Photos

Woodburning Stove

Her companion, Hermana Navarro

Liesl's childhood friend, Hermana Badal 

BREAKING NEWS PEOPLE!!!!  I now have an hour on the computer each week AND I can send as many emails to whoever I want!!! So por faVOR send me emails!  And i can respond now!  And now, moving on...

When I was in the MTC, one Sunday we watched a talk that Elder Holland gave at the MTC a couple years back, and in his talk he said that he has never understood why people have said that they´ll go back to real life after their mission, because a mission is as real as life is going to get.  And I can´t tell you how true those words are.  

Yesterday my companion and I went to Sunday dinner at the house of the President of the Relief Society and her son, who is the President of the Young Men´s.  He recently returned home from a mission early because he was severely injured and had to return home early to recuperate.  Eating dinner with us was the sister of the President of the Relief Society, who is not a member.  As we were eating dinner, my companion asked her if she had ever read the Book of Mormon and she said no, but that she respected the Mormons for what they believed.  She then went on to describe what she believed, which was a very vague sense of God in everything and metaphysics.  The son then began to talk to her about the things she believed and answer her questions with scriptures from the Bible and Book of Mormon to try and explain the answers to the questions she has.  When he started doing this, I was thinking a bit like, oh brother, why does he bother, she´s never going to change her opinions.  

He then bore his testimony with a very personal story.  He said his mother was in a very serious car accident and when he arrived at the hospital, his mother was in serious condition.  He went home that night alone (his dad had left them both earlier for another woman and his mom divorced him) and he said that he prayed more fervently than he ever has, that if his mom would live, he would preach the gospel to everyone.  When he went back to the hospital the next day, his mother was alive and said to him, thank you for your prayer and then repeated the exact words he had said in his prayer.  He then said, And that is how I know the church is true.  His mother and aunt were both crying by this point.

He then began to talk to his aunt about her son who had been murdered a few years back.  His aunt had said before that she didn´t think God was really more than the nature around us and our souls stopped existing after we died.  He told her that he knew that her son still existed, that she would see him again and that she would be with him forever and have the same happiness forever that she felt when her son was born.  His aunt then said, but why me, why not so many other people, why would God let this happen to me.  The son then said, I asked myself the same questions.  Why me, why did my dad leave and my mom and I were left to ourselves.  Why didn´t I have shoes or notebooks for school, why did I have to come home early from my mission.  Everybody experiences trials in their life, but I know that my Savior lives, and I know that I will see him one day.  I know that your son exists and that you will be with him forever.  Believe me.  Believe me that you can have this happiness.  He continued to bear one of the most powerful testimonies I have ever heard. Then he turned to me and said, I don´t have the honor of wearing a plaque anymore, but Hermana Nielsen does.  She has the power and authority of God to teach you how you can be happy in this life and be with your son forever.  She is an angel walking the earth.

I have never felt such a strong sense of responsibility in my life.  I felt a tangible weight settle upon my shoulders and an incredible sense of why I am here.  The past week had been pretty difficult.  I was laughably optimistic to think that half the branch are inactive members.  It´s so much more.  We ran out of wood this week before we could buy more and early morning study sessions were rather cold.  Almost every appointment we had fell through this week and we walked up and down trying to find people.  But in that moment, my entire perception was changed, truly.  His aunt then said very quietly, I believe you.  I have never felt such an incredible spirit.  

I know this gospel is true, I have to go but I love you all and send me emails!

Arriving at the airport in Chile

Hello everyone, it´s been a great week! Quite rainy and all, with lots of mud, but it´s all very exciting.  I really love the rain, it makes everything more exciting.  Gathering firewood in a downpour at 7 in the morning or 9:30 at night is not my favorite though.  Especially because then the fire won´t light because the wood is extremely wet, but really it´s fine. I think I´m going to try and invest in some slippers today because my socks get RATHER dirty because our floor is rather dirty, what with the mud, ash and kindling that seem to be everywhere despite our best efforts to sweep regularly. The people of Chile are as warm and friendly as ever, and I can usually collect my dinner by the time I get home (an orange at one house, a slice of bread at another).  

This week my companion and I had a GREAT experience with a less active family in our sector.  There are about fifty people who attend the branch regularly and then about ten or twenty (on a good day) who come every month or so.  We share our branch with a companionship of elders, and they have most of the active members in their sector (we have about four) I cannot begin to tell you how many less active members there are, but they are still coming out the wazoo.  Our whole mission is like this, and our mission president has started a new program where we assign these less active members different things to do in church each week to encourage them to attend.  Many of them have strong testimonies of the gospel, but have even more excuses as to why they can´t go.  Being lazy is an acceptable excuse around these parts and I´ve heard it rather too many times.  It is always really fun to teach them though because they agree with everything we say, it´s just the doing it that´s tough.  It´s a good lesson for me to learn.  It is NEVER enough simply to know something, you have to APPLY what you know.

