Week #49 -Secretary and Week #51-What a Steal




Here is Collin's letter from Week #49:

CHANGES ARE HERE!

Some pretty crazy stuff happens. A few of my friends moved into town, down to Mendoza. Elder Hobbs and some other guys from my group are now Zone leaders in Mendoza so that will be some fun.

I ended up staying in the offices. Even though I was told that I was gonna leave, I am now going to stay, but instead of being historian, I am now Secretary! Well, more like secretorian because nobody else will do my past job. 

Basically as secretary, I am the legal and travel adviser of the mission, along with some other stuff. For example, I planned every single trip made this past week through the Mendoza mission. That meant about 80 (more or less) inter-province trips in Mendoza, San Juan, San Luis and Cordoba. Let's just say I haven't slept much this week. I spent 12 hours at the bus station this Monday making sure everyone got to their places. They did. I spend so much time in the bus terminal during transfer week, so its pretty crazy. I've eaten at the bus terminal's subway like 3 times this week. They have a sub of the day that changes so that's sweet. On top of that, I've also had to make and receive about 150 calls in the past few days.

It's been an insane week. My responsibility in the mission just shot up a lot. It's scary. You have to be super organized as mission secretary. I have improved a lot at that since my high school days, and I hope to keep improving on that front. The key is to CLEAN! The spirit resides in clean and organized places. Just look at the temple.

I´ve got a new comp now. I don't have any pics with him but he's awesome. He's the Filipino that I've talked about a few times. He's awesome. 

I really like my new job as secretary, it's fun. I have a conference with a lady from Buenos Aires tomorrow to learn more about my job.

They sold one of my favorite alfajors in the supermarket for 10 pesos, so that was pretty exciting. I bought three. 

That's pretty much it for this week. I feel like I write that at the end of every letter.
 
Elder Murphy
-Secretario-
Misión Argentina Mendoza
Celular - 261-216-4141
Oficina - 011-54-261-424-4165



 Here is Collin's letter from Week #51 - What a Steal

Hey!

This week was pretty cool I guess.

It all started last Monday. We literally just played ping pong in the offices all day. Kind of lame but I had fun. Sometimes the best P-days are the chill ones. Some people want to go paintballing today. That just doesn't sound relaxing to me. 

After that we had a crazy week. I have a ton of tramites to do. Tramites is this word that really doesn't have a good translation in English. It pretty much means "doing paperwork in public." Literally everything is a tramite. Basically I have to do legal tramites so that the people I message can be legal in the country. It's a pretty stressful process. If I lose a FBI background check, we have to do some crazy stuff to get it back. It's no fun. 

The worst is the migrations office. You walk into a room, looks kind of like the DMV but even uglier, and colder, and with less comfortable chairs. It's jam packed because there are a ton of Bolivians and Peruvians trying to move here to work. We stand in a long line to give our appointment paper to the front desk. The dude at the front desk always bashes the missionaries. It sucks. The new missionaries show them their papers and passports. We then wait for them to print out this sheet that basically says they are legal for 3 months. The worst part is that they misplaced one of our sheets. We waited for like an hour for them to call out one of the sheets. Eventually I got impatient and talked to one of the workers. They told me to wait more. I waited like another 30 minutes then asked again. She looks literally on the desk, and it was SITTING THERE THE WHOLE TIME. I feel bad because I just kind of took the paper and left without saying thank you. It was like 4 hours in that disgusting building, waiting for something that was already ready. Migrations is the worst.

A couple days ago we were walking in our area and found this lady who was selling clothes. My companion asked them if they sold ties. She said "give me a second." The lady walks out with like 20 ties and says, "these were donated, they are all 10 pesos each." 10 pesos is like 40 cents. It was an absolute steal. I bought 4. They are kind of ugly but also my favorite ties at the same time. One has mickey mouse playing soccer, the other looks like the scooby doo van, and the other 2 are just awesome. I felt bad so I gave her 50 pesos instead of 40. Usually 1 cheap tie costs like 100 pesos at least, these were basically free.

I also did another TORMENTA BLANCA. Basically where the whole zone gets together in 1 area and just finds a bunch of investigators for the area. Its a lot of fun. I got to work with Elder Mendonça. He's from Brazil and has the little ç in his name. Its pronounced mendonsa. He's super fun. He's got to be one of the funniest elders ever. We went into this dangerous neighborhood and started knocking doors. We just had a lot of fun. We did a lot of "fun" contacts. For example, I would hide around the corner and throw him a Book of Mormon, he would catch it and talk to them about it. We also knocked on this dudes house that said "the Molino Family" on it, and we asked, "someone sent us to talk to hermano Molino." He was super confused. Also, when we got rejected we told them that we were just trying to find the owner of the 5000 pesos we found on the ground.

It was funny. It wasn't all jokes though. We found a super good investigator for the elders in this house. It was funny because she told us that she didn't drink alcohol or smoke without us even mentioning it. Pretty funny. 

Also, I had someone tell me that Mary is my mom because Jesus is my brother and Mary is his mom. 

That's all for this week. 

Elder Murphy
-Secretario-
Misión Argentina Mendoza
Celular - 123-456-7891
Oficina - 011-54- 123-456-7891


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