Day 285 - Escaping Argentina

Sunday, March 29th, he started making his way home. It was quite an adventure! I am going to post from his letter that talked about the crazy day that Austin had trying to get out of Argentina:

Escaping Argentina MARCH 29, 2020 The last few weeks have been a little crazy!! I’m just going to give a quick summary of what exactly went down. A little more than two weeks ago, I was out working as a normal missionary. Out in the street everyday talking with people and making visits. 2 weeks ago, the country of Argentina went into quarantine. Nobody could leave their house, only during the hours to go to the store between 1 and 5. If you were outside at a different time, you would be arrested. Me and my companion came back close to 5 one day and saw a few police buses that had handcuffed people packed inside. It was pretty real. After 10 days in quarantine, we received a call saying that we would be leaving the country the next day! We had to make sure that our stuff was packed and ready to go at 5 Sunday morning. I had to call all of the missionaries in my district and make sure that there were members from the church that would be able to give them rides the next morning to the mission office with all of our suitcases. The problem was that during the quarantine, only one person can be in a car at once. If not, the police were allowed to pull you over, arrest you, and take your car. For this reason, it was difficult to find volunteers. Everyone ended up getting a ride, but some drivers had to bribe the cops to let them keep driving with the missionaries. Sunday morning at the mission office we all had to line up our bags in a long line throughout the entire church building. There was a big travel bus outside, but we had to quickly put our suitcases on and hop on 1 by 1 so that we didn’t look too suspicious. There were about 40 missionaries that we had to get onto the bus. We were doing so good, but with about 5 missionaries left to go, some cops showed up with a cop car. And then 6 more cops showed up. And 3 more cop cars. And then two of those big scary police buses showed up. I thought we were screwed haha. The cops ended up talking with our mission President for about 15 minutes and they eventually let us leave. It was an 11 hour bus ride to Buenos Aires to the airport. During this ride, we were stopped 6 more times by police. They didn’t want us getting out of there haha (the Argentine borders had been closed at this point so no one was allowed to get in or out of the country). We arrived at the airport and were supposed to meet up with a few other missions. We found out that one of the missions got detained within the borders of a different province and couldn’t make it out of the country. Another mission had all of their suitcases stolen. Things didn’t go super smoothly. It was about 8 at night and our flight left for SLC the next morning at 7. So we had about 11 hours of downtime. They started to let us into the airport, but then stopped once about half of the missionaries were in. They said that no more missionaries were allowed inside because there wasn’t enough room to keep social distancing. So me and a bunch of other missionaries were stuck outside with the death eating mosquitos for a while haha. After a bit they decided to bring some buses back and take the missionaries that were stuck outside to the temple grounds at the Buenos Aires temple to wait for the flight. So I waited there for a few hours as well which was cool. We eventually got back to the airport (more people lost bags) and I got on my flight. 12 hours to SLC. I had a layover in SLC for about 4 hours and then got on my flight to Seattle! I saw my family!! This was a little bit of a crazy experience, but I feel very blessed that everything turned out okay. It was about 50 hours of travelling with some sleeping on the planes haha. Since I’ve been home, I have been released as a missionary. I will still be ending my mission at the same time that I had before; in May of 2021. I am just not sure when I will be called to head back out and if I will be going to Argentina or be reassigned to a different mission. Although, I do feel at peace. I know that this is a scary time for everyone, but I also know that God has a plan. I am praying for all of you! I hope that all of you are well. This will pass. I absolutely loved the experiences that I had and the things that I learned while I was in Argentina. I hope I get the opportunity to head back there and serve. As long as we have faith, everything will be great 🙂 Un abrazo fuerte, Elder Miller