Week 67

This week was a very interesting week! Haha!

So first off, Elder Stockford headed out to Parral on a very rainy Tuesday morning.

I left him at the side of the bus and headed back into the station and met up with my new companion Elder Flores.

Elder Flores is great. He is from a city in northern Chile called Tocopilla. He is a bit older me and is a bit taller than me (of course….). He is pretty laid back and is a little bit shyer than any other of my companions have been. We will get along great. He has a really thick Chilean accent. It will be good to have 24/7 practice with Chilean Spanish.

It is crazy living with 3 other Latinos. Man, they are crazy. I am so glad I can at least understand them and converse with them. I would feel so left out if I couldn’t.

This week was tough because new years happened. Oh man they party hard here for new years. I swear that every one and a half deserted their houses and every responsibility that they could ever have and left to the countryside, the beach, or somewhere else besides their homes. THERE WAS NO ONE HOME FOR THE ENTIRE WEEK. So poor Elder Flores and I knocked doors, and knocked more doors, walked, traveled, and searched for any living soul that would talk with us or let us in. It was pretty challenging. And honestly we feel completely exhausted after all of it. We are just looking forward to getting this week over with and trying to find people next week now that the festivities have died down just a bit. 

Estefano is progressing very well. And yes, he left during the week as well. So we weren’t able to visit him but when I called him on Tuesday to see how he was doing, he committed himself to go to church. We met up with him on Sundaymorning and went to church. It was a kind of a weird fast and testimony meeting due to some strange testimonies and stories that were mentioned but apart from that he had a good experience. In the Sunday school class he participated a lot again. We are excited. Actually, today we are going to be visiting him and we want to put him with a baptismal date. We will see how it all goes.

The New Year for us was pretty calm. Elder Flores and I walked around the main sector where we work at, Pedro Del Rio, and tried to find anyone who would talk to us. We ended up walking a huge distance. I swear we walked like 8 miles just in the afternoon. At least it felt like it. But after a long afternoon in the summer heat, we headed to the church to set up a new years celebration. There were only like 10 other people there while we were there. Apparently everyone got there after 1:00 in the morning. We were only there till like 10:50 because we had to be in our house at 11:00. So it was a tiny celebration for us.

Haha! Funny experience,

We got there (us 4 missionaries) and realized that we had forgotten part of the invitation; we had to bring our own food. So we dropped our stuff off right away and started running through all of downtown Concepcion in hope of finding anywhere that was still open to buy some food. We walked A LONG WAYS and absolutely no one was open. After a while Elder Castellon spoke up and said that right before he got to the chapel he saw a little negotio that was still open right around the corner by the church. So we ran all the way up there. And lo and behold it was open. It was a new year’s miracle. We had in mind to go cheap and buy bread, hamburger patties, cheese and ketchup.

We got there and asked if they had any bread left and the lady pointed to a big box sitting on a counter. We lifted up the cloth covering it and saw a good sized pile of bread. Feeling content we just looked at it for a bit and after a few seconds Elder Castellon just said, ‘’We’ll take it all!’’ So we cleaned out the place of all their bread, bought 16 small hamburger patties a block of cheese and other things for about 10 bucks. After all of the running around Concepcion we ended up going right around the corner by the church and taking all the bread that they had left.

We went to the chapel and had a little celebration. We stayed for a bit and ended up running back to our apartment building. We couldn’t see many fireworks because there are two giant apartment buildings blocking our view right out of our living room window. But we were able to see just the outer ends of the firework displays. But from what we heard and from the little bit we saw, the firework shows were MASSIVE. It sure lit up the neighborhood. I hope all of you had a good new years!

So that is a pretty basic summary of the week. I love all of you and I am grateful for all of you and what you do for me. I feel all of your prayers sustaining me every single day. I am so grateful for the opportunity to be sharing the gospel as a servant of the Lord every single day. There is no greater pleasure. I am growing every single day and I get more excited to share the gospel day after day. I hope that we can all come together with the same desire and share it with all those who need it! I love you all so much! Until next week.

 Elder Ethan Haws