Sept. 24, 2012

Hey All!

I will start by answering some questions that my mom asked that might be interesting for you all to know.  We do both tracting door to door and just talking to people in the streets, but generally just talking to people in the streets in between teaching appointments.  My Spanish is coming along alright.  Poco a poco.  I am understanding a lot more than I was last week, but that still isn't much.  It is really hard to learn new words too because we don't have the same kind of study time as in the MTC, but its coming along.  And lastly, no my feet don't hang off the bed.  haha. We have normal twin sized beds.  Not all Chileans are short, just most of them. ;)  So although the beds are normal sized the doorways aren't always normal.  Needless to say, I have hit my head now many times.

The 18th (their Independence Day), was just like any other day, we tracted, taught, all the usual stuff.  The only difference was that night we went to the activity that the ward was having.  They had food and drinks there.  They were just dancing so we couldn't really do anything but sit there and watch, but it was still fun.  It was really interesting to see all their different dances that they have.  It was nothing like any dance that we have in the US.  They pretty much only did their native Spanish dances.  At one part they had some Brazilian music where they did some line dances (those were really entertaining to watch cause they're totally not like how you would think of a line dance being.)  But that was all for the 18th. Oh wait, we got pulled (literally pulled) into two houses by drunk guys.  Inside there was just a bunch of drunk people sitting there wondering why in the world we were there.  It was pretty funny.  We just kinda talked for a minute or two and they found a way to escape.  Their Independence Day is like our Fourth of July mixed with Thanksgiving; they eat a ton and all the family gets together like Thanksgiving, but then also party and all that fun stuff.

We we had a surprise on Saturday.  On Friday a cat got into our house through an open window.  We didn't know it was there until Saturday morning when I went to put my socks on and reached into my sock drawer.  I felt something super soft and it freaked me out. I couldn't actually see into the drawer because there was a thing in the way so it only opened enough to put my hand in.  I jerked my hand out and like 50 thinks flashed through my mind of what it could be.  But then I moved my sock out of the small opening and there was a cat...  Needless to say I started screaming in English that there was a cat in my drawer (I only say I started screaming in English because we only speak Spanish so it was funny).  So all I could see was a little cat face and so I moved some more stuff and "THE CAT HAD BABIES IN MY SOCK DRAWER!!!!!" Yeah the cat had babies in my sock drawer.  5 I think, maybe 6, but yeah.  So after a while of discussing what to do we finally decided to make a little home for them until we could find someone who wanted them.  So outside of our apartment we made a little house and have been feeding the mom.  It's pretty crazy.  So yeah, we have like 6 or 7 cats now!

We haven´t really had many progressing investigators lately.  I hope that we will be able to commit Gabriel to baptism today.  He was the first person that we taught my first day here in Chile.  We haven´t been able to teach him for a week because of the holiday.  We do have one investigator named Janis.  She is super awesome and has a testimony and wants to learn more.  After we taught her the law of chastity she broke up with her boyfriend and the were separated for a week.  Then they got back together and they are planning to get married, but not until next year.  It's really frustrating because she was progressing so well and then he came back into the picture and now we don´t know what to do because she can't get baptized as long as she is still breaking the law of chastity.

I can't think of anything else at the moment that is worth mentioning....  Oh a little side note, I am allowed to write emails to people who aren't family, so if you want to email me my email is william.knapp@myldsmail.net.  But, just so you know, I don´t have an unlimited amount of time to write, so if you do write me I may not respond immediately.

Okay I think that's all for today.  Love you all, hope you are doing well!

Elder Michael Knapp

Chile Week 1: Sept.17, 2012

¡HOLA!

Well my first letter that is actually from Chile!  I must say it is extremely difficult to type this because the keyboards have some different keys on it... haha.  So lets see.... so far we have done all the normal stuff I guess. Contacting, teaching, baptizing, you know... the kind of stuff that awesome missionaries do. ;)

Well I guess I will start with my companion, his name is Elder Metcalf.  He is from Kerns, Utah.  He is currently in his last transfer here so I will be getting a new trainer after 6 weeks.  It's too bad that he will only be my companion for one transfer because he is awesome.  He is so energetic and happy all the time and just loves the work.  I have been having such a good time with him here. He also has a crazy good memory with people.  I don't know how he does it, but he can remember everything that people have told him.  I don't know if it is because he has just had so much practice with it, or if he can just do that, but either way it is super helpful.  I want to be able to remember like that. But yeah, I feal very blessed to have him as my companion.  Oh and I just found out that his birthday is tomorrow! woo! He is turning 21.

