week 83: A Really Good Week

March 26, 2018

Hello everyone, Elder Olson here. this is week 6 of transfer 13.

This week was a good one. A really good one. I don't know if this sector has seen this good of a week in longer than 6 months. We found a lot of people. We had quite a few people in church and we have some new people who are working toward baptism so we are really excited about that. It's been a really great week.

Towards the beginning of the week, we met with the Nuñes family, who I think I mentioned last time, that they came to church. The dad is a less active member but has been inactive for over 15 years and his wife is not a member and neither are their kids. So we've been working with them. The Branch President and his wife have been really supportive. They gave us the reference so they've been really involved in the teaching process with them. So that's been really good.

So this week they accepted a baptismal date for the 28th of march. 

We weren't able to meet with Darling (I think I mentioned her) because she has had to work. She wasn't able to come to church because she worked. She's a nurse and a nursing student right now. So she was down in Curico and got called into work on Sunday, so we were kind of sad about that. But her mom, Karen, the one who I mentioned about with the prayer last week, who gave the really awesome prayer, she came and brought her little boy. She's a less active member and is really great. Also, a convert, who the first time I came out to Licantén, (if you remember about a year and a half ago, I came out to Licantén for one day with Elder Pollard (?) on a special intercambio, exchange) and that day we had a baptismal interview out at the beach with a kid named Mario. Mario has a lot of problems in his life, but he came to church this past week for the first time in quite some time. So we were really excited that he was able to come out. We've only been able to see him a couple times. We don't get out to the beach very much here. I'm sure a lot of you think we're crazy for that but it's a really small town out there. 

So that has been cool. That's a little bit about the work this week.

On Friday, we had an Elder's Quorum activity, something they've been trying to get done for a little while here. We had a BBQ. It was AWESOME! The food was really good. It was just pork and what's called Choripan (basically just sausage and bread), but it was done kind of a different way. Normally, the sausages are pre-made in these little like individual, like a really short, fat hot dog, but a lot more sausage flavor. But this time, the way they cooked it, they had a really long one and they rolled it up in this big spiral and stuck wooden sticks through it and put it onto the BBQ. Today we kind of copied them. We did our own little Choripan BBQ in the house and it turned out AWESOME! We did it Gringo Style too. We bought BBQ sauce and threw cheese on it and this hot pepper sauce that I made. So yeah that was pretty good.

Right now we are in the church because at the library, they are closed all day and that is the only place that has a computer in Licantén. So me and Elder Hiatt are going to take turns on the computer here in the chapel. So we're just hanging out here.

Other that that, this week's been pretty chill. I have a few more pictures this week. I realized I haven't been sending too many so we've been out in this place called Placilla a bunch. That's where most of the pictures will come from. And Placilla is basically this tiny little one street, well, it's kind of just everywhere between here and Hualañé, the other town I mentioned. In between is called Placilla. The houses are really far apart from each other. It's really rural out there. But it's really pretty. I enjoyed being out there. That's where Darling lives and another investigator with a baptismal date named Juan. Everybody out there is super receptive and nice. There are quite a few parts of this sector that are like that. Licantén not so much, because the missionaries have been pretty limited to working in just Licantén before now so it's been pretty knocked out. Everybody comes and has worked this tiny little town over and over and over again. So when we get out of the town a little bit, we are in places where the nearest missionaries are 2 hours away and so if the missionaries from Licantén haven't talked to them, nobody has talked to them. And so we found some pretty receptive people out there.

One of them, her name's Evelyn, we contacted in the plaza here in Licantén a little while ago and she said we could pass by her house in Placilla. A lot of the time when we contact people who live in a place where we don't stop and proselyte often, we don't always do the best job at getting out to them. Mostly for the sake of time and money, we can't just be using our time stopping by people's houses who live twenty minutes apart. So if we do visit them, we have to get ahold of them by phone. But Evelyn, we said we were going to pass by one day and we did not pass by. And while we were looking for another investigator out in Placilla, we had forgotten she lived there (it had been about a month since we contacted her) we were looking for another investigator and we came across her but we didn't recognize her. She was like, "Hey how are you? Oh you finally found my house." I was like "I don't know who you are." We didn't really remember her. We reintroduced ourselves, I guess. I felt pretty bad about not remembering her. But she was really nice. She let us in. We had to teach her on her porch because her husband wasn't there, but we shared something short with her and set and appointment for this week to go back and teach the whole family. And she has cousins from Santiago who will be coming down here during this next weekend. So they'll be here for General Conference, which will be cool.

So that's been our week. There hasn't been anything else particularly interesting that I can think of. Hold on just a sec.

Oh yeah, at the Branch BBQ we had some investigators come, a group of Haitians.  I'll see if I can get one of the pictures to send that they supposedly sent me, we'll see. All of the Haitians who are investigating the Church that live in Licantén, I think we found the majority of them, we've been trying to teach them. They're all friends at this point. They've all met each other by either coming to church, or because it's a pretty small town. Pretty easy to notice other Haitians. So they all came. There were about 5 of them. Even though they didn't speak much Spanish, they had a pretty good time at the activity this week and we had a few of them in church as well. 

So yeah, that's it. You guys all have a nice week. Love you guys. Take care. Bye!

Elder Olson

Video of the Haze (and Frogs)

Out in Placilla

Elder Hiatt and Elder Olson

Elder Olson said, "Is this picture hipster or what? Not even trying..."

week 55: Hello Rancagua!

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!