Elder Preston Moe in the Argentina Buenos Aires North Mission: "Attack Of The Coronavirus!"

In Escobar with Elder Gomes

Mar 16, 2020

Hello Family! I am in ... ESCOBAR! I got transferred to Pilar with Elder Gomes as my companion. I am SO EXCITED!! It is so awesome out here in Provencia. Pilar reminds me a little bit of Jose C. Paz, but it is prettier here. It is such a crazy difference from being in the Villa. There is so much more space and more green. The few members I have met so far seem awesome, and our ward mission leader went out with us for the entire afternoon. It is great out here in Escobar, we have a lot of work to do; we need to find people to teach. Please pray that we will be able to find new people that are prepared to receive the gospel here in Pilar! (that is the name of my area)

Elder Gomez is from Brazil. He seems like a great guy and has lots of desires to baptize. He only has 11 months in the mission, he makes me feel SO OLD. Escobar has 13 companionships so we need to be baptizing like crazy! This zone didn’t do too hot the last couple of months and it is one of the zones with the biggest potential. So I feel a lot of responsibility in helping the zone raise up.

I am pretty excited because I want to learn Portuguese with Elder Gomes' help, so we are trying to talk in Portuguese a little, and we put a goal to talk only Portuguese in the pension (apartment) for the last two weeks of the transfer. Já posso falar y entender un poquito, mais quero aprender muito mais. I just tried to talk to Gomes' family and I said something in Portuguese and they didn't understand me… hahahaha but I’ll get there. The good thing is I can actually understand a lot of what they are saying.

Attack of the coronavirus! Wow it’s been pretty crazy here so far.

There is a hermano here that got baptized on Wednesday. After that, on Jueves (Thurs), we received instructions to use personal or emergency money to buy food for a three week food storage kit “Almacén de emergency.” So, we had to go to the church, print out the list of stuff we had to buy and buy it. They are going to send us a reimbursement this Monday. So that was kind of crazy, now every missionary in the mission has their own three week emergency food storage. Then we figured out that all church meetings have been canceled, even sacrament meeting, for the coronavirus... WHAT!? We had various conference calls with President Zúñiga and the other zone leaders. We received permission to take the sacrament into the houses of members of worthy priesthood holders. We don’t know for how long the Sunday meetings will be canceled, so we received permission to baptize and confirm the same day! Hahaha!

So Sunday we took the sacrament in the home of a family that are recent converts, and we had a nonmember friend with us. It was honestly a really cool experience. The family we were with were baptized only like two months ago, and they were kind of nervous to do the sacrament and have the meeting in their house. I honestly felt a really special spirit as I took the sacrament. It is such a huge blessing to be able to partake of the sacrament even though we don’t have a formal meeting in the church building. The atonement of Jesus Christ is so amazing.

Even though it’s sad that there is a deadly virus being spread around the world, it was an amazing experience being able to meet in a small humble home and take the sacrament this week :)