Let's see... so I guess I will talk about Chile a bit then.  So far it has been cold and cold.  It warms up a little during the day but not much.  It is still pretty cold outside right now at noon.  Well, my area I'm in right now is called San Pablo and my sector is Lo Prado.  I don't really know how to describe it here.  It's really odd... everyone kind of lives in tiny little dirty houses, but then inside they have these nice plasma tvs and stuff.  It's really odd. So I guess you could say I'm serving in the "suburbs", but it's not like it is in Utah.  It's a whole lot more ghetto.  Take a house, get rid of the yard, make the house about the size of your kitchen and living room, tack on a small bedroom and a bathroom and that's about it.  Oh and add a nice computer and tv.  haha.  Sounds awesome doesn't it?!?!  No, I really love it here it's great.

Let's see... so we have this mission wide goal where each companionship has to get 140 contacts every week, it's like 20 per day.  Well last week the first two or three days that I was here we didn´t really get that many contacts because I was scared to talk to people and my companion couldn´t do it all.  So we had to get a lot yesterday.  So insead of the usual 20 for yesterday we got 55... woot!!!  Yeah I have been talking to people and asking if we can teach them and I can't even understand what they say to me. It's awesome!  Oh, something different in our mission, we don´t wake up at 6:30 in the morning, we wake up at 7:30.  I like it, but that means we also go to bed an hour later.  So it's still the same amount of sleep, but just an hour later.  In my apartment the ceiling above the shower is too low so I have to hunch the whole time.  It's great fun.

So about my investigators, we taught one guy who is about 19 or 20 years old, his name is Gabriel.  He is really cool and really wants to learn more about the gospel and has all these questions.  I think that it would be a really great to have him baptized.  But every time we teach him his mom comes in half way through and basicallly asks us to re-explain everything we just taught again.  So that is really frustrating.  We were going to ask him to get baptized this last time, but his mom came in and totally killed the spirit so we didn´t do it.  We also taught this other man Juan (everyone here is named Juan I think) and we commited him to be baptized in October.  That was really cool.  We also have some other investigators that have stopped letting us teach or are gone, that my companion was teaching before that I don´t know.  Hopefully we will be able to continue teaching them after the holidays.

The Independence Day of Chile is tomorrow.  So we haven´t really been able to teach anyone because of that.  Basically just making contacts for the next week.  So I am going to be eating tons of food tomorrow.  Which I'm kinda glad for cause we haven't had much food the past couple of days.  It will also help that today we will go buy some food that we will be able to eat in the morning and night.  We didn't really have anything because we hadn't had a p-day to go shopping yet.

I love the ward we are in.  The people are so nice.  I think that hispanic people in general are just so much nicer and happier.  That's what it seems like anyways, probably not completely true.  There is this one family that we had lunch with yesterday that is super fun and nice.  The other trio of missionaries that we live with had a baptism yesterday.  His name is David, he is awesome.  He is deaf, so we have been learning sign language from him.  So not only am I learning Spanish but I am also learning Spanish sign language, interesting no?  I like it, but I would like it more if I knew Spanish already, haha.  I am also teaching English classes.  So a lot of fun stuff has been happening.  Lots of members are attending the sign language and English classes, which is good because we get to know them better. But we are hoping to get some investigators to come to the classes... We tell everyone that says something in English to us that we have classes, but still no one has come. Oh and a lot of people yell hello at us just cause we are from America, it's fun.

The elders that we live with in the trio are Elder Wright (another newbie), Elder Soto (from Peru), and Elder Baldwin (he is like 6 foot 6 inches or something like that and from Arizona).  They are awesome.  We are always laughing and having fun in the apartment.

The food is alright.  Nothing I have had has been super amazing or super bad, just kind of bland so far.  Lots of bread and rice.  We had soup one day while it was pretty hot outside, that was weird.  Cause in the US we only have soup when its cold, but here they have it all the time.  In Chile they eat a small breakfast, a massive lunch, and then what they call once, which is kind of like dinner.  But we aren´t allowed to each once, so we eat lunch and then by 9 we are starving, it's kinda fun.  I'm not sure why, but it really is.  As for transportation, we walk....a lot...  yeah.

Well, I love you all.  All the way from Chile!

¡Cuidense!

=Elder Michael Knapp=  :D


For sending mail and packages they say the mail is great.  Do NOT use Fed Ex or anything other than the US post normal system.  ONLY the normal US post, otherwise it gets stuck in customs and we have to pay like 100 bucks to get it out.  The address is just the mission office address.  It should be up on the blog.

Pres. & Sister Essig & Elder Knapp

Pres. & Sister Essig & Elders Knapp & Metcalf

From the Mission Blog that I found interesting:

Chilean Money
Chile has some beautiful money.  The numbers on the bills can be a little intimidating, but I was told you take off the last 3 zeros and then double the number.  That gives you the amount the bill is.  Bills are called “mil”, they also have pesos.   For example there is a 20000 mil bill.  Take off the last 3 zeros, which makes it  20 and multiple by 2 and you get a bill that is worth about $40 in American.  Here is a list from Sis. May, the former mission president’s wife to give you an idea of what you may see.

