Jan. 12

Dear Family,

Thank you for all of your prayers, thoughts, and emails. Things sound like they´re going just swimmingly at home.

This week I finally recieved the Christmas Card that you sent! That, may I say, is a great Christmas card. It´s wonderful. I also finally got the Wedding Invitation from Ali Hancey! One other mail related item is, I got confirmation that my Christmas package is here in Argentina! Not that I have it, but It´s here! With the new customs processing, I´ve been told that mine, along with a hundreds of other packages have been delayed in customs. So, hopefully, I will recieve it... eventually.

Life is a balancing act, on or off the mission. I hope all of you are trying to keep it (especially the most important things) all in balance and succeeding. It´s so important.

Attached is a picture of my new District here in 25 de Mayo.

Here in 25 de Mayo, I´ve noticed a few things that differ from Plottier. It´s nicer, they have more paved roads, less smells, and nicer looking houses within city limits, but the people in spots seem to be less accepting of the missionaries.

My companion is good. He´s still learning Spanish, as Portuguese is his native language, and consequently uses a lot of portuguese/spanish words that I don´t really understand. But he´s learning quick. Spanish is very similar to Portuguese in lots of ways.

Many of the habits that I had in Plottier got thrown off when I moved here to 25 de Mayo, and so I´m having to work to reestablish those. On that same note, our daily schedule as a mission changed this week. We now get up at 7:00 and everything is moved 30 minutes forward. It doesn´t get dark until later here, now, and so we also don´t go home until 9:30 and sleep at 11:00. We have lunch and then right after that, during the siesta, where everyone naps, doesn´t answer their door or does so less than excitedly,also the hottest part of the day, we are going to have a few hours to study.

I think these changes are going to be good, and are going to help us work more effectively with the people.

I´m out of time, but I love you all, and wish you best this week

Elder Bradley Turek

(P.S. Sorry for not being more interesting. I´ll see what I can do about that,)