Email September 17th
Well another week of contacting, and visiting the old sector. Things got really weird in Los Pensamientos. They pulled out every single old elder from there, and no one knew where anyone was at. Pres sent me back on special divisions so that I can help repair the damages that were done. It was a mess, seriously. No one was getting visited because everyone was still trying to find them.
Temple today! I decided to do something weird before going this time, I came up with a specific question about some doubts that I had and prayed that I would get a response. After going through and reading the scriptures in the celestial room, I found my answer! It was Jesus healing the inflicted man on the Sabbath, one of the first times he did it. It was super cool how that just stuck out to me.
We contacted a pretty cool guy today after getting back from the temple! he spoke almost perfect English, and had some pretty cool ideas about life. He didn't believe in god, but he knew the concept of karma pretty well. We gave him a Book of Mormon and encouraged him to read.
Email September 24th
The beginning of this change started good, until...
"Hola Elder Faber! How're you doing?"
It was my zone leader calling us up for the changes (translated from Spanish), so we didn't know if we were leaving or going until this phone call. So when Duenas handed me the phone I almost died. I kept thinking "no, no! I'm going to be transferred!" So the conversation continued, he asked how my day was, the sector, and then my heart dropped...
"So I'm calling to let you know that your are training. In a whitewash. Do you know what a whitewash is?"
I thought to myself "Ah crap..." Whitewashes I've heard suck, beyond belief. You don't have an area book, you don't know anyone in the ward, and you have no one to teach, so its just straight contacts for days until you can find someone.
"Also, President has a calling especially for you! He wants you to also be the next Assistant to the President!"
I died. Almost literally. I ONLY HAVE 8 MONTHS? WHAT THE HECK IS HE THINKING?
And then I heard laughing upstairs. Then it hit me, maybe this is a lie? I then looked at the caller ID and it said "Nocedal 2", or the other Elders that live with us.
Not the zone leaders.
It was them the entire time.
Fun story to start off the email. This week has been pretty good! We did a lot of contacts and had a couple of good ones. There was a family that we ran into that the mom was helping her kids choose religions, and then we showed up! She got interested and hopefully is bringing her kid to church this Sunday to get acquainted!
Also this last week the 18th happened, or in other words, Chile's day of Independence. In all honesty, no one really did anything. They all locked themselves up in their houses and refused to come out. Our bishop saw us on the streets just suffering to get into houses that he just let us in to eat Empinadas. That was pretty fun, we did a bunch of family activities and some of his less active family members came over so we were able to get a lesson in at that house.
This week we are going to try to break our lesson count. We average about 9 to 12 lessons a week, and those are terrible numbers (average in a lot of sectors unfortunately), and we started this week with a pretty good number of lessons. So we are hoping we can get around 18 lessons this week, hopefully higher. The problem here is that when you try to contact someone's door, they see you're a missionary and they just either 1: flip you off, or 2: give the catholic finger, which is them shaking their head and waving their pointer finger back and forth. Because of that, we invented a game called "golf". If they just give us the finger, we play golf, or in other words, we throw pass along cards at their door from the fence, and whoever can get the card to hit the door first wins. I'm beginning to become a pass along card ninja!
Oh last thing, apparently there's 2 menos activos that no missionary have ever been able to talk to. And both are computer nerds. I finally got to talk to Justin, the first one. He's super nice, born in Utah and speaks English perfectly, along with
Spanish. And then there's Thomas. Duenas and Anderson told me that he's just a punk that just hates people, but he loves computers. Anderson did divisions with Nikko, a kid in our ward. They went to his house and Nikko and Thomas just talked about video games for a while and different types of graphics cards. Nikko told me he got super confused. Apparently that's where I come in... I am the key.
We were doing contact practices in the house, and it was my turn to go. Anderson was pretending to be the person at the door and I was contacting him. So I tried to convince him of the validity of our message, and I tried to give him a resturacion pamphlet. Didn't turn out very well. So he told me that we are going to switch over to English, but this time try to sell me a computer. I convinced him on the first go without stuttering and breaking down. he then compared it to the gospel. I need to know more about the gospel than computers, but if I can, compare the gospel to a computer to start off, so I can get all of the key points figured out in a format that is nice and presentable. He then encouraged me to read the Book of Mormon in Spanish whenever I have free time.
That guy is super cool. I'm getting a lot of help here with confidence and spiritual growth. It reminds me of my blessing that President Pope gave me, about heading to my companions advice... The gospel really works miracles, doesn't it?