Anyway, we had taught this family a couple times before, but only the mother and her two teenage sons because the father always works late.  But this week we were able to catch both him and his brother (who lives close by) along with his entire family, and it was one of the best lessons we have ever had.  We talked about the Restoration of the priesthood and the power of the authority of God, and both him and his brother said that they´ve been thinking about preparing to receive the priesthood.  This family hasn´t been to church in three years, but the Spirit was incredibly strong in the lesson, and I think we finally found a family that understands the importance of the knowldge that they have through the gospel.  And this week, they attended church! It was great! Anyway, our goal for them is to have them sealed in the temple.  

Dessert of the week: Leche Asada - I don´t know if there are different kinds, but the one I ate was caramely 

I have to go I love you all!!!

Sometimes I chuckle to myself when I think about how I thought the MTC was hard.  HA! Ah so young and naive.  You think you understand a mission is hard, but you can´t really understand in what way until you´re here.  But amidst the hard times, there are those moments where you see eternity and you understand a little bit more why you are here.  

This week we focused a lot on the less actives in our sector.  I will venture to say that about half of the members in our branch are less active.  They are coming out the wazoo people.  We have about thirty five less actives in our sector that we know about.  And about four active members.  I´ve come to realize that my mission is going to include a LOT of reactivation.  I keep thinking about the seminary answers that everyone made fun of: pray, read the scriptures and go to church.  So simple, but let me tell you, those three things make all the difference in the world.  I would give a whole lot for the people here to understand those three things.  There is a word, a Chileno word, Porfiado, which is basically someone who knows they should do something, but doesn´t do it.  That might sum up this week pretty well.  

But when someone starts doing these things, oh how you can tell the difference!  One woman we are teaching, who wants to get baptized, her husband and daughter are members, but she can´t get baptized until her husband obtains a divorce from the woman he is actually currently married to.  It´s a very strange situation, but this week, their family started reading and praying together, and oh how you can see the difference! She is so much happier!

We are still working with the eleven year old who is going to be baptized, and we had a great family home evening with them and his whole family attended church this week, it was great!

Some things about Chile that I´ve forgotten to include:

1. There are dogs everywhere, I have not yet met one person who doesn´t own a dog. There are dogs just roaming the streets, ugly dogs, beautiful dogs, dogs that nip at your heels and dogs that just bark like mad when you pass.  It´s like that story with those dogs that say do you like my hat? no i do not like your hat.  Dogs everywhere people.

2. Semola con leche! Look it up! Delicious.  With caramel sauce.

3. Fields of cows and horses! I´m going to try to send a picture next week! 

4.  The houses here look like an old western town, inside and outside. All the houses are warmed by a woodburning stove and all the food is cooked there.  I´m pretty experienced with starting a fire with matches now I would say.

5. The main meal is lunch here, we eat rather a ton of food at about twelve, and then just work through the night until we come home at about 9:30 and eat a snack.  My family will be interested to know, I haven´t eaten eel yet, but a lot of chicken, rice and potatoes.

6.  I can see Volcano Osorno from my house!  

I love you all! The language is coming, hopefully.  I haven´t spoken English to anyone in a month and I think I´m going crazy!  I´ve caught myself thinking in Spanish HELP!! 

Love you all! 

Hello everyone!  I love you all!  This week we had someone accept our baptismal invitation - he´s eleven years old and his family is all members, but inactive.  To get baptized, he has to come to church at least three times, so we are working with his family to do this. It´s really exciting! I hope that his family will start attending regularly as a result of this.

We´ve also been teaching an older women who is basically Mama Odie.  She´s the woman whose aunt I sang too.  She´s awesome and lives in a house that kind of looks like Mama Odie´s, minus the snake and the bathtub of gumbo, but she does have about eleven cats.  She´s hilarious and loves when we teach her.  She loves everything we teach and acts like it is the most natural thing in the world and that it is absolutely beautiful and wonderful, but I really don´t know how she really feels about it.  We invited her to baptism and she didn´t respond for forever and then said, chica, I can´t promise much.  She can´t leave her house because she cares for her aunt, so I really don´t know what´s going to happen to her.  She is incredibly confusing but I love her and she acts like I sing like a star on Broadway.  She keeps telling me I have the voice of Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music, which is an enormous exaggeration, but apparently the Sound of Music is bound to follow me, even when I´m not telling people my name is Liesl.  

This week has been exceedingly rainy, and I sleep in an attic room that looks like Sarah Crewe´s attic room in A Little Princess (minus an Indian man with a monkey living across the way), so I fall asleep every night to the rain just pounding the roof.  One morning I woke up around four because the wind was howling furiously and I was positive the roof was going to collapse under the rain and wind.  It´s incredible.  

The rain does mean it´s hard to get people to church though.  Most people walk, and when it´s pouring rain, no one is very motivated to get there.  

The language is still rather confusing.  Yesterday an investigator in Princples of Gospel class asked me something, and I couldnt´understand so I just said Sí.  I thought he might be asking if it was raining cause he was looking at the window.  Turned out he was asking me if I had ever done drugs (because we were talking about the word of wisdom).  Confusion ensued.  So basically I´m a wonderful influence. But it´s getting better! 

I love you all, and I want you all to know that I have an incredible testimony of this gospel and I have already seen it change lives, I´ll write more next time! love you all!