Received February 20th

My replacement

The Cup!!!

Dear Family,

Thank you so much for your letters, love, support, and for not killing me for taking so long to write this week!!! Unfortunately conferences hit with such a bang this transfer that we weren't able to leave the offices on Monday. Today I'm finally getting a chance to write my family though poor Elder Salmon wasn't as lucky today (he did get to write earlier though). Well to make a long story short: my REPLACEMENT just showed up this week!!! His name is Elder Stevensen and he's kind of from California (he's from a number of places actually). He's been a little sick so President called him into the offices to take my place. It's been interesting training him. I've been trying to remember what Elder Maxfield did to train me in basically 3 good days. At the very least he's been able to see what the offices do to prepare for conferences. We had our zone's conference yesterday in the Guaymallén chapel. Among other things we had a presentation from the Assistants along the theme of March Madness in order to get us ready for March so we can help improve our work. We also had a zone teaching competition in which we had to teach certain gospel principles in under 45 seconds (a little nerve-racking as you can imagine)......
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I kind of won the competition...it was pretty fun though. I had to teach about random things like "The Fall," "teaching to 3 questions in 30 seconds," and another one I can't remember (it went by pretty fast). Then to make things even more crazy, President picked two Elders to go find someone from off of the street to come in and receive a practice lesson. In about 2 minutes they managed to find someone walking down the street and invited them in to listen. They looked pretty surprised sitting in front of all the missionaries but everything went pretty well. We had about three random people come in and President Lindahl taught the last one to show us how it's done. We also all received a sheet of paper with a little pathway through the Book of Mormon in which each stepping stone is a chapter in the Book of Mormon. It's all set out and color-coded to help us read the scriptures in 66 days since it took Joseph Smith 66 days to translate the Book of Mormon. It's always pretty fun seeing old friends in the mission and helping out so conferences go smoothly. At first we didn't have a key to the microphone system in the chapel so President told me to "see what I could do." With his permission of course...I kind of hot-wired the chapel's sound system in order to turn on the microphones (President called me McGyver). Fortunately the guy with the key came so I didn't have to worry about holding the connection with my hands during the whole conference. Needless to say Argentina's security system isn't quite what it could be. Anywho........(yeah, life in the offices is interesting...I'll miss it...though I have probably 2 months to go). We're already gearing up for more traveling in the immediate future. Elder Salmon is going to Valle de Uco today to drop off some more of the things we ordered for the mission. Well I hope this letter hasn't been to overwhelmingly random but there's been a lot going on which is half of the reason why I wasn't able to write until now. I hope you all have an amazing week and I love you all!!! Bye!!!

Love,
Elder Williams