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.