In the story of Don Quixote or the play Man of La Mancha, it´s about a man (Don Quixote) who´s been driven so mad by all the evil in the world, that he has deluded himself into thinking he is a knight errant, and dashes about fighting windmills and looking for his nemesis, The Great Enchanter.  He sees the world not as it is, but as it should be.  Most people think he´s crazy and turn him away or laugh at him, but one scullery maid he calls his lady and treats her like one, and because he sees her as she could be and not as she is, he changes how she views herself and how she decides to act.  And that´s what I´ve been trying to do.  When you see people as they can become, suddenly their ability to become that is so much greater.  Though I feel like I´m going mad sometimes and like I´m fighting windmills, I try to think of all these people as they can become.

Chile is beautiful and as I flew in, I looked over fields of green and tons of cows and I was reminded of Darrowby from All Creatures Great and Small.  The area that I am in is a bit more rural, and there is ony one branch for our entire district area, whereas a lot of Chile has wards.  There are only three active members in my entire sector, though there are quite a few inactive members, so we´ve been focusing on reactivating a lot of people.  The houses are made out of corrugated tin or wood planks and I´m constantly humbled by these people who have so much less than me.  We taught a family yesterday who couldn´t even buy wood to warm their house.  It was freezing. All of the houses are warmed by combustíones, which are basically like woodburning stoves.  Every morning my companion and I go out to collect firewood to start the fire, and it is absolutely freezing.  Since we can´t keep the fire going during the night, we just get lots and lots of blankets and wear about four pairs of socks.  Apparently I´m going to have to learn how to chop firewood.  All of Chile smells like a campfire, that´s just the smell of the air.

My companion, Hermana Navarro is from Honduras and speaks about two words in English, so it´s been pretty hard because she does NOT speak the Spanish I learned in the MTC and neither do the Chileans.  It´s very hard to understand, which makes it hard to be useful during lessons, but I´m trying my best to stay positive and patient about learning the language.  We sing a hymn before every lesson though, and many people have asked me to just sing afterwards, so I´m trying to sing my way into these people´s hearts because I really can´t talk to them.  We taught a woman and her daughter this week and after, she asked me to come sing for her tía who is bedridden and basically dying.  I sang How Great Thou ARt (in Spanish of course) and her aunt started crying, though she coudldn´t talk much. it was a beautiful experience. Somehow it made the whole night f freezing and being turned away from doors worth it.  

Also one night, my companion and I had been turned away from many doors and we had no appointments, so we said a prayer that we would be lead to those who needed us.  Twenty minutes later, as we were walking down kind of a dark street, we found an older woman who was drunk and we helped her home. she kept saying her mother had died, i´ll finish the story next week, i have to go! i love you all! i can´t write separate ltters any more!