English practice

This week I´ve started to practice my English again whenever I had the chance. The hardest are phone calls. and greeting/saying goodbye to people. But I’m going to keep practicing so we can do skype without problems.

This week I went on splits with our district leader and we decided to knock doors and offer to play/sing a hymn with guitar. We thought that the surprise factor of 2 gringos knocking your door and offering to play you a song would help us out but almost everybody still made the same excuses. We only ended up singing twice but at the end of singing we asked if they had any questions before we left. One of the people who let us in asked us "yeah, i have a question. how can I know which church is gods church." We taught her twice since then and she is awesome. One of the few people I have met that are really searching for truth.

Grandma asked me if I had ever had a moment when the spirit took over what I said. The other day we were walking to an appointment and we saw a women feeding her 9 cats. We stopped to talk to her and she told us a long story of how she always wanted a house. She said that she had bought houses before but they were never good enough but she finally has the house she wants. There was an awkward pause but then the words came out of my mouth "maybe its not a house you are looking for but a feeling of stability." She then started to cry and talk about her alcoholic husband that abuses her in many ways and how she cant get away from him. It was interesting. Still, she isn´t going to let us help her unfortunately. But we left her with a pamphlet and hopefully that plants a seed.

I´m running out of ideas for good breakfasts. I´m open for suggestions. 

Yesterday we were stopped in the street by a guy who asked if he could visit people with us. Turns out he is a member from Curanilahue so we let him. His name is Miguel Silva and he is basically Forrest gump. He has been deported from the states 4 times, he got married in peru, he has 4 kids that live in new york and LA, he has played soccer professionally, he sold cars on the black market in new york, he once dug under the mexico border and lived in san diego and now he sells leathers. We are going to do a family home evening with him soon while he is here. 

Get your computers charged up because skype is just around the corner.

Till next week

Elder Thompson

la Busqueda

This week we decided to stop focusing so much on working with the people we have and start finding more people. We spent basically all day every day this week looking for people. We also worked a lot in the Chilean equivalent of the ghetto so we met a lot of interesting people. 

A group of kids from the orphanage came to church again. This time we didn´t even invite them and they came on their own. We decided to go to the orphanage and teach a couple of them. When we got there the Tía called all 20 of the kids to the living room and they all sat down in front of us. We didn´t have anything planned so we awkwardly explained the Restoration while the kids were screaming, fighting, and eating. There was also a time in the middle of the lesson when the power went out and we had to use the cellphone to find the emergency light. It was a crazy experience but in the end a couple of the kids asked us for Book of Mormons and one of them said the prayer.

That's about it for the week. For pday we are going to the beach to do beach things. 

Elder Thompson

I'm still alive

It has been a full couple of weeks. 

Last week we were doing a family home evening when all of a sudden the dad that never talks came running out of his room and says there were earthquakes in the north. We turn on the TV and sure enough there were some pretty big earthquakes. We didn´t feel anything but it did quite a bit of damage up there. We left their house and were walking to the house when someone stopped us in the street to tell us they are evacuating Lebu for the tsunami. We quickened our pace, grabbed our emergency bags that we luckily had prepared and a member came to drive us up to the hills. We waited their for a while until the "tsunami" passed. Which was a wave just a little bit larger than the others. It made for an interesting experience anyways.

This week was also transfers. My comp left and my new comp is elder saavedra. He’s from the jungles of Peru. He has a lot of cool stories of Paranas, anacondas, pet monkeys, and climbing trees. When we got off the buss, a member drove us to our house with all our stuff and he couldn't figure out how to unlock his door. It´s going to be a fun transfer.

This week the sister missionaries needed help putting together a wedding for their investigators. We didn´t have anything to decorate the chapel so we bought some balloons and strung toilet paper on the ceiling. It was the most trashing thing I have ever participated in but it turned out really well.

We passed by some investigators Cristian and Tina so that my comp could say goodbye. Their parents were there too. Elder Williams said that as soon as Tina has her baby, he wants to see pictures. The room got silent and Tina turned red. Cristian then pointed out that their parents didn´t know yet. We quickly said goodbye and got out of there as soon as possible. It was pretty uncomfortable.

On Saturday we played soccer with a bunch of kinds from the orphanage. The next day, almost all of them went to church by their own will. They are pretty impressive kids.

We were teaching a family with a 9 year old kid who is really smart. He apparently is the best reader in Lebu. I´m not sure how they test that but he has awards. We gave him a book of mormon and had him read 3 Nephi 11 when Jesus came to the Lamanites. The next day we asked him what he thought about the chapter. He said he loved reading about when Jesus discovered the Americas. We are going to keep working with them.

I got the package! a lot of kids are going to be very happy.

That's about it for the week. Sorry for the confusion of not writing for two weeks. We had to travel then we had a conference both the pdays and all the while there were a series of earthquakes, tsunamis, Forrest fires, and murders in our area. But we survived.

Love you all, 

chau!

Week

We missed emailing time this week. We had to travel. Talk to you guys next week.

Paul