Week 44!

hey hey hey!!!!!
sounds like you all are doing fantasticup there!  down here it's getting cold!  the problem isn't that it's cold, the problem is the humidity inside the cold!  this week was pretty good!  we found another family who just recently came back from the united states!  it's a mom and her kids, they lived in Tampa and also in New Jersey!  they lived there for 8 years and all of them know englis perfect! haha it's super weird because before i got here i never met anyone who could speak english well, and now that i'm here i'm meeting people who lived in the US, and can speak english like a normal person!!!  WOOOO  hahaha they're super cool people and to make it better, the father of the lady that we found just got baptized in Paraguay like 1 month ago!!!!  i'm super excited to see what happens with this family! also on the carlos part, he came to our ward activity (futbol and volleyball) but he didn't make it to church.....  so we have to push his baptismal date back a week....  GOOD NEWS!!! i learned a new type of crochet for hats!!!!  haha yeah it makes the hat more saggy and it looks fancy!  an investigator taught me how to do it and it looks great! i've already finished 1 hat!  hahaha guess what?  i taught Elder Vega to do crochet!  hahaha he's a crocheting machine.  he's finished one hat also!  in the past week, only working at night before bed i've finished two hats that look siiiiiiiiiiick! hahaha it's been a lot of fun this week and everything!  we've been working hard and we're going to finish this change strong! oh by the way, our changes are going to be this next week! so, i can't email till tuesday when i'll tell you guys what's on the up and up!
love ya,
Elder Atkinson

Week 43!

hey hey hey!!!!

how's life going in the far land of north America?  i'm having a GREAT day because last week was a complete turn around!!!  we found a BUNCH of new investigators AND Carlos (the 22 year old guy that lived in Boston for 8 years) CAME to CHURCH!!!!! not only did he come to church he has a baptismal date for the 9 of July!!!  WOOOOO!!!!  he's really a complete STUD!!!  we're having a lot of fun teaching him, last time we taught him we invited his cousin to come with us because his cousin is a bishop in another ward whose been trying to share the gospel with him.  it was super cool because Carlos told us this story that the last year or two while he was living in Boston he started getting into bad stuff with some bad people.  he started really thinking about it and decided that he was going to read the Bible, almost right as he started reading the bible he kept feeling promptings to move back to Uruguay to make a better life for himself.  he told us that the first people he met when he got back here from the states was the missionaries.  he's a great guy, he came to our ward activity which was soccar and volleyball and he loved it!  he also loves talking in english with me so he doesn't loose it.  haha he couldn't remember a word and he told me, "SEE ELDER????  i am loosing it!  for this reason i keep talking to you in englih!" hahaoh yeah i got your package this last week!!!!!!  thanks a crap ton for the BYU jersey, the church news article and the jimmermania poster thing!!!  i LOVE IT!!!!  and also Elder Vega (the short guy in the fotos) says thanks a ton for the scarf and candy!  you guys are soo sweet of thinking of me!  this week we had a conference with the mission president and Elder Foster who is one of the area authorities here and it was super good!  i got to see Elder Ashby AGAIN and he told me that he keeps dying at lindsey's letters!!!  funny story: so for this conference we had to give a musical number as a zone and i had to do a solo at the beginning of it because we didn't have any good singers in our whole zone.  but that morning i hadn't eaten ANYTHING so i was literally sick and couldn't sing so some one very graciously gave me an alfajor that they had in their bag.  haha BAD IDEA!!!  all an alfajor is is chocolate and dulce de leche which i terrible for your throat for singing.  haha i completely slaughtered the somg in front of our mission president and a general authority!!!!  haha yup the good ol McBride blood coming out!!!  hahaha ;)  hey gotta go but i love you crap tons!!!

love,

Elder Atkinson 

Week 42!

hey there everybody!!!!

