Area Council in Salta with 20 General Authorities

Building in the central plaza in Salta at night

I had been working with the Area Presidency in planning an Area Council for August 10-11– my first one.  This is a quarterly meeting where the Area Presidency, who are all from the first quorum of seventy, train the 17 area seventy that cover these 4 countries.  Getting them together with the presidency means we have 20 general authorities.  This one was going to be held in Salta because Pres. Gonzalez wanted to include one of the local bishops that was having considerable success in activating families and getting his youth out on missions.  It is a half or full day of training, two of which are are planned right after general conference so the Presidency can pass along the training they receive at general conference.  This was a little unique because Pres Gonzalez asked those that could stay until Sunday afternoon to each be assigned to visit a different ward.  That meant that most of the wards had a visiting general authority, and the two stakes there were very excited.  Elder Vinas was a hot commodity since he had also been a mission president there and was asked to speak at two wards.

sliding a plate of empenandas into the wood burning brick oven

Friday the 9th I was busy getting all the materials ready for the flight and flying to Salta.  I got there with Terry Spallino the DTA.  Bill Wingo was already there and took us to dinner at a little “traditional Salta” restaurant where the waiters dressed as gauchos and the house specialty was really good oven baked empenadas.  I guess the best way to describe them is little half-moon shaped meat pies.  I would have to say they fill the place of the hamburger in the US.  They precook the meat (beef, chicken or ham and cheese) and mix it with some of these other items such as onions, hardboiled egg, or potatoes, and olives for salty and raisins for sweet all depending on where they are made.  These were some of the best I have had.

some asado on the grill, He was actually a member and knew
of all the GAs coming and wanted to know if we were some of them

Saturday I got up early and had breakfast with Terry about 7am.  I oversaw the arrangement of the conference room and many other items.  The 70 that were there had lunch together in the hotel.  

Early morning picture of Salt from the Hotel window

The meeting went well with Elder Costa in China and Elder Barros at home with a sick wife but both connected on by video conference.   We had more than enough material to have gone a couple hours longer.  It was a great experience and I really enjoyed the bishop.  He said he had quite a few priests and decided to get them all active and on missions.  He called each one in and challenged them to prepare and go on a mission.  He gave them their mission papers to start filing out and set up individually interviews for them each month to see how they were doing.  He then challenged each of their parents to be temple worth and be endowed to be able to go with their sons when they would go to the temple before their missions.  He set up temple classes and planned temple excursions (about 16 hour bus rides).  And it worked.

hotel breakfast

Sunday Aug 11 I got up early, studied, worked on the book I am writing and went down about 7:30 and had a nice breakfast in the restaurant.  It was a nice somewhat leisure morning.  I got checked out and ready to go to Church at 10.  All the seventy were going to different wards.  I went with Elder Wilhelm since he did not have a partner.  He is from Chile where he runs a cattle ranch and a car company.  He was a mission president before.  He was going to this ward because he knew the bishop who had been a missionary of his when he was a mission president.  The Bishop had been called when he was about 26 and he was now about 27.  He had been married a year and a half and had a baby. 

We arrived in time for Sunday School.  I saw a class of young people and just went in and surprised her.  The teacher was doing a wonderful job and it was a lot of fun; besides they treated you like some very special visitor. She asked me to give an experience relating to family history and the temple. I told the class it is like detective work and you will find some good and some bad ancestors but all with interesting stories.  I mentioned Charles Boyle and Boyle’s law and how it was fun to know you are related to people.  I told them how special they all were and genealogy work is to tie them back to the family of God.  If the world would be more interested in knowing how we are all related rather than creating strife and war how much nicer it would be.  I ended with Joan’s story of meeting Chris and Ann on her mission, their baptism, her death from cancer and meeting Chris in Vallejo Calif at a navy sub yard ;  about how Joan got to be proxy for Ann so she could be sealed to Chris in the temple: and that is the purpose of temples and sealing families and that is the blessing of the restoration of all things. 

In sacrament meeting, I was shaking hands with people in the back and Elder Wilhelm invited me up to the stand and asked me to speak for ten to fifteen minutes before he spoke.  I started using Paul’s beginning in 1 Cor 2-6 but put in Salta in place of Corinthians; I then talked about Bishop Orellana and doing sealings in the temple and what it felt like with one of your baptisms from 43 yrs ago.  I talked about how important families are to be sealed and we are the only ones that understand that order of heaven or have the sealing authority, priesthood, and temples to create eternal family relationships.  I mentioned that traveling a lot in my career taught me how lonely eternity would be living it alone.  I ended by challenging them to fill their hearts with love and let their light shine to fill the building and so influence the community. I don't know if they understood half of what I said but I was thankful that I could talk for 15 minutes in Spanish in front of a ward.

