¡No puedo pensar en un título!

Well well well hello dearest everyone, 

When we started working here in Magallanes, we started with the ward list to go and visit those who are not coming, so we were knocking a lot of doors, and cleaning out the list at the same time by writing down if the people didn´t live there, or if they had moved,  or passed away etc.  Well we knocked one door and the woman there immediately let us in, we asked her if she was the woman who we were looking for and she told us that she wasn´t, but that she always opens the door to missionaries and after talking for awhile, we discovered that she also had been baptized when she was 14 and is a member of the church!  

She told us that she LOVED learning from the sister missionaries that taught her when she was 14 and that she participated very actively in the church until she moved away to Argentina to live with her mom, where she stopped going to church.  She said that now she really doesn´t remember anything, but that she remembered that the missionaries found her in a very critical part of her life and had helped her incredibly.  

Well, we have continued teaching over the course of the transfer, and lately she started saying that she would like to go to church.  We had been talking about the family as well because she just went through an incredibly difficult separation with her husband, and they´re deciding now whether they should give it another shot so that they can be a family again.  We talked about the importance of the gospel in the family, and she was always very touched.

The another night, we passed by to see if she had read the Introduction of the Book of Mormon that we had left, and she said she hadn´t, that she really didn´t remember ANYTHING about the Book of Mormon, so we told her we would read it together.  We took turns reading paragraphs in the Intro, and when we finished, we asked her if something had come to her attention, or something she had liked.  She looked up at us and tears were streaming down her face.  We were somewhat surprised because we had just read the Intro and we had no idea why she was crying, but then she said "I don´t remember much, but my heart feels like it´s swelling, and I remember this feeling. I´ve already asked my Heavenly Father if this book is true, and just reading this page and a half, I already know.  I don´t have to ask again because I know it´s true.  I´ve asked before."  

I know The Book of Mormon is true as well, because I have read it, I have thought about it, and I have asked.  The power it brings, and the importance it has in our lives is irreplaceable.  I encourage anyone reading this, to read the Book of Mormon, and then pray to our Father in Heaven and ask Him if it´s true.  He always answers.

I love you all!!!! 

Pictures of all the hermanas here when we had our huge tsunami warning sleepover AND... Torres del Paine, otra vez

Hello dearest everyone!

A very very happy Easter to everyone, there is nothing more wonderful to know than that Christ was resurrected. Because He lives, we will all live again and we have the opportunity to change to become more like Him every day. 

The Magallanes ward is small, as the ward has been dwindling over the years, and we´re at about 25 people every Sunday.  It has been hard for the few faithful members that remain, but their faith truly inspires me.  This week, my companion and I decided to plan an activity for the ward for Easter.  (Here, the missionaries plan, organize and execute the majority of all activities), and so we went to great lengths to plan something incredible for the ward that they could really enjoy.  We planned an Easter egg hunt with tons of chocolate eggs hidden everywhere in the church (those things are EXPENSIVE here) and some plastice eggs with questions about the live of Jesus Christ inside.  We started with the egg hunt and then after, we all got together and we played a jeapordy-like game with the questions.  It went incredibly well and a LOT of people came.  Normally the missionaries activities here have about 8 or 10 people, but FORTY people arrived for the activity, the majority of them less actives.  It was UNPRECEDENTED. And amazing.  My companion and I also decorated, and we decorated the door to the cultural hall as the open tomb of Christ with the stone rolled away with Kraft paper and the fake flowers that are normally in the sacrament meeting.  It looked quite good if I do say so myself.  Afterwards, the members came up to tell us that they had really enjoyed the activity.  At the end we watched part of the movie How to Find Faith in Christ about His death and resurrection.  It was incredible.   

Here in the ward, we have also enfronted many sad situations with people we´re teaching, as alcohol is QUITE the problem here in Chile, but I cannot tell you how it has strengthened my testimony in the commandments.  If EVERYONE could just keep the commandments, they would discover an indescribable peace that can´t be found anywhere else.  That is why Christ sacrificed His life and died for us, so that we have other opportunities to change and keep His commandments.  I know that He is our Savior, and that true and lasting happiness are found only through Him and His gospel.

In other news:  This week we discovered that 1) we have cats living in the ceiling and the stains on the ceiling that we THOUGHT were just stains from the roof leaking are definitely NOT water stains.  We can hear the cats little feet pattering around during the day, and sometimes they get in fights and we feel like they might fall through the ceiling one day.  And 2) we have rats living in the walls and sometimes they come out to sit behind the calefacción to warm up.  We´ve found little bit of crackers or grapes back there too.  MY question is: WHY the cats and rats can´t live in the same spot?! WHY must one live in the ceiling and one live in the walls and have NO contact whatsoever?! Really.

I love you all so much, and can´t wait until I have the opportunity to share my testimony with all of you with something longer than a letter that I have to write in 10ish minutes.  I hope you all had a WONDERFUL Easter and remember the sacrifice of our Savior Jesus Christ.

The first picture is of the tomb with the elders of our ward and also the Hermanas of another ward that we invited to the activity.  And the other is of me and my companion, I don´t know if I´ve ever sent a picture of us.  

Love you all!!!

From Sandy Point

Hello hello hello dearest everyone, 

This week we had interviews with President Rappleye, our mission president, who finishes his mission in June.  Our new mission president is named President Obesos, and he´s from Mexico!!  It will be extremely strange to have a different mission president.  President Rappleye is very business-like and direct and to the point, and has incredible stories.  He´s worked internationally almost all of his professional life, so he and Hermana Rappleye have lived abroad almost the entire time they have been married.  She is incredible and it will be sad to see them go, but if there is one thing that is constant in the mission, it is change.  We adapt.

