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Shake, Rattle, and Roll

We are working hard here and this week will be the first real week of work. The first week was full of conferences, this last week was Christmas and New Year´s Day (I think I heard gunshots around our neighborhood in Millahue) and so this week we´re working on getting into a good schedule. But even today is weird because it´s not a Preparation day but we are doing all the things we usually do but just working more. We had Preparation day on New Year´s Day because there is nobody...I mean NOBODY around on New Year´s Day. They stay up until all hours of the night and sleep in later than they normally do anyway.

We spent most of New Year´s day with a family in the ward, but this ward is strange. The chapel is on the very edge of the ward and the ward has two parts, Millahue and Labranza. There are two elders working in Labranza, which is about 15-20 minutes away by Micro. Anyway, we ate lunch with them and played games with the other elders. We met up with Luis (an investigator) while we were in Labranza. The ward is trying to organize a karaoke night and Luis has the stuff to do it.

As for the work, we have not had much progress yet. We´ve been meeting with Felizidad (Feli is what we call her) and she is progressing immensely, but her husband is against her going to church because that means she can´t attend the Catholic church on Sundays. She is very excited to go, so we´re praying that everything will turn out ok.

We´re also close to baptizing Rosa, whose cousin was baptized about 3 months ago. She had an aunt die recently, so she´s very sad at the moment.

Marcelo and Cecilia are having trouble as well, but Elder Kamalu and I are confident that we can overcome their concerns about the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. They have a little girl named Naomi and Elder Kamalu really wants them to get baptized.

We stopped visiting a couple investigators because they were not progressing. Delia and Caty, two other cousins, are almost never home and they haven´t been reading when we´ve invited them to. We also stopped visiting a different Rosa because she works as a nanny in a house in our sector. Thus, we can only teach her when she works and she never seems to be there.

We received a golden reference this week, however. His name is Esteban, the boyfriend of one of the members in the ward. It´s awesome to teach him because he wants to learn English. He and his brother lived in the states for a few months and can speak English pretty well. We won´t meet with him for a couple of weeks while he´s out of town, but he already knows a lot about the church because of his girlfriend (Reyna), so he learns fast.

We visited some old investigators and discovered that they are still interested in the Gospel. We´re trying to meet with Eduardo, but he´s never home. However, we´re going to visit the sisters of a recent convert, Cathy. She teaches the class for investigators at church. I had no idea they separated the classes for investigators! so we have Sunday school with them each week.

The other day we had an awesome experience while knocking doors. We found Claudio, who said the minute we opened the door (in perfect english, I might add) ´´if you want to talk about friends, family, sports or anything else about life, you are welcome. But no religion.´´ So we went in and talked to him about his wife and his little girl and discovered he is a free mason. I don´t know about free masons, but Joseph Smith was one, so it can´t be that bad.

Other than that, we´ve had a pretty average week. We didn´t even notice the earthquake. We were confused why we couldn´t make calls for a while, but later the zone leaders called to ask if we were alright. We replied ´´Yeah, we´re alright. Why?´´ We´re having a blast and trying to get things rolling here. We´re trying to start up an English class as a way to get referrals. That´s our week!

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