Elder Wilhelm and the young and the daughter of our High
council guide in the church parking lot- it was a cold day

We had different members of the stakes high councils getting us to our wards and back to the airport.  After the meeting they had prepared a little lunch for us.  While Elder Wilhelm talked with the bishop I spoke with the brother that took us.  He said his wife just had a baby and that is why she did not come with him but his daughter really wanted to meet us (really the 70 general authority)  I told him to go get her and she could ride with us to the airport.  He went and got his whole family.  He brought his wife, daughter of about 14 one another of 11 and a new son.  We had a wonderful discussion with her.  She had all the worries of a young teenager and she was delightful and wanted a picture with us.  We flew home that evening.

Finding old baptisms - a missionary's dream come true

This blog is about a missionary’s dream story.  

Just before we left on our mission I
found two photos of La Banda and
the Orellanas.  Here my comp and I
met the town mayor and gave him
some gifts

When I was on my mission as a young elder in 1970, my companion and I had the chance to be the first set of missionaries in the town of La Banda.  It is a small to medium sized country town near Santiago del Estero.  Almost all the roads were dirt and it was the door way into the ranches and farms further out.  We got there in the middle of the summer which would be like Gilbert, Arizona without air-conditioning.  We spent the first couple of weeks looking for a place to live as we tracked.  Each night we traveled 20-30 minutes by bus back to Santiago to sleep on the floor of the apartment of the elders there.

One evening we met a young man that seemed to be very interested in the gospel.  He invited us to go to the home of his parents for diner.  As we walked with him, we found part of the reason he wanted to talk to us was because he was so mad at the Catholic Church.  He had just gotten married in the Catholic Church but they charge for marriages and he did not pay as much as the couple before him so they had them step aside and literally rolled up the red carpet in front of them and his guests because he had not paid for it.  He was so embarrassed that he promised never to go back.  We got to the home and his family was some of the nicest people in the world.  The parents treated us like their own sons. 

The Orellanas are on the left with a family that was fellow-
shipping them at a stake center we traveled to.

On our walk home that first night, the older son and his wife and child walked with us since they were going in the same direction.  The wife said to me, “I am already a member, now we just have to baptize my husband.”  We were happy and excited and searched out her membership and sure enough, she was a member.  She had joined with her brother as teenagers in another town. Within weeks of becoming members, the family moved to La Banda and with no Church there they hadn't seen a Mormon for 4 or 5 years.  Remi was a golden person and contact and was soon baptized.  He told me his side of the story just recently.  It turns out that they had lost their first child about 6-8 months earlier. It was a little girl a little over a year old.  They, of course, were devastated.  He went out into the country to a family he knew where he adopted a little girl about the same age.  I knew this part of their story and it was a wonderful thing for them and their marriage.  What I didn't know was that they were still in shock and were searching to find answers to her death and what would become of her.  The gospel held the answer they were praying for and that was why they accepted it so readily and so whole heartily.

We also discovered that he was extremely well known because he was one of the best soccer player of the province’s pro-team.  He was the first member baptized in La Banda.  We got on a radio program and a visit with the city mayor because of him.  Another part of the story I did not know until I got back here was that the branch in Santiago del Estero still had a missionary as the branch president 3 years after I had left.  An Elder Daniel Moreno, who actually now works in the office with me, was sent to Santiago del Estero with the goal to find a local branch president before he left.  He wrote the Mission President that there were two men that could be it but Remi Orellana was the best candidate but he was a professional soccer player and so missed many Sundays playing soccer.  He called Remi in one day and told him he needed to quit soccer.  Remi asked how could he do that when he was making as much money with each game as he did in a year at his regular job as a school teacher in a college level trade school.  He finally said he would but he had to play 3 more months to finish the year because his team had qualified for the national play offs.  He became the first local branch president and later the principle of the school and an accomplished soccer news caster.

When Joan and I arrived I did a search and found that he was now one of the bishops in La Banda and his son was a branch president in another.  In fact, most of his family are now members.  He told me that even though his parents loved the missionaries and treated them like their sons they were very unhappy with them for joining the Church.  (His mother felt she needed to take care of the missionaries because she knew how she would feel if her son was a long way off in a foreign country.)  He told, first his sister, then his mother then his sister’s boyfriend that if they would listen to the missionaries and do everything they asked (like read the Book of Mormon) and did not believe it he would quit the Church.  They each in turn took him up on it and each in turn joined the Church.  The boyfriend even postponed their wedding to go on a mission to the dismay of Remi’s sister.  All ended well and there are now three generations of members from this great family.

