I'm glad that you got home safely and that the trip was considered a success for you guys. I can imagine what you are talking about with the little kids in your Sunday School class having lots of energy. Being a missionary here, all the little kids love you, and I some of them are really...excited. I really enjoy the kids, but sometimes they scream a lot and that tries my patience a little bit - I'm not perfect. That being said though, they are usually really good and I think that I am a lot more mellow than Elder Revi about it.
It doesn't really surprise me that Chile produces more copper than Arizona because that is pretty much all there is in the North of Chile. Everyone here is a miner or works in the mine doing something. It can actually make it annoying because the usual turn in the mines is seven for seven or fourteen for seven and the people are really hard to plan lessons for. One of the guys that we have taught a couple lessons to works 14 for 7 driving those huge trucks in the mines. He gave us an example of how big the tires were width wise and they are really impressive.
That is really interesting about Maxine (Shelley's sister, Jordan's aunt) needing a hearing aid, and not really surprising. Perhaps she will stop yelling into the phone now.
My foot feels fine now. I have no idea what happened to it, but my tactic of ignore it and hope it goes away worked. Another interesting note - the shoes that I brought that I was wearing before my mission are garbage now. I have pretty much destroyed them. These other ones should last a lot longer though. I may not need another pair of shoes, or if I do, it should only be one. We'll see.
Transfers aren't this week, they're next Tuesday so I will probably find out if anything is changing in Tocopilla sometime this week and be able to let you know on the next P-day.
The thing with Tocopilla and going to Antofagasta a lot is that we are part of the zone Calama, which is another city. Tocopilla, Antofagasta and Calama make a triangle of cities that are all about 3 hours apart. When we have meetings the President just sends everybody to Antofa instead of using his time getting to Calama cause he is super busy. And it is also a nice break to go to Antofa for the missionaries here because Tocopilla is really small.
The Spanish is coming along good and Elder Revi is starting to point out the small things that I am doing wrong because I am not making that many big errors, and when I do I ususally know why. I just have to get used to when the Spanish grammar doesn't line up with the English grammar. For instance, there are times when English makes a verb into a noun by adding "ing", but Spanish never uses the equivalent that way. Sometimes I get errors like that, but I'm learning and I'm really glad that Elder Revi is pointing these out.
About my investigators then:
May-ling and her husband Carlos are the couple that I talked about last week with the two sons and they are doing really good. We have shared a lot of lessons and messages with her and she is super excited about the church. We are having trouble getting her to go to church, but I think she wants to go with her family. He is a little more hesitant to accept the gospel because I don't think that he necessarily thinks he needs to have an organized religion, but just a good religious environment for his kids.
Brunilda is a 92 year old lady that has a baptismal date for this Saturday. She is progressing pretty much without issues. The only thing we have with her is that she kind of forgets stuff until you remind her, but she really enjoys the church and the people there, so we are pretty confident. We are also a little worried that the baptism might be a little much, so we are making plans to have a super controlled situation. We'll get some help so that it all goes well instead of just the usual cold water baptism.
Dorys is an older lady that has a lot of problems in her life, but she knows one of the youth here and we are working with him in order to solidify her resolve. She is coming along and has a baptismal date for the first Friday in April.
Suyen is our last really solid investigator at the moment and she has a baptismal date for the first Friday in April too. She was an interesting girl that we have been working with for a long time. She is 20 years old with a child (this is really common in Chile) and she was living with the father and not married, so she couldn't be baptized. She is really awesome and really understands that everything is true. She was even asking us to baptize her for a long time but we couldn't unless the boyfriend moved or they got married. We have been visiting her since my 3rd week here and she has been super receptive. Well... last week she broke up with her boyfriend and is now going to get baptized. I think that this is good because that relationship wasn't healthy.
We will be needing to push for finding more people to teach in the coming weeks cause we don't really have anyone else.
We are also working with a couple less active members.
The family Vasart Sanz, which is the picture I sent of all the missionaries at the table with the family. The husband Luis is a less active member and the wife is super active. His brother Hermano Yerko is also a really strong member and part of the Branch Presidency. Our goal is for Luis to baptize his daughter who is 8 and not baptized but has going to church with her mom. Luis is making huge progress to get to that point.
We are also working with the family Morales. The wife is active now after working with her for a while and the husband is looking pretty good for getting back to activity too. This family is super awesome and I really want them to keep going because they have been sealed in the temple and then went less active.
The last family is the family Nievas who are sealed in the temple and are inactive, but we may stopping going for now because they never commit to anything and are starting to be a time sink.
Love,
Jord
