Dear Family,
We hope all is well with all of you. We are so grateful that we are able to visit with you periodically on the telephone and occasionally skype and get to see you. It seems we are so far away that is nice to forget the distance and see you and talk to you. It was fun to watch the egg fight on Easter Sunday. That certainly brought back a lot of memories.
We had a very busy week with eight missionaries going home and ten missionaries coming into the mission. This is called Cambios in Spanish, but Transfers in English. That usually involves us with meals, transportation, and shopping for three days. This time, because of conference they had Leadership Council on Thursday for all of the Zone leaders. That is also a very busy day for us, as 34 missionaries converge upon the office for the day and we have to prepare food for them.
Friday would have normally been a rest day from the four days previous, but with General conference coming up, we were trying to get quite a few investigators to watch conference. We had invited ten, and had five come. They seemed to enjoy it. We hope we can more forward in their teaching and get them baptized into the church. Our investigators are very special people, and it would make our mission worth it they would become members of this wonderful church.
I had to go downtown today (they call it Centro here) and I always try to find someone to talk to along the way that might be interested in the church. I have usually been successful. We made three contacts today that gave us their name and addresses and wanted to have the elders come and teach them. It was interesting that in the one case, the two elders were walking a head of me and I noticed a woman on a bench with another lady watch the elders pass by and look at me like she wanted to say something. I stopped and walked over to her and introduced myself. The elders then came over to help me with my Spanish. The lady (Vitoria Tablete) indicated that she had had the missionary lessons 15 years ago and was about to be baptized, but was not. She indicated that she has attended many churches since then, but had not found one that compared to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and wanted to have the missionaries come by and teach her again. That sounds like a pretty good contact and will be turned over to the sister missionaries to the missionaries in that sector tomorrow.
It is always a struggle here trying to make contact with people here. For some reason they do not want to tell you they are not interested in your message after you have met with them, so they just quit answering their phone when you call. We do not know that they are no longer interested, so keep trying to contact them thinking they are gone, or there phone is off or something. In some cases I find they block your number so that it will never ring through from your phone. You finally concluded that they may not be interested. We never like to give up on people, so you keep trying until you are forced to give up. I wish they were more open and honest that her than letting you continue to try to contact them. We have one or two like that right now who we thought were very interesting in learning about the church and then one day they do not keep their appointment, but you can't reach them any more.
We noticed that it is getting cooler today. Normally we have our doors open to cool the apartment down, but today, we have the doors closed because it is getting colder outside. In Utah it is Spring right now, but here it is fall. We will never have snow, and I doubt I will every wear more than a suit coat during the winter, but we have noticed the change in the temperature. I was thinking today that when we arrived in chile it was winter. We then had summer here and now we are going into winter again. When winter is over here, we will be leaving for Utah (November or December) and be going into winter in Utah. There will be thee winters and one summer.
We really enjoyed the talks at General Conference. Some of them were very outstanding. Some buoyed us up in our missionary efforts. We have to keep trying and doing our best, and that is what matters. Success is not measured by by the number of baptisms but by how much effort we put forth. We have set a goal to try and have 6 baptisms before we leave. This mission has about 400 baptisms per year. Since there are 200 missionaries, each missionary averages two baptisms per year. Since we will only be her 18 months we felt we should have 5 baptisms to be equal to the other full time missionaries. They do have an advantage in that the are working full time, and we only have evenings after office hours and weekends to find our people. It is a lofty goal, but we are hoping to reach it.
We love and miss yo all.
With much Love,
Mom and Dad
María opening her birthday present.
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