Their names - Perez, Vargas, Chumbita - dot a tattered yellow legal pad and a couple of steno notebooks. Their gentle faces appear in dozens of photographs. Their love fills the hearts of Wayne, Florence and Lyle Voorheis.
Thank goodness for Argentine angels.The Voorheises' experience in Argentina was sweet despite the dire circumstances. Their son and brother, LDS Church missionary Orin A. Voorheis, 20, lay in a coma after taking a bullet to the back of the head during a robbery.
The three family members traveled to Buenos Aires to be with Elder Voorheis shortly after the April 9 shooting near the missionary's apartment. They spent 10 hours a day for nearly three weeks at Hospital Britanco waiting, watching, praying.
Though thousands of miles from their Pleasant Grove home, the Voorheises were never alone. Friends, acquaintances and even strangers to the injured missionary watched and prayed along with them.
"He may be your son, but he's our missionary," they told his parents.
Sometimes as many as 25 people crowded the waiting room outside the intensive-car unit. They made long bus rides to the hospital. They waited hours to hold Voorheis' hand for a moment.
They sent cards and letters. They brought empanadas (pastries stuffed with meat or seafood, eggs, vegetables and fruit) and other Argentine goodies.
"Sometimes we'd get there and people were already there. Their main mission was to cheer us up," father Wayne Voorheis said.
The Voorheises wrote the names and addresses of each visitor on their notepads-turned-journals. Florence Voorheis kept a record of her comatose son's every blink or wiggle as relayed from doctors in daily "informes."
Because bedside visits were limited to two one-hour sessions in the afternoons and evenings, the Voorheises bonded in the waiting room with the families of other critically and terminally ill patients. The families buoyed each other in the struggle against a common enemy, death.
"I see in my heart a good future for your son," a Catholic woman told Florence Voorheis while counting prayers on her rosary.
The Voorheises, too, offered their beliefs about the future to grieving new friends, particularly The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' vision of life after death. They carried on the missionary work their son was abruptly rendered incapable of doing. Wayne and Lyle Voorheis donned ties nearly everyday. Florence Voorheis always wore a dress.
"It really did feel like I was in the mission field," said Lyle Voorheis, a brother who served an LDS Church mission in Mexico. "It was really a great feeling to serve that way."
Orin Voorheis remains an ordained minister for the church on medical leave. Wayne Voorheis said the Buenos Aires South Mission wants him back.
Doctors initially gave Voorheis a 20 percent chance to survive. The word "bleak" appears among the first entries on the yellow legal pad Florence Voorheis used to chronicle her son's ordeal. The Voor-heises didn't plan to go to Argentina unless they thought their presence would make a difference between life and death.
The situation turned around almost the instant they arrived at Voorheis' bedside, leaving doctors perplexed. "We really do feel like it was a benefit for us to go down," Florence Voorheis said.
Not only to comfort their son and brother, but to get to share in his life. Wayne, Florence and Lyle Voorheis walked where the young missionary walked. They talked to people he knew. The family ate his favorite Argentine food - milanesa, a breaded meat similar to chicken-fried steak.
They brought back memories of people the young missionary taught and loved. They know their names, their faces.
Wayne Voorheis figures he and his son will have much to talk about when the third-youngest of his nine children awakens from the coma.
The Voorheises ventured to the suburb 20 miles south of Buenos Aires where the shooting occurred. They imagined the clean-cut, white-shirted missionary crumpling to the ground. They saw his companion, Elder Armondo J. Barry, of Cleveland, Ohio, cradle the fallen elder in his arms.
"But we could not picture in our minds the perpetrators. It was like, `This is not relevant to you, Wayne and Florence and Lyle,' " Wayne Voorheis said. "The Lord is really merciful."
The three believe they were blessed to be able to focus their hearts and minds on their injured family member. They still pray for his attackers.
The family has continued daily, all-day visits to Voorheis at University Hospital since philanthropist Jon M. Huntsman's private jet flew him to Salt Lake City on April 30. He remains comatose and is battling pneumonia.
Jacynthia Voorheis spends morning and afternoons at the hospital. Wayne and Florence Voorheis arrive in the late afternoon and stay past dark.
The couple again often find themselves in a waiting room. Florence Voorheis reads through the yellow legal pad and steno notebooks and sifts packets of pictures. She'll compile them into a large memory book for her son to read. Wayne Voorheis softly plays a hymn on his harmonica.
"Leaving those people in Argentina was hard for us to do even though we wanted to get Orin home," he said.
Perhaps they'll someday have the opportunity to go back, and bring him home again.