9/11/17
Hello!
So this is the first week of transfer 9 now. It's crazy. Time is really flying. I'm going to apologize in advance for the background noise. I forgot to record in the morning and now we're on our way to the cyber, the computer place, to write you guys. So now that I'm here walking, there's going to be a bunch of background noise and I'm probably going to be super scatterbrained but hopefully you guys can understand what's going on.
So yeah, we had transfers this week. I came to Rancagua. This is my first time in Rancagua in the mission. I'm in a branch here. It's a pretty big branch, definitely bigger than San Clemente but smaller than Buin, the last branch I was in. It's called Baquedano. It's pretty centric, central, something like that. It's the only sector in our Zone that is actually here in Rancagua. I'm a zone leader again here with Elder Davis from Washington. He's a stud. I like him. He's a solid 7 out of 10 hahaha. No, he's awesome, he's awesome.
Got here on Tuesday. To be straight, I've gotta comment on the conditions of the house that the last Elder that was there kind of left it. Not in tip top shape I would say. So we did a little bit of cleaning, did a little...honestly it was basically an exorcism of the house...because of all the stuff we had to clean but we almost had to do a real exorcism I guess because it sounds like the house is haunted apparently. Nah they were just saying some weird stuff was happening with the house before the change and the change before that. Having some weird stuff happen with an investigator but I won't go into too much detail. But honestly I haven't seen any weird stuff happen I think we're gonna be just fine. Basically the bathroom was really dirty. The sink had been clogged for like a week and it wasn't fixed still. So we got here and I spent the first couple hours cleaning like the necessities and then today I finished off the rest.
The sector seems really good. It's like a suburb. There's only one supermarket and there's bunch of chinese food stores. It seems like there's a lot of Chinese food in this sector. So that's kinda cool. But a lot more suburb. I've always been in sectors that are a lot more central that have more stores and a main street and stuff like that but this is my first sector that is just suburb, just houses basically. We got bikes. My companion's bike was broken so we had to take them to get fixed earlier this week to the office. It's kind of nice, the office is really close. I got to see my boy, Elder Robinson, who is from my CCM, MTC group, who I haven't seen up until this point in the mission. So it was cool I got to see him. I got to see him in the leadership council as well.
This week we had a lot of meetings. Tuesday we had changes, Wednesday we had a meeting to set goals and plans as a zone, and Thursday we had leadership council with all the zone leaders and sister leaders. And then Saturday we had to give a training to the District leaders and tomorrow we're going to have interviews with President. So that'll be fun. I'm excited for that. Looking at the zone (stats?), it looks a little more complicated as a zone than Curico. I don't know. Curico was kind of an easier zone than here. Last change there weren't any baptisms and it was really tough to get people to church in our sector last change. But we're already looking up. This first Sunday we had a couple investigators in sacrament meeting. One of the sectors already had a baptism. So we're already seeing improvements in the first week. We are already being blessed. I obviously didn't do anything...I just barely got here. We're just getting blessed to start out the change. So that was cool.
Today we did a pday activity and made Choripan which are like a hot dog with a sausage but a different kind of bread and then you put an aji which is like a spicy salsa. I don't know how to explain a lot of the food down here. You just have to see it to know what it's like but it's pretty common to see down here so that's a pretty common zone activity that we do. We did that and played football.
So our zone is almost pure new people. Every companionship, except for my companion and I, is a training companionship. So there are two companionship that have elders in their second change in their mission and then we have 3 who are brand new. We had a Filipino and two gringos. So we have a lot of new people. Hope we can keep them all excited. Not let them "die". Keep everybody, give them a lot of energy and an optimistic first look at the mission is the idea.
Other things that happened in the week: We got rejected pretty hard a lot of times. We've been looking a lot for new people. Both Elder Davis and I, in our sectors, have had a lot of success in finding people. But this week, we both felt like we were working hard, not only hard but really smart, but we both got shot down pretty hard a couple times. One investigator who had a baptismal date, I hadn't met him before, but we went to his house, and we called for him, (you yell, you don't knock on the door), so we called out "ALLO!" and we yelled like 5 times and then called him a couple times, but this guy did not...well we passed by his house a couple times and we were like "we know you see us." We just wanted to talk to him but if he didn't want to talk to us that's fine, but we don't want to waste our time passing by his house if he's not gonna want anything. But he came out and he seemed really mad. He came out and threw the Book of Mormon at us. He like shoved it through the fence and was like, "I DON'T WANT ANYTHING ELSE! STOP COMING BY MY HOUSE, STOP COMING AROUND HERE. STOP COMING CLOSE! JUST GET OUT!" I was like, " Oh, OK." That was kind of rude, I don't know. One that was out of nowhere. Usually people are pretty nice. If they don't want anything, then they say they don't want anything right away. So it's kind of weird to have somebody who's kind of receptive at first saying, "yeah, yeah," and then they have such a big change and be like that to be that rude I guess. I guess
But I guess I'm kind of spoiled. I know there are missions where people are a lot ruder than that. ...We're blessed. We're lucky.
I've got a funny experience. So we were contacting the other day and we go to call at a house and say, "Allo!" But we had been saying a lot of prayers that day, trying to go by the spirit. So Elder Davis, my companero, my companion, he goes to say "Allo!" but instead of saying "Allo!" he yells "Padre.." Like he was going to say Heavenly Father but yelling it...like he was going to start a prayer but yelling. but he was saying hi to the house, like knock on the door. Ahhhh it was soooo so funny. So so funny. I just about died.
That's pretty much all I can think of for now to tell you guys. I'm optimistic for the change. It looks good. A lot of good missionaries in the zone. The district leaders we have working with us are awesome, awesome people. Elder Rogers and Elder ? are the names and they're solid. And another weird thing is all those trainees...there's a bunch of them from Utah. I have never had so many people from Utah in my zone. There's one from Salem, one from St. George, one from Orem and then me. And then there are two more gringos, one from California and one from Washington. There are only 2 Latinos, 3 Brazilians and 5-6 gringos. Which is really weird. I've never had a zone like that. My last zone I was like the only or 2 gringos. I don't know, there weren't a lot of us. But that's cool.
I love you guys. Take care. Read your scriptures. Say your prayers do all that good stuff obviously. Look for ways to help people. I hope everyone's ok with all the natural disasters that are going on up there. I've heard a lot about the hurricanes especially and a lot of crazy stuff that's happening. But we can always trust that God will take care of us when we're doing what he asks. Or if we are in a situation where it doesn't look like he's taking care of us, it's not so because sometimes we've gotta learn to do things for ourselves too.
Take care. Ciao!
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