Serving in Santiago: CRAZY, BUSY, WEEK

Holy Cow. I swear everything happened this week.... its been an emotional rollercoaster and very exhausting but over all quite memorable!

First, Katie has been sending me emails?!! I haven´t gotten any! I thought maybe she didn´t love me anymore haha. Did she send it to kyrstin.millett@myldsmail.net? Mom, I play it probably at least for one thing every sunday... all the members want me to teach their kids piano but we don´t have time or materials so I tell them to talk to one of the elderly couples in our ward because we have like 10 elderly couples that work in the offices or in the temple.

Also WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU THINKING!?!?!?!?! YOU DIDNT PUT UP THE GARLAND!?!?!?! PUT IT UP!! I LABELED EACH OF THE STRANDS TO MAKE IT STINKING EASY TO KNOW WHERE EACH ONE GOES AND I EXPECT TO SKYPE YOU GUYS ON CHRISTMAS WITH THE GARLANDS. IF YOU DONT PUT THEM UP IM GONNA CRY!!!!!!!!!! ..... you guys should definitely put the garland up... make it Jake´s punishment next time he is a stink haha

Thanks for all the pics.... I´m sitting in the internet store bawling right now. I LOVE being a missionary but I´m not gonna lie, being away from home for Christmas and Thanksgiving is really hard. I´ve never been homesick before but seeing the pic of all the girl cousins without me and mal there is kinda sad! I hope you are loving the holidays, I think this might be one of the hardest times I´m gonna have on my mission (you all know how obsessed I am with Christmas... its not the same here... but I´ll try to make the best of it)

On to the details of this crazy week.

First. Thanksgiving. Yeah turkey doesn´t exist here so we all pitched in and bought kfc to surprise hermana mckinley for her nine month mark and thanksgiving. It was really fun I love the hermanas here in pocuro they are some of my best friends and it was fun to pull together and do something for hermana mckinley! She was sad the whole day because we didn´t say a thing about her 9 month cumplemes which is a huge deal, but she was really happy when she walked in and saw all of the balloons and decorations that night!

This week we have been working with the wife from the couple that was fighting last week. I seriously couldn´t love her more she is so sweet and so awesome, we have been getting her back to reading the book of mormon. There are two things I like to keep in mind when it comes to the BOM, the first is something dad said, that he has never had anyone in his office with a problem that was reading the book of mormon everyday. And second, Elder Holland in our devotional said that he has never seen anyone (Investigator, less active person, etc) come into the church unless they came reading the book of mormon. He says when he has no idea what the need is of the person he bears his testimony about the importance of reading the book of mormon because it is the best missionary tool that God has. So we have really been trying to work on that and I think it is really helping!

We have been trying to open our mouths more and it is surprising how many nice people we have found! Its funny how when we don´t want to contact everyone is really mean or creepy men, and then when we are trying to contact alot the people are so nice and accepting! Weird. What a blessing.

Also this week we had my Visa run, we got up at 5:30 in the morning and met up with all the people that went into the CCM at the same time as me to go get our visas we waited in lines for HOURS. We got there at 6:30 and there was already a 2 hour line, so we waited to get a paper, then we went to another line and waited another hour to get another paper, then we made copies and waited in another line for another 2 hours to give them all of the papers and apply for our carnet.... problem was I finally made it to the end of the last line gave him all my papers and on one of the billion papers they gave me they forgot to put a second T in my last name......... so we ran back only to find that the system crashed at the place we needed so we will be going on another adventure bright and early tomorrow morning... YAY!

Saturday we met up with Mxxxx to see how he was doing.... he feels like he isn´t worthy to be baptized this week because of something that happened but he figured it all out with his elders and he is on track to be baptized this saturday, I´m so happy for him!

We also had that baptism of Cleber!! He is literally such a great guy and the Lord has prepared him so well for this, literally I feel like as missionaries we haven´t really done a thing because he just had a testimony of it all before hand, but I am soooo grateful for the opportunity I´ve had to be a part of this special time in his life! It was cool because he was baptized by his friend who served a mission in Brazil (I think the Porto Alegre mission!) and he baptized him in Portugese! Afterwards Cleber bore his testimony and literally everyone in the room was just shocked the spirit was so strong and his conviction so strong, he has such a sweet testimony of the gospel despite everything! The baptism went by sooooo fast because we were running around getting everything ready but it went really well and Its crazy to see that people really are finding the gospel and changing their lives!! Hopefully I´ll be able to send you pics of marios baptism next week even if I won´t be able to go!

Well I gotta go, Chau!

A fun Halloween package from Nik's family.