Week 7

First week out here in the real world

Hey Everyone!

Life is crazy! I left the MTC Tuesday morning and got to the mission home and got assigned to my trainer Elder Ramirez! He is a good guy! He has been out here for about 15 months. He is Chilean so he speaks super fast and mumbles a lot so that it's so hard to understand him. Haha. I thought I knew Spanish pretty well until I got out here the first day and heard people speak. The first few days I got wrecked and just nodded and said "si" to everything people said—but I can understand them more and more each day. People that have teeth are a lot easier to understand, which is actually more rare than to find you'd think, haha.

Our area is super poor. It's crazy how different it is here. We live in a members house on the 3rd floor, and it's super trashy but we have hot water!!! kind of... it's this little electric thing in the shower head, and it you touch it you get electrocuted, and its not even 6 feet high so I have to duck so I don't shock myself all the time. My comp is really nice but he's a cochino (which means dirty person). So basically in all the extra time we have I am just cleaning the house.

Our ward is great! Lots of members—the Bishop pulled a fast one on me and told me to speak for 5 mins in sacrament meeting which was really hard and scary but I pulled through, haha. We do a lot of work with less active members here. Basically half of all of our missionary work is teaching and visiting less actives. People here have faith and believe, but they don't act on it and it just dies. They need to read James 2:11-15 "faith without works is dead." It's hard to teach them the importance of obedience.

We have a few people that are progressing really well though—one family, Gustavo and his children have a baptismal date for this Saturday the 24. He is keeping his commitments and sees the importance of obeying commandments, so thats pretty exciting. Moises has a baptismal date for the next Saturday after that but he just doesn't show up to church. It's really frustrating because in our lessons you can sense him feeling the Spirit and believing and having a desire to live the Gospel but he won't act on it so I don't know what will happen with him. So, all is well here! Spanish is coming along, although it is super frustrating at times, and we are working hard! 

-Elder Hale