from the Church like scriptures, church CD's, and scripture protectors. We are now the only Elders left in the offices, the other missionaries being the Jarvises who are senior missionaries. The Browns are coming pretty soon and they'll work in the offices as well but they won't be replacing Elder Salmon and me. I think Hermana Brown will be the mission nurse but I'm not sure what Elder Brown will do. We work in Trapiche which is an area right next to the area where the offices are actually located (Godoy Cruz Centro Ward). Elder Miles works with his new missionary Elder Lauritzen in Godoy Cruz Centro and they don't work in the offices so they can work all day like normal missionaries. Elder Miles was really excited to work full time in the mission field again. Trapiche is not as large as Godoy Cruz Centro's Ward and we use folding chairs in the chapel instead of wooden seating like in our chapel. It's a two story chapel with a big soccer/basketball court in the back with a nice size field. It's also one of the few chapels with an elevator. We don't actually work in the Mission home where President Lindahl lives but we work in an office building that's right next to the Godoy Cruz Centro chapel. It used to be part of the Godoy Cruz Centro chapel but the old chapel burnt down years and years ago but this part of the building wasn't as damaged though they have since remodeled the offices after rebuilding the chapel to a three story brick huge chapel. President lives on the seventh floor of a high rise building as per order of the Area Presidency because they want the mission presidents in Argentina living in safer buildings. All of the guards who work downstairs in President's building know us, the missionaries, and always open the door for us before we get far enough to ring the door bell. They also open the door to the underground garage when we pull up in a car and can't find the remote. It's weird now thinking about President Avila's house and when I showed up at his house, fresh off the plane. I found the picture archived on the Historian's computer (my computer) and saved it to a folder I'll eventually burn onto a CD.

That's really amazing that Mom remembers the Espinosa family so well and that they were such good friends. I'll definitely pass on Mom's e-mail address so they can get in contact. I think the mom of the family still lives in Lujan where there's still sister missionaries there right now. I'm not sure where the sisters live but I'll ask Hermana Rossi when I see her next. Yesterday her husband was called to be the High Priest Group leader of the ward so that was pretty interesting. We almost went to visit her on Tuesday or Wednesday but because of the car accident we didn't get out of the offices very much.

I have one question for Jennifer. While I was working on other things I noticed that the Church came out with some new website called "A Brand New Year" and I was just wondering if she had any activities or dances that had anything to do with that. It looks like the church went all out on the website and everything so I was just curious if it was big in our ward too. It's kind of funny because even though we work in church offices we don't exactly get news very quickly. We didn't hear about Elder Wirthland until someone from Salt Lake called and among other things basically said, "so did you hear about Elder Wirthland?" In other mission news, we've made major progress in making a mission website. It's not posted on the Internet yet but we've basically finished all of the hard stuff. It's mostly going to be for missionaries to send in their weekly letters to President Lindahl but we may expand it if everything works out really well. We had to call in two zone leaders who had HTML experience though in the end we just found a free service that does everything for us. President was pretty excited because it'll save everyone a ton of time which is quite valuable when we already have quite a bit to do. With any luck we'll be able to use it to pick up numbers from Zone Leaders and soon make public websites where we display the weekly newsletter of the mission. I know this will lead to tons of ideas for how we can use the website. Even the church is moving towards an online system called iMOS which will be the Missionary Office System which we use except all much more advanced and all online. It'll have access to records online so we won't have to be constantly updating our records with every change that occurs. It'll also have an electronic system to keep track of missionary transfers and where everyone is. It'll be much more efficient than President's whiteboard which I have to update by hand every six weeks and sometimes more often in the middle of planning transfers. Basically everyone's excited for it to come out and we hope the Browns will be trained on iMOS and not on the old system. They'll probably teach us a thing or two since we haven't had any experience on it yet. Ok, one quick story and then I have to go: this morning I got a call from one of the Zone Leaders who had their Zone Conference today. They couldn't get the projector to work so I was trying everything I could to figure out what the problem was. Finally while explaining everything the Elder said, "should I try one of the other USB ports?" Basically, he was using the wrong plug and I didn't realize it until after trying everything short of reprogramming Windows myself over the phone. He plugged the other cable in and sure enough everything worked. It just reminds me to pay better attention. Well, I hope you all have an amazing week and I love you all!!! Bye!!!

Love,

Elder Williams