Anyway, to explain the pictures, I asked an area seventy over that area to look him up for me.  So, when he went there for a leadership conference he pulled Bishop Orellana aside and gave him the phone number of my office and told him an Elder Boyle wanted him to call him.  It was so exciting to talk to him and hear all the rest of the story.  He told me about Daniel Moreno and and I immediately went down the hall and got filled in on more of the story.  It turned out that in a couple of weeks Remi had a temple trip planned to Buenos Aires with some of the members of his ward (about an 18 hour bus ride).  So Wed Aug 7 Remijio and Marta Orellana came to the office around 4pm.  It was such an emotional meeting and Remi has such a loving spirit about him that two of the secretaries had to come to see what was going on and one was crying she said because she could feel his spirit, love and emotion from the other room.  Daniel Moreno came and we sat in the VIP sala.  Elder Gonzalez even came in for a few minutes.  We had a lovely evening then came to our apartment for a while and talked some more then went to dinner at Trapiches.

Here we are with the Orellanas and the Morenos at the BA temple

It turns out Daniel Moreno had been the area seventy in charge of the re-dedication of the BA temple and was now a sealer there.  So the next day, Aug 8, we went to the temple with Daniel Moreno and met the Orellanas there and did sealings together.  You would have to say it was the end of a missionary’s fairy tale story.

I have had another amazing experience with the Quinteros family, but that is another story!

August Birthdays, family ties and more

The start of the birthday week!

I made my recipe for my now famous chocolate chip, oatmeal cookies for the young adult family home evening again (there is no competition because they do not have anything like them here.)  They brought a Peruvian drink made from roasted, ground and blended peanuts.  The Peruvians use peanuts in a lot of foods.  Sister Isquierdo gave an amazing lesson again.

Birthday dinner at Cabrita's

We found out that our young adult named America had just had her birthday, and mine was Sunday and Juanita’s was Monday.  So Saturday Aug 3 we took Juanita and America out to dinner.  They were a little late arriving and we found out later it was because they had made me a cake (Caki) but to do that they had to take it to someone else's home because they did not have an oven.   We went to Cabritas and they called their young adult friend that works there, Cynthia, for dinner suggestions and so we all ate well. Cynthia is the happiest, prettiest, Argentine return missionary you will ever find. 

Then Juanita Genesis Granados was
in two days on Monday
she likes going by her middle name
"Genesis"

 

They Projected our names up on the
side of a building starting with our
sweet Bolivian YSA, named America

Next was mine which was the next day

 

I got a big box of the best
Alfajores and an Argentine
BBQ or asado apron

On the way home there was a promotion of writing a message on a tablet and they would projecting it on the side of a building.  The girls wanted to put feliz cumplianos Boyle but they were not quite ready.  Later after they left our apartment they went back and it worked and they took pictures with first my name the Juanita then America’s

Sunday 4.  It was my birthday.  It started off normal enough.  It was fast Sunday and many of them fast from noon to noon since it is often their biggest meal and they eat dinner real late (9pm).  Around 5 we began making our dinner.  Just as we had everything about prepared, Joan left and brought back Juanita and America and they brought in a Bolivian chicken and rice meal with a Peruvian rice pudding and a Peruvian "Caki" for my birthday.  We all sat together and had dinner.  That evening we talked and skyped with all the kids and grand-kids.  It was nice to see everyone.

and the Bolivian lunch

The three Birthday folks with the
Peruvian cake

Monday 5. We first had family home evening with the seniors.  Family home evening with the YSAs was at Margaritas home.  Zieda gave a very emotional lesson about her mother and how her father left with another women.  When her mother went to the women to ask her why she was breaking up their family the women stabbed her mother in the back and had to go to the hospital.  She told her feelings and what she said to her father.  How her mother told her to forgive her father. Then she told of going on her mission and her road to forgiveness. Her brother just returned from his mission and he went to visit his father and said he and his wife are starting to go to the LDS church.

It was Juanita’s birthday.  Sister Isquerdo came in talking about how prayers were answered and she had a surprise for Juanita.  Juanita sensing what may be happening wanted nothing to do with it and grabbed a hold of me.  Evidently when she had left Peru a year earlier she had left angry at her mom.  Sister Isquerdo talked to her to reassure her and brought her mother into the room and Juanita held on to me tighter.  Her mother had traveled nearly three days to come see her on her birthday.  Finally she let go of me and gave her mother a hug and they cried and her mother told her how much she loved her.

Sister Isquierdo, Juanita, and her mom

It was a pretty emotional night for just about everyone and in the end there were lots of hugs tears and pictures were taken.  It was something to think- her mother had traveled three days from Peru to be with Juanita on her birthday for one day and then travel back three days to Peru.

A couple of weeks later, Juanita gave the FHE lesson and told what an experience it had been for her and how good it was to make amends with her mom.

Tuesday 6.  We had our every Tuesday half day meeting after the Presidency had been off for a month and only got through the big items.  They also brought in an apple streusel type cake for me and sang happy birthday.  Joan had a luncheon and service project with the sisters and presidents wives of making baby blankets to take to one of the hospitals for the newborns.