Hola everyone! This letter is going to be short again because not much really happened this week, but there are some stories to share! Life is just a little slower here in Paniahue, but that's okay!
First good news about Alan! He's the son of the family of investigators that I talked about in the other letter, named the fma. Yua or something like that. We've been inviting him to sports and things every week to get to know him and gain confidence, and this week we taught his family for the first time and they weren't extremely receptive, but he was. We put a baptismal date with him (but none of the rest) in that lesson which was awesome, but he still has to feel like he receives an answer before he'll get baptized, so there's a lot of work to do! The really exciting thing is that he came to church with us on Sunday, so he's already made it farther than about 90% of the investigators I've had thus far in my mission! I hope to be able to see him progress and change in my coming months here, the only problem is that there aren't any youth in the branch, so it would be very difficult to keep him active without his family being members or other youth in the church.
BUT we found some youth this week too! We found this one girl (forgot her name sorry) who's super intelligent. We gave her a Book of Mormon in our contact and she told us that she'd have it read before Sunday, which would've been incredible, but alas she didn't finish it. She started it though, and has a lot of questions, which is awesome. We also have a few other families and people that I think can start progressing here soon, so I'm excited to see that things are picking up! There's an awesome convert in the branch named Yanina who lives with her mom and cousin, and we've started going by them gaining confidence with their family while giving lessons to our convert. So good things!
Other stories! New Years Eve was a blast, it involved a pointless trip to Rancagua and gringo desserts! I needed to go to Rancagua to get my carnet (Chilean citizenship card thing) which is at a civil register (a building that essentially does everything related to the government) there, so we decided to go on Thursday to get it. It's about a 3 hour trip in total. When we got there at 1:00, we walked to the civil register to discover that it had closed.... at 11:00 that morning. I found out that the civil register normally closes at 2:00 in the afternoon (2:00... on a normal day), but because it was New Years Eve it closed at 11:00 in the morning.
I know you like complaining about the U.S. government... but really... just be grateful for it. There are more advanced forms of stupidity in this world.
So we took the trip for nothing! Which was pretty sad because we wasted a lot of time, but also fun because we got to eat at a sandwich place that sells .5 kilogram sandwiches (about a pound) which I enjoyed greatly. And ate the whole thing. Easily. It really is amazing I'm not fat.
We got back to Santa Cruz at about 6:00 and had to enter the house early because of New Years Eve at 7:00... so we didn't really get a lot done that day. Oh well. That night I studied the New Testament for a few hours and then us four Elders in the house made oreo shakes and also a delicious brownie\chocolate chip cookie dessert with ice cream that was absolutely delicious. It was a little too North-American for my Argentine companion, however, and he got so sick that we stayed in the house the whole day the next day. It was fun studying and watching church movies and mormon messages, but I started getting pretty restless, since our house has the square footage of our family room and I couldn't leave it. I just felt bad for my comp though, he plans on moving to the states after the mission so I hope he doesn't suffer the same problems with the food when he goes.
We also had our first English class here but we didn't advertise very much at all so only Alan and his family came. Some of the English that went around the room was pretty hilarious though, since they got some of the practice sentences mixed up. Here are some examples:
Alan to Elder Leguizamón: ''Where..are... your people?''
(I think he mixed up 'where are you from' with 'how many people are in your family' somehow.)
Elder Leguizamón in response: ''They are in your house.''
Our people. They always be in your house.
Also Elder Leguizamón also accidently asked for marijuana in the closing prayer, saying specifically ''we ask thee for... weed.''
I think he was trying to say 'please bless us', but got a little mixed up and wanted to say 'we ask thee for we' but added a 'd' on the end. I thought it pretty hilarious.
So that was my week! It was a great week with all said and done, though a slow one since we went two days without doing much. And we're going to back to Rancagua tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes!
Quick thought on faith: over these three weeks I think this is the biggest lesson I've learned here. In Conti I kind of gave up faith as a result of our lack of success, which certainly didn't help the fact that we didn't have a lot of success. We can have faith despite the circumstances, always, and if we create our circumstances (rather than letting our circumstances create us) with faith, we can achieve miracles. Always. Our Heavenly Father is a God of miracles, but he works on the principle of faith. We can have faith that He can do anything, but even better is having faith that he will do it. But of course, in order to know that He will do it, we also have to know that it's in accordance with His will, which is knowledge that we have to seek through Him in prayer.
Love you guys! The Church is true!
Love
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