By Michael R. Morris

Church Magazines


The day he learned to read is also the day Eduardo gained a testimony of the Book of Mormon and its power.

"My grandfather used to say, 'If we want to become somebody, we have to learn to read,'" says Eduardo Contreras. "My grandfather was right."

For Eduardo, however, the road to reading was a long one. As one of five children reared by his widowed mother in the city of Córdoba, Argentina, he quit school when he was eight years old and went to work to help support his family.

"We were very poor," he recalls. To help make ends meet, Eduardo shined shoes, made bricks, picked potatoes, sold newspapers, and took on other odd jobs until, as a young man, he found full-time employment with the city government.

As the years passed, Eduardo married and started a family of his own. By the time most of his five children began to leave home, he still could not read and had little prospect of ever learning how. That changed one day when he chased off several local boys who were heckling two Latter-day Saint missionaries in front of his home. He invited the missionaries in, and before long he and his wife, María, were taking the discussions.

"I had a hard time understanding anything they said because they spoke little Spanish," Eduardo recalls, "but they showed me a pamphlet that had pictures of the Savior and of the Prophet Joseph Smith in the Sacred Grove. I thought the pictures they showed us and the things they taught us were beautiful."

Soon those missionaries were replaced by others, including a native Spanish speaker. Eduardo and María, who had lost an infant daughter to death a few years earlier, were touched by the Church film Families Are Forever. They, along with their youngest son, Osvaldo, were soon baptized.

With Eduardo's baptism in 1987 came a desire to strengthen his testimony by reading the Book of Mormon. "How do I learn to read?" he asked his wife. María told him to look at the letters, put them together in his mind, try to sound out words, and then attempt to read aloud. With practice, she assured him, he would eventually learn to read.

Eduardo, then 45, knew the sounds of many letters, but he had not attempted to read since leaving school nearly four decades before.