Hola!

It has been a good week. We lost a little bit of time due to some health problems of Elder Meniz, but we pushed on and had a solid week. We found a really cool investigator named Virginia who is 18 and her mom died 4 months ago and she is living all alone in this giant house. It was kind of sad, but she is very hopeful and we talked to her about eternal families and she loved it! She said her parents came to her in a dream and said she needed to go back to church, but she didn´t want to go to her old church because they just scream loudly and she doesn´t feel good. So we invited her to ours and she came and loved it and will probably be starting up with seminary as well this week! She is way cool and we are gonna try to talk about serving a mission and stuff after her baptism because she said she would love to serve in the church! Miracles.

Also, this week I realized how crazy the life of a missionary is. I experience and see the entire spectrum of human emotions throughout the day. We go from talking to a half drunk guy on the street, to the less-active woman whose drug addicted son has just destroyed the house, to a man who just welcomed a new baby to the family, to a war veteran who has mental problems from what he has seen, etc. etc. It really is kind of exhausting, but so rewarding to be able to help these people. The woman whose son destroyed her house was way down and crying and we gave her a blessing and it calmed her down so much and the branch president is going to pass by today to help her. It was just way cool to see the power of the priesthood yet again.

We are also focusing a lot on helping to get the branch and the members more involved in the missionary work. The last baptism in our area was like a year ago and it was someone who was (as they say here in Argentina) "not playing with all the players". That phrase is way better in Spanish. But because of this they are all kind of pessimistic about missionary work and don´t really understand how they can share it with their friends, etc. So we are going to be working closely with the leaders and such to help improve this. I know it will be WAY more effective than just clapping 100 houses every week. We are having a lot of difficulties with he branch president who doesn´t want to help us too much, but we are going to start serving him more and talking with him and making a branch mission plan and we are praying lot so I know that it will start to get better. I also think it will help the future missionaries in this area, which will be very good.

Anyways, I am still here in Argentina---healthy, happy, and loving life. Thank you all for all you do and I love you all so much!

Con amor, Elder Hawk

These photos are me in front of giant churches. We do it during the nap time so no one sees.

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