A Series of Unfortunate Events - Pichidegua Edition

Hey all!  Considering how unfortunate the events of this week were it was a pretty good week!  I have some funny stories to start out though:

Fence scratchers!  So the other week this less-active member was walking on the street when we passed him and said hi and shook his hand, and before he said anything he said:

''Hey, don't feel bad you guys, but I've been getting some complaints from some of my friends in La Torina about you guys.  You see La Torina is a very atheist place... you know what atheist means?''

Me:  ''Uhmm... yeah.''

Member:  ''Yeah it means their super super Catholic.  That's what atheist means.''

Me: ''Uhhh... are you sure?''

Member:  ''Anyway, they're very atheist over there.  So one of them came up to me the other day and told me that after you ''alo''-ed at his house you were scratching the fence while you were waiting for him to come out.''

Me: ''....we were... scratching the fence?''

Member: ''Yeah, apparently while waiting for him to come out you scratched the paint on his fence, so just be careful not to touch people's fences if they don't come out.  If they don't come out, they just don't come ya know?'' 

As we were walking away Elder Kammerman said, ''Oh yeah I totally have a habit of scratching fences while waiting for people to open the door.  Oh wait... no I don't!''

I thought that was pretty funny.  We continued making jokes during the week about ''them dang fence scratchers'' pretending to be livid with those fence-scratching mormons.

Another random quote from my companion:

''When my gravy light gets echoed, man, game over.''

As confused and obscure as this comment may seem, I promise that it actually does mean something.

Anyway, on to the week!  It was a pretty stressful week, but it turned out to be a great week by the end!  We got everything done that we needed to by the end, so it was good!  Also learned some important lessons.

Tuesday was the start of the nightmare.  We had some appointments set up, so we biked to La Torina (ya know, the super atheist place that's way into Catholicism) which is pretty far from our house.  After going to one of our investigators who wasn't there, somehow the wire that controls the back tire gears got loosed from the gear-changer thingy and the chain kept slipping off the gears so we couldn't go anywhere.  With some tinkering around, I figured out what the problem was and how to fix it but I needed an allen-wrench.  We proceeded to go door to door for about an hour just to find the wrench, but our efforts were in vain.  We ended up walking back to Pichidegua and buying an allen-wrench.  After that, we went to a less-active we had an appointment with and he wasn't there.  We contacted a bit more in La Torina but then needed to go to Andrea, who we had an appointment with.  We decided to take the long way back to contact one or two houses more.  We did so, and while talking to this nice man who came out and started talking with us, I suddenly felt something pinch down on my leg hard.  I turned around, and alas!  It was a wild dog with its jaws firmly attached to my leg!  At this point I honestly just laughed because of the kind of luck we were having that day.  The dog gave no warning, nobody saw it come up and it didn't make any noise or bark or anything.  The good thing was that it didn't hurt that bad, but I knew I needed to take care of it so we had to cancel our appointment with Andrea.  Honestly, having to cancel the appointment was the only part of the ordeal that was irritating to me.  We went to the chapel to see if it broke skin, and it did, so we called the nurse and she told us that when we went to Rancagua the next day (we had a meeting) that I'd need to get a rabi shot afterwards.  That night I cleaned it out as best I could and we had to go back to the house to bandage it up and then it was too late to work more.

The next day!  I looked at my clothes and realized that there weren't any visible holes from the teeth so I told the nurse that it didn't seem like the teeth actually directly reached my skin.  So she said we didn't have to worry about it!  Then we had the meeting and the meeting was excellent and I learned a ton.  The sad thing was that the meeting went way late and we were going to go visit Christian, upon discovering that was impossible we set an appointment with Andrea, but we also had to cancel that because the bus took so long and we got back home at 9:30 at night.  That night I looked at my clothes more carefully and realized that there were holes... so I called the nurse and told her that I actually probably did need the vaccination.

Next day!  We were going to go to Menene but in the morning we had to do the district class because the meeting replaced it the previous day so we went to San Fernando that morning and went to the hospital there.  Upon waiting a while, we discovered that my insurance somehow didn't work from them so they would have to charge about $75.00 for the shot.  Nope.  So we went back to Pichidegua and because we were delayed we had to cancel with Menene.  At this point I was pretty dang stressed and really frustrated at the dog.  Luckily that night we got to teach Andrea before going to the hospital in Pichidegua that finally gave me the shot for free without much hassle.  Finally!

And with some crazy time-management skills, we managed to visit Menene and Christian still later in the week.  So it all worked out and was fine and I was silly for worrying.  But that was the craziness of the week!

Saturday morning we also climbed the hill here in Pichidegua with the youth of the branch and the Elders from Peumo.  It was a ton of fun and we were able to get to know Leyper (Christian's girlfriend's son who's a member) a lot better and had a good time.

So the lessons I learned this week!  This week I actually had a good deal of very profound spiritual learning experiences that all came after the three days of extreme stress.  We watched this ''Hope Works'' thing which seems like Mormon ted talks with this guy who talks about not worrying things that won't matter in 1,000 years.  I learned a lot from that and definitely recommend it.  The biggest learning moment, however, came when we were watching another one of those hope works things with this girl that talks about the ''perfect lie.''  She explains how she was approaching life at a me + more = christlike perspective when in reality the truth is me + christ = more.  I LOVED that.  Learned a ton from that, and it went along with a lot of the lessons I've been learning here.  We also watched the face-to-face with Studio C (advantages to having a church computer to download all these things during branch activities) which was actually really inspiring and had a lot of lessons about the atonement and God's love.  Good stuff!

Well that was my week!  I love you all!  The church is true!  Have a great week!

Love

Elder Fox