I do not know how I ran out of time so quickly this week, but I want to send a few pictures, so next week it will be extra long. The first picture is with Angel and his family and the other is from Torres del Paine (it´s going to take a few weeks to get them all in).

I love you all!!! 

Hello dearest everyone, 

First and foremost, a most HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY birthday to my wonderful little smoochie poo Emma Louise tomorrow! I love you Emma!!

Well about 10:30ish Tuesday night, we got a call from our zone leaders.  Well actually they called the two other Hermanas with whom we are living because we didn´t have a cellphone as we had just opened our sector.  I think I might have forgotten to mention that my companion and I are living with another companionship of Hermanas.  Hermana Teeples from Arizona and Hermana Rodriquez from Peru.  I quite enjoy it although the house was REALLY not made for four people and we are sleeping in a room that was very recently a bathroom and we didn´t have beds until a couple days ago.  Apparently an alcoholic lived in the house before too and painted every available surface.  I love it.  Truly I do.  I´m going to miss the mission so much.  ANYWAY, our zone leaders called us Tuesday night and asked us if we had heard about the tsunami warning.  Well we had not since we are completely out of the loop with the news, and the elder, not wanting to scare us told us, "Well there isn´t one, but if you could all prepare emergency backpacks with clothes, food and water, that would be wonderful."  WELL, bien... So we started preparing the backpacks until Hermana Rodriquez said, wait a second.... isn´t it April 1st?  Isn´t that a holiday of jokes in the United States?  This has to be an April Fool´s Day joke.  So we called the elders to tell them HAHA BUT YOU CAN´T FOOL US, until they told us that it wasn´t a joke and actually the tsunami was predicted to arrive in the middle of the night and would come up until one block below from our house and that they really thought it better if we went and slept with the other hermanas in Patagonia for the night.  SO, much sooner than I thought I would, I returned to my lovely sector of Patagonia and all eight hermanas in Punta Arenas slept in the little apartment where I had just lived for five months.  Later we found out that the tsunami was going to be a repercussion from huge earthquakes in the North of Chile.  We are praying for these people, who apparently are still expecting more earthquakes, but we are all fine down here in Punta Arenas.  

Well, this week we have also found a lot of wonderful people and families, which I will have to recount to you all the next week.  But also, Conference was absolutely wonderful. The talks are becoming much more direct.  That means we should all start paying a bit more attention.  We are incredibly lucky to live in an age with living prophets and apostles.  I know they are chosen of God to give us His counsel for our days.  

I love you all!!! 

One day I´m going to send a billion pictures because there are just too many.

HOLA HOLA HOLA DEAREST EVERYBODY!!!

WELL, the last week we went to Torres del Paine, the eighth wonder of the world which was probably the most incredible thing I´ve ever seen in my life.  We also took the most express tour EVER because we had to get back by six to start working, and the tour guides who were driving the bus kept saying just so you all KNOW you´re not going to get to see everything, are you SURE you have to get back by six and WHY and are you SURE.  But we told them that sí o sí we had to get back by six, so we rushed around the park in our bus and when they would park so we could get out and take pictures, they would give us five minutes to do it, so we RUSHED out, frantically took pictures and would rush back into the bus. GO GO GO.  But it was so worth it and I hope with all my heart that I´ll have a chance to go back and go camping or backpacking there someday.  Absolutely incredible.  There is also a hotel there right in the middle of the most beautiful lake I´ve ever seen, but you have to be VERY loaded to stay there.  Maybe I´ll just work really hard here so that my mansion in heaven looks like that.  ANYWAY, many pictures to follow because I can´t describe it.  there was a LOT of wind, so there is not one single picture without my hair all over the place, but STILL.  The second picture is in Puerto Natales, a little town on the way to Torres del Paine.  I´ll be sending more pictures.

WELL this week me and my new companion, Hermana Palma (from Santiago Chile), opened a new sector in the ward Magallanes.  It was a very new experience as, normally, at least one of the companions knows where they´re going or what they´re doing.  But both of us were RATHER lost, but we printed out the list of members in the ward (the majority of which are less actives) and a map and went to find them all.  We were also just talking with everyone and knocking on doors and the whole shebang.  One day we didn´t enter any houses or sit down anywhere, but we taught more lessons in one day than I have in any other day of my mission.  All in the doors or the streets or through windows.  I came back rather frozen (it had suddenly decided to become really cold the last half of the day).  My companion just finished her training in the mission, so only has three months in the mission, but is quite a good missionary and very nice and so I have a feeling this will be a great transfer.  The ward needs an incredible amount of help because there just aren´t people there, but I have a good feeling about it, and lots of faith.  There were so many people who were so grateful that sisters had arrived because the elders can´t enter in houses with women alone, but we can, so there were a lot of really grateful women alone in their houses.  There was one woman (who has a little daughter) who was alone and told us that she has depression, and hasn´t been able to do much (I also believe she has another mental issue) and her house was a complete disaster, nobody had washed the dishes or changed the sheets or swept the floor or cleaned the bathroom in a LONG TIME, and she asked us if we could help her clean because alone she just doesn´t have the energy.  We did so, and it was a very long process, but she was so grateful and kept thanking us the whole time and the house looked MUCH better when we were done.  Truly there comes a joy through plain, hard work.  Thanks Mom for teaching me how to scrub floors, wash dishes, clean bathrooms and all that jazz.  Wow, now I´ve said thanks for that AND for making me practice piano.  What is this mission doing to me.  

Anyway, I want to leave you all with one of my favorite quotes and the reason why I´m on a mission sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ:

“The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of the people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. … Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature” - President Spencer W. Kimball

I love you all so much!!!!!