Courtney's Week #51

First off, I just want to take a guess at the reason Teri is going to email us, is Sam engaged? I definitely
need to at least see a picture before I will approve anything.

So, guess what changes were today and...I´m TRAINING!! The new missionaries get here tomorrow and I will be training one of them, I don´t know who, I don´t even know if it will be a gringa or latina,
but I am super excited!

Oh, I guess some of you might be more concerned about "the earthquake". Well I´m not sure exactly what they call an earthquake. I haven´t heard of an earthquake at all, but we did have temblores, or
trembles, that were super strong and I guess could have been called earthquake. The first one was Saturday at about 4:30 in the morning. The movement was pretty strong, strong enough that a few things in our
department fell from their places, but there also a lot of noise, it was like the earth was angry! It was a huge growl or something, my companion is a pretty sound sleeper and so she didn´t wake up until
the noise started, it scared her and she leaped onto my bed and held on to me with a death grip, even after the temblor passed. It only lasted like a minute in total, (well at least the part that I was awake for).

The second temblor happened Sunday afternoon, we were teaching a lesson outside in the country part of our sector, usually all of the little temblors happen in the night time, but this was the strongest
that we´ve had here during the day. It was pretty cool, you could actually see all the trees moving and stuff, its almost as if the surface of the earth turns to disturbed jello, all jiggly and everything. It´s pretty cool, but no one died and it wasn´t that big. Here in Chile there are lots of temblors, but some are just stronger than others.

Oh, so other news. I got bit by some sort of bug or spider. On the bright side, doesn´t look like it was one of the poisonous ones because, well, I can still breath. But, my whole neck is red and irritated and it is spreading to my arms as well. I forgot to bring Benadryl with me to the Santiago and I won´t be returning to Los Andes and my stash of Benadryl until tomorrow night when I have my new companion. So we are just going to hope that by that time I´m still alive. I´ll let you know how that goes.

Well, I will have to let you know about my new companion next week, when I have actually met her. Ojala qué todo esté bien con ustedes!
Les Amo Muchisimo!! Cuidense mucho!

Hermana Evans

Walker's Week #57

So this week was changes and my companion had changes. My new companion is Elder Luna, he is from Oaxaca, Mexico. He has like three months in the mission or something like that, as in I'm his second companion. So this week we had a baptism which really is a miracle. His name is Bryan. His grandma is a recent convert and she pretty much like three weeks ago just started inviting every one she knows to church. So yeah that was awesome, hopefully she keeps on going. So I want to feel an earth quake, that would be super awesome. Oh so Ii am now senior companion, which I don´t really know what that means but I am. I guess it means I get to give the reports woot woot, love paper work. But oh well guess it was going to happen some time. But yeah right you all next time.

Courtney's Week #50

Well, aqui estamos. This week has been pretty good. Funny story, so here in Chile, usually your first Sunday in a new barrio they have you bare your testimony. Well, this would have been Hermana Escobar´s
first Sunday, but we had intercambios and so she was in Santiago for two days and I was here with another Hermana. The bishopric didn´t know that this other Hermana was just visiting so they introduced her
and had her bare her testimony as the new misionera. It was pretty funny, next Sunday Hermana Escobar will be saying Hello and Goodbye because she goes home Monday.

So there are 20 Hermanas in the mission right now, but I have only been compañeras with 5 of them, the others have gone home and two more go home next week.

So my sector contains two parts the first part is here in the old part of the city where all the old people live and the other part is out in the country, we pretty much use bikes everyday, but sometimes we walk
or take the microbus, just depends. If you look on lds.org on the maps, my ward is Primer Crucero, the limits start at the calle Chacabuco y Chacay, but then my sector follows Calle Larga and the
Calletera almost until you reach the next city of Esmaralda. It´s huge. Before there were two sets of Elders here, but now its just us. We have lots of work to do, but the ward is really weak and so its a
really hard to get investigators to progress because the members aren´t very nice and make really bad 1st, 2nd, and 3rd impressions. So it´s really hard to get people to feel the spirit in church--I can´t
even feel the spirit sometimes!

So that is my sector, I really love this sector there are people here that are so awesome, but I guess we just need to try a little bit harder to get the ward members to be nicer to each other and to the new comers.

