Monday, October 27, 2014

Off to the Hospital again

Hey family, 

So Elder P......'s doing well. It was just a ganglio... I don't know what a ganglio is though. 

ALSO... turns out Elder A...... (P.......'s comp.) has a hernia. So we went to the hospital for another 3 hours to go get him examined. But it's all good now. (Nick was really late writing again today)  

Que pasó esta semana... 

another week of a whole lot of nada. 

Forgot to tell you that I saw a dead guy in the street last week. Just chillin´ there with a blanket over him so he doesn't get cold with all the police sitting there looking at him. 

No, but really it was just... weird. We were walking down the highway and we saw the police up ahead. 

"Ahh maybe someone crashed" 
keep walking... look to the left, "Is that what I think it is?" 
"Yep." 
"Oh okay."
Keep walking 

...what to write about when you have nothing to write about... 

Rode in an elevator for the first time in a year. So that was exciting

Ate 7 donuts in 2 days. They were pretty good. 

Gave a drunk guy a hug. 

Had Carne Asada with rich people

We cleaned out a chicken coop of this guy that sells tacos by the church.   Caught a chicken by chasing it around with my hands. Found lots of Black Widows. 

Whats really going on in our area. Right now were just trying to work more with the members. Here's something I wrote down at the beginning of my mission. 

"Every external problem is repaired by being fixed internally"

With the mission we've set all these goals that are pretty high, and we've been working to accomplish them for about... 6 months now. 

The problem is no one's reached them in those 6 months. So it's been a lot of analyzing, meetings, and talking to see what we can do better. 

Frankly our ward is kind of a mess. You can't help put other people together if your not put together yourself. So we just want to motivate them to be better, be more responsible, and help out with every organization so that everything works well.  So when people join the church, they don't just fall away. 

In other news we have a meeting with President this Thursday with interviews. So we'll see how that goes. 

Tell Maddie I said happy birthday! and that I miss her. 

Love you all, 

Elder Arvanitas




Monday, October 20, 2014

A letter in 3 parts

Nick's letter came early today and it came in 3 parts throughout the day.  Sounds like it was a busy day.  


Hey I'm not sure if I'll get to write that much today. But, I'll write a little and if I have time later  I will write more. 

Long story short Elder P...... has a ball under his chin on his neck, and it could be a tumor. This lady felt it and said she doesn't think it's stored up fat because it's hard. 

So we gotta go to the hospital today with him.

Keep him in your prayers, he's pretty freaked out. 


Hey here's my short email for this week. More later if I can. 

Tuesday, the worst training meeting in all history of training meetings. I was just way out of it, and the whole thing was boring.(I guess he can say this because he's the one leading the meeting) Maybe tomorrow's will be a little better. 

Had divisions that night with Elder A....... We spent all day in his area.... I thought my area was ghetto... his part doesn't even have paved streets and there's wild goats that walk through it. 

But hey, I didn't die, so it's all good. 

Wednesday, is when Elder P....... showed us what he had under his neck. 

Thursday. I don't remember. 

Friday, we ate in the worst house I've ever seen. The lady lived in a cement block and it was just filled with bags of garbage with turkeys and chickens running through it. 

To clean our plates she just flicked the garbage off it with her hands. 

But hey, I got most of it down and what I didn't get down I put in my pocket.  ha ha. 

She was nice though. Just dirty.... 

We had a dinner for bishop that night in the house of the other elders. We ended up making Hawaiian haystacks. 

Only instead of cream of chicken it was mushroom and orange cheese doesn't exist here, so we used Manchego (I don't know what it is in the states)

Sunday, gave talks. I talked about hope. 

Another baptism this week. An 11 year old girl named Susy. 

In other news we had a really good lesson with a grandpa this week and he started crying.(This is Nick's way of saying, he felt the Spirit) So that was cool I guess. 

Okay, I'll try and write later, love you guys. bye}


Nick wrote back this evening and I asked him how Elder P....... was
I'm not sure it was all in Spanish. Basically there's two types of tumors, soft and hard. Soft you can take care of and it just means he's sick and he takes meds. That's what they think it is. 