how's it going?  it sounds like you're all doing great from all of your emails!!!  this week has been a lot of learning and a lot of different feelings.  first off we've been trying to start a new way to plan for our weekly planning, this week one of the APs and the president came up to Artigas and gave us a training class on how to do this new way of planning that the area presidency gave us.  for this new planning we have to plan for every hour of every day for the whole week during weekly planning, of course through the week we can adjust it as things fall through and as we find new people and drop people who aren't progressing, but we have it to be able to plan more efficiently.  it's a lot of work but i can tell that it will definitely help our mission be more successful.  down part of this week, we didn't find one single new investigator....  this is the first time it has ever happened in my whole mission.  Elder Vega and i had a long talk about what happened this week to not have us find anyone.  we've been working super hard and trying to find people in this area but for some reason this week it just didn't happen.  we also talked about what we could do better to not have this happen ever again, we read through preach my gospel and we've thought of some really good ideas to be more successful.  but this week we had three investigators in the church (but not one of them was carlos...) we had the little girl who's named Debora and the couple who's not married named Miguel and Tina.  later that night we passed by the house of Miguel and Tina with a couple from our ward who are sealed in the temple, it was a great lesson because we got to talk to them about getting married.  miguel learned that if it's a commandment from God he needs to do it!!!  but tina is the one who's still a little bit scared of it.  we're going to try to work harder with her.  we had a great week with carlos.  he was accepting all of our commitments and was really doing great!  but he didn't show up for church...  after church we also passed for him and he told us that he had to work for 10 at night until 5 in the morning in his bakery so he couldn't wake up!!!  but he's told us that he's going to try to ask off for this next week.  so we'll see what happens!!!  hey sorry this might be a little short but the internet is super slow!  here's some pics of me and my comp in montevideo infront of the teatro solis which a a super famous theater and at the house of a mamber for lunch and on the border of brazil with our diastrict.

love ya,

Elder Atkinson

Week 41!

hey there everyone,

i'm emailing you from my wonderful area in Artigas.  yes it's about the same size as Paysandù with the same amount of missionaries.  my area is near the outskirts near the artigas airport.  it's starting to get cold down here, hahaha needless to say i'm using my blue fluffy blanket that i brought with me to the mission.  this week we found a new investigator whose name is Carlos he lived in Boston for 8 years and recently came back to Uruguay.  he wants me to talk to him in english so he doesn't loose it.  so i speak it to him every now and then.  we invited him to play futbol with our ward for friday and he was the first person to show up.  it was alot of fun!  there was only me, my comp, carlos, two youth from our ward, and a non member whose wife is a member.  even though there was only 6 of us playing we had a lot of fun!!!!!  we played for an hour and fifteen minutes without stopping.  but this week has been a little bit tougher but also with some miracles!  this past week we've been pushed really hard about finding people to baptize,  President heaton has been super worried about the whole mission; he told us that he recieved revelation that there are 1,500 people prepared this year to accept the gospel of Jesus Christ in this mission.  but for right now we aren't looking soo great.  part of our fast for me and Elder Vega was to find prepared people to accept the gospel in their lives.  from monday all the way to saturday we only found one GOOD person ,Carlos,  we get to church and he didn't show up....  super devastating because he told us without us asking that he was going to come to church.  a little bit through church the one primary teacher that this ward has comes up to us and introduces us to a young 10 year old girl and tells us how this girl is not a member, her parents aren't members, but her grandma is a very active member and she went with her grandma to church because she loved the example of her and she wants to follow the example of her grandma and she also wants to be baptized.  we fixed a time to go by her and give her a Book of Mormon for this week and we'll see how this plans out.  we told her that she can only get baptized with her parents approval and if her parents were with her in the lessons.  i know that it's only a 10 year old girl, but to me it's a miracle because we were truly depressed because we didn't have anyone in the church... then she shows up!!!!  haha it was a true blessing!  but i gotta go, i love you all!!!

lots of love from uruguay,

Elder Atkinson