Operación Pino

This week started off pretty slow. Everything was pretty much done in the office so we had time to work as missionaries. On Wednesday we got a big package of new phones for the missionaries. The office elder from the other mission told us that when they got their new phones, the phone guy in santiago (Mr. Pino) messed up and deactivated like 20 of their old phones. So I emailed Mr. Pino and told him to be careful. But sure enough one by one people would call to tell us that their phone doesn´t work. When we lost about 15 phones to the "plague" everything went silent. People stopped calling to report that their phones don't work. We looked up online the check the damage but instead of only 15 phones not working, 70 phones stopped working. People stopped calling because almost none of the missionaries had phones. We quickly had a meeting to see how we could fix the problem and after thinking for a while, we realized that the only way to do it would be to split up and drive to every single sector in the mission to deliver new sim cards. We called it Operation Pino.

So I went with Elder Anderson and we chose the route through the coast and up through Angol while the other Elders went straight down to Temuco and Loncoche. We left at about 7:00 pm, bought some drinks, cookies and other unhealthy road trip food and headed down. After a full night of getting lost trying to find houses and pass out sim cards we finally got to Lebu at 12:30 and slept on the floor there. The next morning we got up early and got on the road. First stop was Cañete which was beautiful at that time of morning and the road from Cañete to Purén was even prettier. That morning we decided to make best use of the opportunity and stopped to look at views and took a bunch of pictures. I only wish the pictures could really capture how beautiful this country is. Sometimes it was just breathtaking. When it was time for lunch we bought a couple 2 feet long hot dogs and sat in the back of the van looking off a giant canyon with a cool looking bridge. 

We finally finished that night at about 12:00 again and went right to sleep. The next day all four of us were just exhausted. But 70 companionship's now have communication outside of their pueblitos.

Yesterday one of Rachel´s old companions came into the office to give me a package and it hit me hard that Rachel was home. Watching videos of Rachel was even weirder. It made the end of my mission a very real thing. It´s kind of scary to think about so I´m not going to do it.

That´s about it for this week, I´ll be putting a lot of pictures on dropbox today btw

Elder Thompson