If it's hard, then the meds won't work and it means it's something more serious but not necessarily cancerous.

Gotta go, love you, bye!

Elder Arvanitas

Remember the pants that Nick was wearing when he reread all his Christmas cards?  Yep, here they are!  He's also started to eat lots of green olives.  Miss this crazy boy!

Being weird

They serve orange juice in a bag in Mexico.  

Angel's baptism

Sunset in Celaya

Elder A....... and his crazy tie. 

Monday, October 13, 2014

Week in bullet points

Hey I got nothing so I'm just gonna copy Sydney,
This week in bullet points 

  • Zone conference, just a large meeting with like 20 elders. Talked about activities we're going to start to plan, to help out the ward.
  • First Family History fair in all of Mexico. And it was here in Celaya, imagine that... Kind of boring but they had Guava water :) 
  • Baptism, Angel, Pictures next week
  • We entered a Taxi, and Elder Acevedo had a Ukelele, so he started playing and we started singing about going to get food and being inside a taxi. At the end he sang "y no nos va a cobrar" meaning "he's not going to make us pay".... it went silent, till the taxi driver was like "I'm going to make you pay double if anything, that song was terrible." haha (video next week) 
  • Found a new family this week
  • Another video with Acevedo rapping while I'm playing piano
That's all I got, the rest of the week was the normal of going to lessons, putting baptism dates with people, talking to random people in the street (the easiest is when we go buy tacos from the stands... or all the other random stuff they sell in the street)

Everything's good though. I don't feel homesick, the time is actually passing by so fast, next week I'll only be missing 9 months till I'm home. Imagine that. See you guys soon!

Elder Arvanitas

Monday, October 6, 2014

The feeling of home

The worst week for numbers ever. We had a total of 8 lessons, we tried I promise. 

But it had a lot to do with the fact that I went for my visa! Turns out I'm not illegal anymore. 

That was Thursday. Woke up at 5:40 a.m., hopped in a cold shower (we're running out of gas), got to the bus station at 6:15, and found Elder G........ there! (He was in Nick's MTC district)I haven´t seen him since the last time that I went for my visa, over a year ago... 

I met up with the rest of the people in my group in the MTC (we started out with 8, we're down to 4.. Elder C.... was the most recent to go home,( tore his ACL, I didn't see him my entire mission) 

But  after our visas I didn't have anyone to go to Celaya with because they were all in the meeting with president for Zone Leaders. So I stayed. 

Not much to talk about there, just a lot of information. 

We got on our bus at like 7:30 at night, when it was pitch black outside, with lightning bolts falling all around. 

Stayed up talking to Elder O.... and Elder G........ (one is from Honduras, the other, Argentina) about their missions, just everything that's happened and what it's like in their countries. 

It was one of those moments where it was like, this would've never happened if I didn't come here. 

There's so many moments like that here.  Everyday something new happens. 

It's going to be weird coming home, no music playing out of cars, selling bread, or not seeing dog poop everywhere you walk from stray dogs. 

In a strange way I'm gonna miss it. 

I don't know.   Going back to Queretaro Jueves, while we were in the taxi leaving the central, this feeling just hit me really strongly. 

It was like going home. 

To see the aquaducts, the colored houses, the hills, everything. 

And then the thought hit me that it really was my home, to see my mission president and his family, they really are my family. 

Everyone that I've met here in Mexico has been so good to me (well besides the occasional guy that comes up and yells at me) 

But after more than a year here, I cant imagine life being different. Everything just feels natural now ,eating tortillas with everything, watery salad, chicken with hairs still in it. 

Except for cold showers,  I still hate that. 

(I asked Nick if he got to watch General Conference)Well kind of, we listened to it, I couldn't focus that much. It was good though.  We listened to it all in Spanish.  

But ya, it was an alright week. 

love you bye
Elder Arvanitas
Nick and the Elders in his Ward