CHILEAN MONEY/Dinero using Bills and Coins/ Monedas

These are approximates, round off for averages
One mil means 1,000= $2.00
½ mil, or 500 coin= $1.00
100 peso coin= about 20 cents, less than quarter
50 peso coin= about 10 cents, like a dime

You do the math for the other tiny coins, less than 1cent!When you see prices, we usually just double them to get the idea of what they cost in dollars. For example:

Hot dog/completo= 1,200. or $2.40
Soda drink=750 or $1.50
Sandwich =1,600 or $3.20
Pancito/Little bread=200 or $.40
Bus ride=380 or $.76
Metro=420 or $.84
Meal Mamita/Comida 1.800=$3.60
Treat/candy=100 or $.20
Cone/Helado=600 or $1.20
Ruby Tuesday meal=6,400. or $12.80

Things are not cheap for Americans like in some countries. The largest paper bill is 20,000 and approx $40.00. Sometimes they look at it like you just handed them a $500 dollar bill, and they are not used to seeing those much and don’t like to make change!
No one is really used to tipping here, so you can just leave something VERY small and they still like that.

MTC Week 8: Sept. 5, 2012

Hey Everyone!

Okay, so I only have 5 days left here. WOOO!!!! But also no wooo. haha. It is so exciting to be able to finally be able to go out and teach people but I'm also really scared because, well lets face it, I am not going to be able to understand anyone when I get out there. I don't know if I have said this yet but Chileans are one of the fastest dialects of Spanish in the world. But it will be so fun and I am so excited! So I am leaving Tuesday morning, and guess when I get to Chile? Wednesday morning! So pretty much I'm going to be sleeping for 25 hours. haha. Okay not that much, but only because I will be walking from one plane to another in Atlanta, so close to 25 hours. Oh, I'm also looking forward to another summer when I get to Chile :), even though I have gotten so white from being inside all the time here in the MTC so I will probably fry when I get there.

Okay, now to talk about what I have been doing here in the MTC. I have forgotten to say this in the last two letters. So two weeks okay from this last Sunday I had to sing a solo in church. Sorry to all my family that always tried to get me to sing in church, but they really didn't give me much of a choice. haha. But it was kinda funny because like 2 days before that Sunday I got sick and could barely sing the song, (I sang, Come Thou Font of Every Blessing). But I still got up and sang during sacrament meeting and thankfully didn't crack or anything like I had been during practice. But that was a really fun experiece. I am really glad I got to do that.

It was cool on Sunday, for the devotional we got to watch the video of the "Celebration of Life", the 85th birthday celebration for Pres. Monson. It was really cool and I would recomend you watch it. I thought it was really good but maybe because I haven't heard real music like that for 2 months. haha. But it really was good.

Well my spiritual thought for the week is from the devotional that was last night. The speaker said "The Lord will answer your prayers in your own language." She was refering to the challenge of learning a new language, but I think it means more than that.  How the Lord knows each of us so well, that when we pray with faith, He will answer us in a way that is personal and unique for each one of us, in a way that we will perfectly understand. I know this to be true from my own personal experiences. God does hear and answer our prayers.

--Elder Michael Knapp

MTC Week 7: Aug. 29, 2012

Well, sorry to say but this is going to be a shorter letter this week. I don't have very much time today. So... I only have 2 weeks left here. Weird to think. I can't wait to get out and serve the people in Chile. I am really excited  Though I would be lying if I didn't say that I was also very nervous. I guess that means I need to have a little more faith that the Lord will take care of me.

Well, since last Wednesday not much has happend. I have two new teachers now and they are pretty good. Not quite as awesome as my last two teachers, I don't really think anyone could beat them, but they are still good. Not much else is new really.

We get our travel plans tomorrow! That's exciting. We should be leaving to go to Chile on September 11. So only one more P-day here in the MTC. So all you that haven't written me yet, do it before next Wednesday, so I can have your adress so I can actually write you back when I get to Chile.

I guess I will just share a spiritual thought and be done. I learned a lot of things last week. It was probably the most spiritual week of my life. It was amazing and I will never be the same because of it. "There is nothing too small to pray about." I truly believe this is true. The Lord is standing with his arms open, always waiting for us. One of the ways we can come to him is through prayer. The Lord with strengthen you, comfort you, and always be there when you need him. When we pray we can have the comfort, that help that we need. I want you all to know that I know this gospel is true. I know Christ lives and loves us. I'm not one to do something that is hard that I don't want to do. A mission is hard, the hardest thing I have ever done. But I want to be here because I KNOW that it is true. I love you all.

--Elder Michael Knapp