Hi all.
To answer questions.
I live in a house with my companion and the other 2 sisters. The members normally feed us so much for lunch because that’s the biggest meal here that I just have some milo which is kind of like hot chocolate and toast or something for breakfast and dinner doesn’t always happen because we’re usually running but we might eat some cookies or have an oncecita with an investigator. Oncecita is what they do here instead of dinner and it’s usually hot drinks because it’s cold and either completos or chilean bread (Which is super fattening) with jelly or butter or something. I haven’t really been able to do much exploring of the stores in Santa Juana because on P-days we do most of our shopping in concepción. Hna. Clark is from Bountiful, Hna. Steed is from Canada but her accent sounds like it’s from utah because apparently the “Canadian” accent is mostly just fisherman on the east coast, and Hna. Aros is from Santiago here in Chile. She understands English really well so she does really well being stuck with 3 gringas, but we mostly try to speak Spanish anyway. Our branch is about 30 people and they’re all really nice but they talk super fast so I don´t understand them most of the time. We’re working on getting them to accompany us more.
We started out this week with 4 fechas (baptismal dates). The first is from Maria T. and the second from Millaray, and the 3rd and 4th from Kevin and Ayaret who are brother and sister. None of them came to church though so their fechas all fell through and we need to re-establish them and convince them to come to church next week.
A little bit about our investigators.
Maria T. is about 45 and lives with her boyfriend Rodrigo who is kind of a lazy drunk with drug issues depending on the day but we get the idea that he´s kind of abusive and we’re going to try to help him to change. At the same time we think she should leave him, but we can’t make either of them do anything we can only teach and hope.
Millaray is 11 and flipping awesome. Fernanda is an investigator of the other sisters and she´s getting baptized on Saturday. She was talking about her baptism with Millaray at the branch family home evening and Millaray turned to hna clark and was like “Can I get baptized?” She is amazing and has such enthusiasm for the gospel so we were excited. So we set the fecha for July 1st but then we took her home and she told her mom that she wanted to be baptized because her mom wasn’t there and she was like “What the crap why are you guys going behind my back. We’re Catholic no way.” So we’re going to have to help her change her mind. I understand her reaction though, I probably would’ve said the same thing.
Joaquin is about 17 and Carmen is about 45ish. I´m super excited about them. I think we can baptize them for sure we just got to get Joaquin to believe in God. I know that sounds a little weird, but he says that if he believed in god he would want what we’re teaching to be the truth. He just won’t pray, and that kind of stops the whole process so we’re working on that. Carmen is progressing pretty well. I think they’re the only investigators we have that actually do their commitments. Apologies for any wrong words or spelling mistakes a lot of these missionary terms I don’t know very well in English. I think that´s all for this week.