The Mission Life

Hola familia im writing this email first thing this week because i have even less time to email here as i did in the mtc! wow this is stressful i cant even gather my thoughts it feels like ages ago that i was in the mtc. just want to give a quick shout out to allison paulson, i met elder echanberg in the mtc and got to know him before we left. i approve, good work ;).

so i got to viña del mar on tuesday.... met the president and his wife and they are stallions. president kahnlein is tall and intimidating but also really friendly and just a good guy and i love hermana kahnlein. when we first met them at the airport we got on a bus and headed to the mission home and got some sweet views/pics of viña del mar and it is just as pretty as i thought itd be. ill attach the pics but yeah its just amazing. then suddenly our bus stopped on the way to the mission home and president informed us that he was going to drop us off and we had to ask for directions on how to get to the mission home and also we couldnt come back until we had gotten a reference and given out a book of mormon. i got stuck in a group of three and even though we had no idea what people were saying we gave out two books and got three references before we finally found the home. it was cool and easy because people thought it was amusing that three gringos were trying to conversate with them.

however now that im with a latino compañion it seems like people dont like us as much. wednesday i got my compañion elder ramirez and we headed to our area which is in the city of Quilpue just 40 min or so outside of viña headed towards santiago. that same wednesday night i taught my first lesson wiht eduardo and edit who are couple in their 40`s but not married, super common in chile. they love parejas. anyways i ended up participating in this lesson more than probably all of the others ones so far. we ended up talkiing about faith and i quoted ether 12:6 and sang a solo families can be together forever. hahaha it was awesome they were awful at singing, like seriously pathetic, and they just thought that i had the voice of an angel so they told me to sing for them. it was funny. elder ramirez is argentine, about 6`4 and a rugby player, speaks zero english, and is way too nice. i call him the big friendly argentine giant. haha hes so nice it makes me angry sometimes and ive only been with him 5 days... oh well i guess thats what you get when you tell your mission president you want to learn to develop patience and im sure ill get compañions who drive me up the wall. but yes elder ramirez is great and he likes to work which is what i was worried about. were working hard every day trying to reactivate members and find new investigators! a lot of our work is reactivations though, we have a few hundred members in our small area and only about 50 were at church on sunday. in the liahona there was an article that said one in every thirty chilenos is a member but only like twenty percent our active. however the ones that our active are just solid!! ive been meeting our ward and getting to know them the past few days and i already love all of them!! the ward mission leader is great, elders quorum pres, bishop, his counselors, everyone! and we had lunch at the house of the second counselors house yesterday who is super young and jsut got back from a mission in uruguay and all the sudden his wife and her two sisters started speaking english and i was just like what!?! becuase i swear nobody speaks english besides my zone leaders and it was so refreshing to finally go 5 min of understanding everything!

i was blown away my first few days here guys... these people have nothing. i brought more in my suitcases than a lot of people and i mean that quite literally.. and this is like a middle class area. its really been a wake up call for me to see how blessed i was to grow up with what i had and to go back home to it in two years. some people just have no hope here besides the gospel.. really.

we dont really have any progessing investigators right now which is really tough but were working hard and doing a lot of door knocking and street contacting to find some! right now we sort of have one progressing investigators who came to church on sunday with us but then left in the middle of second hour. yeah were not sure what happened. hes a philosophy teacher and honestly i think he has mental problems. but he loves to teach us when we go to his house. the problem is he is following through on all our committments so we dont know if he is actually interested in the gospel or if he just likes to have more students to teach about the class of crazy. also there is so many fetching dogs here it blows my mind. and these are not normal dogs they all just sleep in the middle of roads and are the poorest looking things you could even imagine. i cant drink coke... mission rules. but i found some cans of dr pepper in lider just barely so thats cool.

but really i love everyone already theyre great and im understanding more every day because i can only communicate in spanish with my comp. i think within a couple of weeks i will have it down ive just got to be patient with it and keep praying for the gift of tongues. i see the lords hand helping me every single day here and my testimony grows every time i testify to someone of the truthfulness of the BOM and this great gospel we have. its not like the evangelical church, or catholic, or any other christian church. this church is true and the covenants we have made are the most valuable things we have in our lives. be grateful everyone. we have it good back in the united states.

lastly i just want to talk about my dear father for just a moment. dad you have no idea how many times a day something you have said to me or taught me comes into my head. you`re the greatest example besides our savior of what i want to become. thank you for always being there for me and raising such a good family. i miss all of you guys so much but i know the next 23 months are the lords time. happy birthday steve hope it was awesome.

oh my gosh i almost forgot about conference!!! how stinking good was that?? oh my gosh so many talks i loved and i could go on forever about it but i fetching left all my notes in my notebook at the mission home!! super bummed that i lost those but man there were a lot of good talks i could go on forever! Jorg Klebingat`s talk of the seventy was my favorite i think. or the other seventy in the first session of saturday who talked about facing the right direction. such good stuff. dang im even more bummed about my notes now than i was before. conference is great.

love you guys. hope your week is good. ¡Chau!

-Elder Allred - Chilean Street Raptor