Well, love you all! Cuidense!
Hermana Evans

Walker's Week #56

Well supposedly our whole little trio thing was supposed to last 2 weeks but we went to the office today and found out that he gets his new companion tomorrow. Woot Woot. So tomorrow things will be back to normal which means I can´t go to my old area anymore. So my area is city and when you get to the outskirts its more city. We just walk all day because its to dangerous and the bus drivers don´t want to go in. We don´t have bikes because someone would steal them. Its very very dead too nobody is ever walking in the streets that aren´t teenagers. I guess like four people died last week there, but yeah. The best part of my area is that our church is pretty big. It has lots of potential, most of the other churches I have been to don´t even have a hall, you have to go outside to change the rooms. But yeah the weather is pretty nice it's cold one day and hot the next it changes like crazy. But yep that is it.-

Courtney's Week #49

So, here we are. Hermana Ellsworth is going home today. So, my new companion is la Hermana Escobar from El Salvador. But, guess what, she goes home in 2 weeks! 

To answer your question, no I will not be getting a new mission president because mine changed last year just after I got here. Mission presidents serve for 3 years, so I´m good.   

I can´t really remember anything cool that happened this week. Oh, we have a super super awesome investigator called Maria Elena. She is super super awesome. Before we found her she was smoking a pack a day, but without us even talking about the word of wisdom she cut back to one or sometimes 0 per day. The only problem is that she is living together with her companion of 8 years and is married to someone else. So the soonest that she could get baptized would be in like a year. But she is super awesome.

Oh, so super sad story, we have a couple investigators that are living together but have past marriages, they have been investigating the church for about a year, but the problem is that he cannot find his former wife to get the signature for divorce. They went on a month long trip to try to find her, but they couldn´t, the government won´t give them any information or anything. They used all of the money that they saved up trying to find his former wife, but in the end they had to come back because they ran out of money. So they will probably have to wait another year before they can try again. It´s super super sad because they want to get baptized so bad, but they can´t.

Anyways this keyboard today really hurts my hands because it´s really stiff and hard to type, so I think I will end here and send you guys some fotos. 

Love you all!

Hermana Evans

 

Walker's Week #55

Hey you guys, so one of the elders in Tibas was actually called to serve in the Dominican Republic but he couldn't get his visa so he started in Costa Rica. Oh he is Costa Rican. So this week he got his visa and left yesturday. So now I am in a trio and we are working two areas until changes. Which is both good and bad, it's good because I'll be working in Tibas again. But bad because I'll be in a trio. And everything is hard in a trio. I feel bad for Courtney because really this sucks.
But better news. I will be able to teach the banana man again which is awesome. We actually are going to visit them tonight. But yeah so interviews were this week it was super awesome. My Mission President is super cool. I was completely expecting him to do something completely different but nope. So my new Mission President is from Lehi Utah I guess. That's just what my companion said because he is from Lehi but yea talk to ya next week.

Courtney's Week #48

So my companion goes home one week from today, and I still have no idea what the plan is for me, but oh well, we will see when the time comes. So this week my companion and I decided that we were tired of teaching the old people. There are a lot of old people here. The majority are just lonely and so, because they are nice they let us in, we sing them a song and say a prayer, but a lot of them either can´t hear, can´t see (at least enough to read), or just plain are stuck in their ways and can´t understand the gospel. So we decided that we needed to be a little bit more selective about the people we teach.

 

We pretty much dropped all of our investigators, took a leap of faith, and started over. Every night we planned for like an hour, we did a lot of praying, and thinking about where we should go. We didn´t find a whole lot during the week so it was a lot of just walking around in the blazing sun, but we kept at it. And during the weekend we found four really really awesome families. It was really cool, and the coolest part was that we´ve kind of stopped knocking on every door, we still do when we decide that we are going to knock a street, but how we found these families it was when we were just passing and we will stop and say I want to knock this door and Ta-Da out comes a super awesome non-old person who was waiting for us. It´s pretty cool.

 

So this week we had stake conference, it was the kind of stake conference where it is broadcast from Salt Lake to like 20 stakes or something like that. The same like they do in Utah. But it was pretty good. Elder Jensen from the presidency of the seventy, Sister Beck from the Relief Society, Elder Neil A. Anderson, and Elder L. Tom Perry spoke. It was pretty cool because they all spoke in their own Spanish except for Elder Perry, he had a translator. Things lose a lot of their meaning when they´re translated, it´s better when you hear it right from the speaker.

 

So Dad how is shut down going? How is everything going in Vernal?

 

Well, I don´t have much else to say, so I will talk to you all next week.

 

Love you,

Hermana Evans