I Made it Safely to Rancagua

Hola! 

I have officially made it to my first area! I am serving in San Fernando in the rama Sentinal! I love my mission presidents! they are amazing. I am so excited to be out here serving. My companion's name is Hermana Clawson. She is from Layton Utah and has been serving for 8 months. I can already tell that I am going to love her. I know that she is going to work really hard and that is what I want to do. 

I just wanted to tell you guys something really sweet that Hermano Escobar told me before I left. He said your parents are amazing. He said from good trees come good fruit and you are that fruit and he told me thank you for being such a good example. I feel so blessed to have been able to meet so many great people at the CCM. Also Hermano Figueroa did something so sweet for me too. I wasn´t able to say goodbye to him yesterday, but he gave something to one of the sister missionaries to give me. He gave me his Predicad mi 
Evangelio from the sister missionaries who reactivated him . It was so sweet. I feel so blessed that I got to learn from him. I hope to be as good as missionary as he was. 

I love you guys and will write more

Last Week in the CCM

Wow, I can't believe how fast time flies here. 

I am working on my last  week here at the CCM. I am sad to be leaving my district and the amazing people that I have met here at the CCM, but at the same time I am so excited to go to El Campo. I want to work so hard and be the best missionary I can be. I am realizing how little time I have to serve the Lord, I am already down to 17 months. In comparison to all the life I will live, 17 months is nothing. Being in Chile has already changed me. 

So today for Pday, we went to McDonalds to get ice cream as a district with Hno. Figueroa and one of the teachers who has become one of my really good friends, Hna. Alfaro. Both of them had the day off of work today and both of them decided to come to the CCM to spend time with us on our last pday. It was so fun. They are both so funny and nice. 

So there's a tradition in Chile that all of the freshman starting college have to go through this initiation where people throw all sorts of garbage and fish and paint on them. They rip their clothes and then take their stuff. And then all of the college kids have to beg on the street for money so they can buy their stuff back. So we had lots of stinky, dirty college students asking us for money today. Hna. Alfaro told me that I should be talking to them about the gospel. So, a boy and a girl came up to me and asked me for money and I said, "I don't have money, but I have a gift for you." And I started talking about the restoration of the gospel with a pamphlet. A minute in, the boy said oh I'm christian too and took the pamphlet and walked away. It was super funny. I hope he actually reads the pamphlet! 

For my BYU friends, I ran into Cole Anderson on Monday on the temple grounds! When I saw him, I was so confused. I at first thought I was just imagining things and then he got closer and I thought it was Hunter, but it was Cole! He didn't get his visa so he was sent to Santiago Sur. It was so great to see him! I thought about how we threw those ice cream cones at that window together and thought about how different things are now. It's so funny how much a mission changes you.

Living at Alcantara has been so great! The Gilberts are the greatest people and they feel like our mom and dad at the ccm. Today during exercise time they filled up a bunch of water balloons and we played water balloon volleyball and it was so fun! I admire and am so grateful for how hard they work for us. We can truly feel the love they have for us. They were so happy to see all of us having fun and laughing. 

I hope all is going well at home! I want to hear from all of you! Love you guys!

Week #4 CCM

Hola everyone! How is everyone doing? I hope everything is going well at home or wherever you may be!

I'm still loving it out here! The people are just so nice! Especially everyone that works at the MTC. One of my dad's assistants started working at the MTC last week and he will be my teacher starting tomorrow! It's so interesting to me how everything works out in our lives. Its never the way we expected it, but it always turns out being better! I'm so excited to have Elder Figueroa teach me, I feel like even though I wasn't supposed to go to Argentina and serve in my parent's mission, its really cool and amazing that I get to learn from one of his missionaries! 

So on Sunday this week, the gums by one of my wisdom teeth got really swollen and it didn't hurt but it was really bothering me. We have a nurse going to the Osorno mission who is living at Alcantara with us right now and I went and asked her what I should do and she said that I should just go to the doctor tomorrow and get it popped and I was like ok. But then it just started annoying me even more, so I asked her if she could just pop it when we got home and she said yes. So on Sunday night she took a pair of scissors and made a little incision where my gums were swollen and squeezed out a ton of puss! It was disgusting! The funny part was that it didn't hurt at all and i haven't had any problems with it since, it was crazy! I'll send a picture.

 

Hna Cook and I taught a lesson to one of our investigators yesterday (who is just a teacher) and afterwards he always gives us advice on what we could work on and yesterday he said that he thought we did a really good job and didn't give us any advice. Hna Cook asked what he thought we could improve on and he said that he didn't have any advice for us. We were so excited! I know we have a really long way to go and that we'll never be perfect teachers but it felt nice to have a really good lesson! 

I hope everything is going well with you guys! I love you all!

Week #3 in the MTC

Hola everyone! I hope everyone has had a great week! I have had another great week here at the CCM! 

I am officially half way through my time here, I feel like I have grown so much. My spanish is good, I feel like I understand pretty much everything the teachers say and I do an alright job responding, but I learned today that I still have a long way to go. 

Before we left for Pday today, our teacher challenged us to street contact while we  were out on the streets and so Hna Cook and I took some pamphlets and a BOM and headed to McDonalds. The other sisters in our district came with us and every time we passed someone we would say hello, but everyone was too scared to actually talk to anyone. So after we had our lovely McDonalds lunch we were heading back to go to the store and then come back to the CCM and I said a little  prayer to have Heavenly Father help me be brave enough to actually talk to someone on the street. We passed a man and I said como esta and he responded and then we just kept walking, but I felt that I should talk to him so I turned around and started talking to him. I asked him if he knew about Mormons and he said he had heard about them but he didn't know any. I asked him if we could share a short message with him but he didn't have time because he was going to an interview so I asked him if we could send some missionaries to his house later to talk with him and he said yes! So I got his address and we're going to pass it on to some of the missionaries! 

Then when we were at the store we started talking to this other man and instead of us teaching him, he started talking to us about the Bible and I hardly understood anything he said. He talked about Joseph Smith so I pulled out a restoration pamphlet to try to teach him about the restoration and he took it and just kept talking about the Bible. I think he was telling us about how he doesn't believe in the trinity because of something that is said in the Bible. When he said that I was like oh we believe the same thing and then I asked him if we could send some missionaries to talk to him and he was like no I move a lot and then I asked him if we could have his telephone number and he told me his cellphone number was going to change so we spent like a good 20 min talking to this guy about who knows what for nothing. We left him with the restoration pamphlet so I hope maybe he'll read over it and want to know more!