Mistaken for a Chilean (on the phone)

It is a miraculous thing that we coming up on 10 months gone. I feel so blessed that it does not seem that long. Although I am definitely looking forward to the Homecoming! I see the growth and determination from afar and know this is a great way for him to spend a few years really learning to obey and be a servant of the Lord.
The pictures are $250 pesos to use the bathroom, glasses get fogged because of coldness, and a jhot pizza!




Before I get on any more, I just realized that you could record .wav files (it has to be .wav)(do it in garageband or audacity and just make sure the thing that comes out says .wav) and send them. I can put them on my camera to listen to them. There´s no rules against that - think sending cassette tapes back and forth. Same thing, just electro-fancy.

Also, there´s a really, really cool scripture case maker in my zone I could get some covers from, but they´re rather expensive. The normal tacky trite ones that all missionaries get almost are 14 mil each. These are 30 each. That´s sixty bucks. But they´re between five and seven times better done. What do you think$ I may just get them to do it. And they are so much better.

This week was weak. We had a bunch of cool trainings about the doctrine of Christ. Allow me to present the five tenets of the Gospel -

Christ paid the price for our sins and will intercede if we obey
What we do in this life determines our happiness now, and in the thereafter
The true church, with the ability to follow Christ, exists on the earth
We are given commandments which we must obey to obtain blessings in addition to Salvation
It is our responsibility to share what we have received from Christ with others
Something interesting - every doubt, problem, sin, etc, results from our lack of understanding and acceptance of these things. These things are the most important things that people understand. You may notice that there are five lessons in Preach My Gospel - there´s a reason for that.

Then interviews with President King. I expressed to him the difficulties of the sector, and he just said, "Elder, you´re the best the Lord has for Silva Chávez." I kind of laughed, but he didn´t. He just said it again - "Elder, you´re the best the Lord has for Silva Chávez."

Kind of a heavy thing, that. It´s really easy to think about these transfers as "postings," like when your sergeant says, "Okay, Private Johnson over there, Private Miller stays here," etc. It´s as if anyone could do any posting, just according to how long you´ve been there, and what sector was open when it was too much. There´s actually a pretty large Divine component, if I understand what President King says. There´s something I have to do here, it seems. I´d like to know what it is, though.

Later we went to our executive comittee meeting, which is always a treat. Not so much because the things for which we are there are so entertaining, rather the members of the comittee are just so dang entertaining. There´s the Elder´s Quorum President, who is a cop, his counselor, who´s an executive of some kind, and our Branch President, who owns a company that rents construction equipment (that guy... bank) that are the most funny. The counselor reminds me a lot of Tres, and the Elders´ President is like that accountant Master of Accountancy guy. We get everything done, but there´s some fun in there somewhere. They´re all powerful, get-it-doners. The problem we faced was some people who didn´t come to the meeting, but now it´s fixed and we´re doing all kinds of stuff. They got people to go out to four houses to do pre-rain repairs in a few minutes. It kind of reminded me of a Utah ward, actually.

We´ve been working a ton with the members, and now they invite us over all the time, which is ideal. You could say we paid some time this week to get some more friendship and help from them in the future. We´re not supposed to just hang out with them all the time, but we also need to be a part of their lives. I never saw a single missionary in all my life before the MTC, which makes it difficult to tell what would be ideal from a member´s point of view. It´s so strange to never have gone out with a missionary before. It´s actually pretty unheard of to never have gone out with missionaries before the mission. When people are about to go the missionaries are all over them. They were practically mythological creatures before the mission. Apparently anywhere else in the universe you´re supposed to go out with the missionaries. In Utah it´s not possible. That is a reason for not being in Utah, I suppose.

Okay, so when did Riley go$ I didn´t hear a date in there ever. August 30 would mean he went in... yesterday or so$ But he´s seen missionaries! What a boon! He knows they exist! He needs no faith!

Tell him he can email me if he wants to. (I get that he doesn´t right now because he has like a half an hour and can´t send pictures, so he´s going to talk to his mom and write to his girlfriend.) But still. If he has a latin trainer he may need to ask me what flaite means or something.

Well, yes. Okay. I said hi from Chile to everyone. Tell Kelsey I sent a letter. (Who knows if it gets there.)

Not to be depressing or anything.

Love,
Elder A. Conrad Crist

I was mistaken for a Chilean on the phone! Yay! I´m toast with regards to appearance, but the phone doesn´t show anything (not this year, at least. Apple´s thinking about what they can do to help that).

I have a little problem, though. I can talk about small things all day, but if I want to talk about cooking, or medicine, or whatever I just don´t know enough words to talk like a human. I have the grammar of a sixteen-year-old with a four-year-old vocabulary. Maybe Dad knows something about this - I don´t know what to study, because everything is so obscure at that level. I though of just telling stories to myself until I encountered a word I didn´t know.