I am sorry I have not been diligent in getting Alex's letters posted. I will try to do better. Every time I now try to post his letters, the blogger site removes all line breaks and/or makes it all white. I would just like to be able to copy and paste the letters like before. Then my life would be easy!
I found Battlestar Galactica on grooveshark in the office. Maybe that's somewhere to start.
This week was a lot of lame happenstance things. We had interviews (my last, by the way), but we got back at seven that day so we barely got anything done. Lots of appointments failed, but even more than that our members who were supposed to go with us just failed. I was slightly taken aback by how only one of seven came through the whole week. Bizarre. Then yesterday, my companion lost his wallet/money/ID/home card/church card, and in his distracted anger he locked our only key inside the house, which resulted in us having to kick the lock out of the door, with the help of our ward mission leader who lives near by. All our neighbors came out and opinionated about how we should do it and later how we should have done it. That day we happened to have looked at a new place to live that was way better, which took some of the day, and the door distaster took some more, so in the end we only worked like two hours the whole day.
We did get some investigators to church - Peruvians, but the volume was very low where we sat and we heard little - which was pretty boring for everyone. They were good sports about it - hopefully we'll get'em for next week.
I really shouldn't complain though.
We got seven new investigators that were almost all references, three of which are almost sure baptisms. The others are a family that's very good. Two of the references were from the young womens - two twelve-year-olds who just appeared and started coming to church and going to the activities. People didn't even notice that they weren't members. It shouldn't be a hard thing, really - the hard thing is mainly interesting the respective parents. If not, we have to wait seven sundays of attendance before they can be baptized. And, of course, the odds of them staying active are not very good if they have no family, even though they have the best of intentions. Chile is littered with people like that. If the whole family goes for it, it's very difficult that they leave, really.
It rained like Barack these last few days. I have an official rip in my shoe in the side that I didn't notice, so I got good wet foot that whole day. Like Randy's dad always says, "Take care of your feet!" That's what I should have been doing, I think. When your feet are cold/wet, it's kind of hard to get satisfactorally dry/warm. Yesterday when we got locked out we were supposed to bring food back to eat in the pension - but as we could not get into it, we went to find a member's house to eat in. I didn't want to because I knew they would make us eat their lunch too. But we did, and they did. No choice in a Chilean household. When someone eats, everyone eats. Then someone noticed my feet were all wet and muddy and started freaking out about how I was going to get sick and stuff. Chilean moms are like that. I just kept saying I wasn't cold and they kept saying I needed to take my shoes off and dry them out by the heater but there was not time for that kind of nonsense!
All in all I am liking the new sector. I got here speaking well, knowing what to do, and excited to work hard but use members also, etc. Several people have asked me where I'm from and been weirded out when I say the US because they think I'm from the rich german part of Santiago up in the East Mission (do some google earth around Las Condes or La Dehesa and you'll see a whole new world). Really rich people live up there that talk, if a little educatedly, pretty normal Chilean. They come from german stock that moved here right before 1900 when the country was starting up. They were the educated people, and that richness has continued on ever since. Point is, I guess my speaking has gotten pretty okay.
I did my second baptismal interview in this area yesterday, too. My interviews had all been easy, and this one was no exception. Nice kid of 23 - new we'll have to convince him to go on a mission.
Well,
I can't think of anything more.
I'm going to listen to Abby.
Love
Elder A Conrad Crist
