Beautiful Day...!

Taylor Family and Friends,
Mom, to give you an answer right away to your first question, I have gotten a few of the letters through the mission address; I don´t know if you´re sending them through the mission address every week, so I don´t know if I have gotten every single one of them. But no worries, even if I don´t get a hard copy of them, it´s ok. I can print them off here in the cyber if there´s something really important that I want. Mary-Anne got a job! YAY! That´s awesome. But don´t stop looking for other opportunities, especially if it´s only a temporary spot, or if you don´t know for how long it will last. But I´m way stoked for you; way to be, kid. :o) Just recently the bishop here in Bella Union was looking for a job because he was without work, and when he finally got a job, his father-in-law stood up in testimony meeting and said that Heavenly Father must have gotten tired of hearing all of us praying for the bishop, so that´s when he finally sent the blessing. Haha. I thought that was an interesting outlook. Maybe blasphemy, but it was funny igual. Mom, you asked if we have eaten anything weird lately-not really. We ate pigeon the other day, as well as a thing that looks like a groundhog with Jimmy Pio and his family, but that´s about it. I watched him skin the groundhog thing a couple of days before, so that was pretty...interesting. Haha. And justamente (I don´t know if there´s a word in English that has that definition, and that´s the one I want to use, so look it up in a dictionary..haha) that day I didn´t have my camera. Incredible. We are fed the same types of food VERY often. When there´s some type of meat, we eat rice with it. And the other days we eat noodles with some type of sauce. We probably eat that 5-6 times a week is my guess. I still haven´t gotten super bored of it, but variety is nice every once in a while. But we usually get our variety meal when we eat with Jimmy and his family-they always cook something weird so we can try it-they know how the system works. Jimmy and his wife are preparing to go to the temple here in the next couple of months, so that´s cool. They were baptized the 3rd of December last year, so it´s coming up. They are just an amazing family-have two kids- Juan Ignacio, 10, and Silvia Selena, 4. But yeah, that´s the food plan. Our apartment is 1/2 a block down the street headed south, on the east side of the street. The vivienda is pretty old, and kind of deteriorating, but it´s still pretty nice. It´s a lot bigger than my house in Artigas, so that´s good, I guess. It doesn´t need to be big, because we as missionaries don´t have a lot of stuff, but still. The sink in the bathroom is broken, but we make do. We´ve only seen a couple of cockroaches, every once in a while, but spiders are pretty frequent visitors. Not to mention our dog. Did I ever tell you guys about Negro? He is our dog. Haha. Mom, you never let me have a dog in the house...who would´ve that my first dog I would have on the mission?! From what everyone tells us, Negro has been around for quite a few years with the Elders. I guess his old owner used to live where we are living, and passed away. So when the Elders moved in, the dog just stuck around, because (of course) the Elders started giving him food! Haha. Not dog food, mind you, rather left-over pizza, rice and noodles. Not the healthiest diet for a dog, but he seems to be doing just fine! Haha. When we leave the house, he usually follows us for about 2 blocks in any direction and then heads back home to do his thing. We we come home every afternoon and every night, there he is waiting for us. What a great feeling. Haha. So we had an interesting experience yesterday. We had a lesson with Francisco, and when we got there, he was talking with another man. We all said our hello´s and Francisco said, "If you guys don´t mind, he´s gonna sit in and listen today." Nope, not a problem at all. Come to find out, Delsito is some kind of professor of philosophy-what luck! Haha. He teaches in an institution called Gnosis. I had never heard of it before getting here to Bella Union, and I still know basically nothing. It´s not a religion, but they conduct studies of the Bible, and help people be good people. Sweet. So anyway, justamente (that word again) we had planned on talking about the last past of the Plan of Salvation-what happens to us after we die. So we started talking about the Resurrection-a great topic for a charla with a philosopher, right? Haha, could have fooled me. No sooner had the word come off my lips than Delsito began to talk...and talk...and talk. It was a really enlightening experience, to be honest. It really helped me understand and simple and perfect God´s plan for us really is. Delsito went off on tangents about reincarnation and dual personalities and all this crazy stuff, with some probing questions from Elder Marroquín and I. It was cool, because Francisco would ask a question, we would give a simple 2 sentence answer, and Delsito would start to go off on some crazy tangent with words that none of us had ever heard (not only the gringo. Haha) Francisco would finally stop him and say that either he did not agree, or he wasn´t answering the question. So at the end of the charla, we set up an appointment to visit Francisco again, and I gave Delsito a folleto about the Plan of Salvation. It is amazing how simple the truth really is.This week we have a really busy, traveling week. Tonight we leave for Salto and tomorrow the whole zone leaves for our sector conference in Paysandú with Elder Claudio M. Zivic, from the Area Presidency. That´ll be cool. We´ll get back to Bella Union wednesday afternoon. Sunday morning we go to Salto with the members here because we have Stake Conference. That´ll be cool. I believe Elder Zivic is going to be there, as well. A long week, with little time here in our area, which is really sad. Hard to help your investigators when you´re not there. But that´s where the power of prayer and faith comes in. Anyways, that´s about it for this week. I love you guys! Can´t wait to hear from each and every one. ¡Cuídense y pórtense bien, por favor! :o)Love, Elder Taylor