Week 9- FIRST BAPTISM!!!

Hola Familia y Amigos (check out how much my spanish has improved!)

 

This week was rather interesting for me, and exciting too with my first baptism!

 

We taught and baptized this 14 year old girl for the past 3 weeks and reactivated her mom all at the same time! It was really great for only my 4th week here! Her name is Elizabeth. I really couldn´t have asked for a cooler experience than my first baptism before my 1 month mark here. The only thing we have left to teach her is that she can´t be going out and making out with her palolo like crazy... She´s 14. But that´s just the way stuff goes down here in Chile haha. I have a lot of faith and hope in her to stay active. That seems to be the hardest thing to do here, to keep your converts active. But we have this thing in place here called OPERATION ALMA. Which is instead of dividing up the sector into smaller areas and assigning specific missionaries to each area. We all work together in the same city just with different assignments. Two elders here in Victoria are in charge of going out and teaching and finding investigators, while me and elder Miyasaki are in charge of recent converts and menos activos. We have found this to be the most effective way of working here in this Mission and have had a great deal of success with it from what i´ve heard and seen.

 

Today almost marks one month here in Chile, and as such I had the goal set to stop studying the scriptures in English with spanish, and now solimente study in Spanish in an attempt to really improve my language skills. Hopefully I will start to see the results as I put more faith in the lord.

 

I had an interesting week with my trainer though, because he got called away to have interviews in Concepcion and Santiago this past week and so I went out teaching with an assistant to the Mission President who actually leaves to go home in one week. This guy, my grandpa in missionary geneology because he´s the father of my father (trained my trainer) was a STUD of a missionary. And helped me make progress on one of my investigators who I had beed hitting a brick wall with the past 2 weeks, and now we can continue to progress with her and have hopes to baptize her in September.

 

September is going to be a HUGE MONTH FOR US!!!! WE ALREADY HAVE 10 BAPTISMS LINED UP FOR NEXT MONTH AND THE COMING WEEK!!!!

 

As always my testimony continues to grow more and more each week.

 

Hasta luego,

Elder Mundell

Week 8

One more week down. Time flies and I can´t keep track of the weeks. I can´t believe that next week will mark one month in Chile!

 

This week has been MUCH better! The frustration with the language isn´t as big of a problem now (I still talk like a retard with my Spanish, but I´ve just come to accept that for the time being). I actually gave my first talk in sacrament this last Sunday, which was a surprise in and of itself because the member that was supposed to give a talk didn´t show up (freakin´ Chileans.... haha) So 5 minutes before we were about to start I got told that I would be giving a talk on Prophets and the Book of Mormon. Some how I pulled it off and gave a pretty solid discurso. I hate to say this, because I had so much motivation going into the mish, but I´ve come to the knowledge that trying to keep a journal is nearly impossible in the field. My time is completely spent up that I have very little time to actually sit down and write in a journal. And I can´t even use my camera now to remember what´s going on because it broke this weekend. So until otherwise... No more pictures :(

 

I had my first drunk dude experience! We were walking in the street going to our next appointment when we saw this guy wobbling down the street and thought it would be fun to talk about the word of wisdom with him. But when we showed him a picture of Jesus, the guy just busted into tears and shouting all kinds of spanish gibberish. Then we realized just how bad of shape this guy was in and decided to try and help. So 45 minutes later we found his house which he had no idea where it is so we had to knock on doors and talk to strangers to figure out where he lived... YEAH MISSIONARIES!

 

Right now we have a woman we´re teaching who is literally a "Golden Investigator", everything we say she understands and wants to change. She´s being baptized 7 Sept. And we´ve also had some lessons where I really felt the spirit so strong! So strong in some cases that I didn´t even realize or have to think about the words I was saying. In those moments I was just speaking spanish.

 

I truly love reading the book of mormon. It´s my addiction since getting out here in the field! And it has payed off immensly because I now have scriptures that pop into my head during lessons that help solidify testimonies and answer questions. An elder who is the assistant to the mission president that is leaving in 37 days gave me a challenge to read the entire spanish book of mormon, out loud, before he leaves! That means in 37 days I have to read something like 643 pages, which comes out to 17 pages a day. I started 5 days ago, and am about to finish 1st Nephi!

 

That´s it for this week! Stay Righteous.

 

Elder Mündéll

Week 7

As promised, here are the pictures I forgot to send last week. Again I have to send them in chunks because the way my email works...

Anywho, what´s the mission been like the last week -- my second week in Chile? WILD!!!! Full of highs and lows, happiness and frustration. My first P-Day last week in Temuco was nuts. I spent about 2 hours in the street markets but didn´t buy anything because I had no clue how to talk to the vendors haha. But then we went to the mall and ran into one of the Hermanas from my district at the MTC. 

My lessons have been going so-so, in the sense that I don´t really get to play much of a role in all of them. However, this week came with some really neat experiences like my first baptismal challenge and next week will be my first baptism (sort of)... I asked her to be baptized but my companion did most of the teaching before I got here so he will be the one doing the actual baptism. And plus, I want my first baptism to be an investigator that I started from square one and work with them up to baptism, so this one is just kind of an appetizer.

My spanish is still pretty hit and miss. I have moments where I went on splits with the zone leader and he had me teach half of the first lesson all on my own and to my own disbelief I did a pretty good job... Then there are days where I can´t understand or speak anything at all. Which is extremely frustrating to me. I want so badly to be a missionary and in fact my mission president came to our branch conference and I had a conversation (in Spanish somehow) with his wife about how irritating it is to have this desire but not the ability to turn my desire into action in my lessons and life as a missionary. It´s hard, and granted I´m pretty hard on myself to achieve goals that are further than my capabilities. I have been complimented numerous times (by members, other missionaries, and even my mission president yesterday) on where my abilities are at this point in my mission but perspective is one thing that I lack. Which is why the past few days I have been studying the characters of Christ, in particular PATIENCE.

As I said, I´m absolutely in love with this work and can´t wait for my abilities to meet up with this passion.

Elder Mundell

Week 6

I´M IN CHILE!!! How crazy is that?!

I can prove it because even the keyboard is different here, which is making it suuuuuper hard to write this email hahaha. I don´t even know where to begin!

My flight was 24 hours of travel in total, but I slept through probably a good 10 hours of it... I have so many funny stories but so little time to share them all because I only have 45 minutes now every Lunes to write my emails home. (¡BUMMER!) You´ll all just have to read my mission journal afterwards to really get a feel for how great this mission has been so far. But lets just forward to the present and I can tell you all about where I got assigned, who my trainer is, and whatnot.

I got assigned to an elder named Elder Miyasaki (yeah, kind of ironic because I know the Miyasaki family back in Miami too haha). We´re working in a city called Victoria which is kind of a small town but is so much fun. All the people I have met are really kind and love us Gringos. I lucked out too because my trainer (my ´dad´) has an adopted mom here (my abuela) who works at a restaurant and gave me and him free burgers my first day here! I don´t know what everyone was talking about the food here being bad, because so far I haven't had one bad meal! Except for the fish one night and they have this soup ´Casuela´ that is pretty gross... but other that that I am just LOVING LIFE RIGHT NOW!

My Spanish is still pretty weak compared to where it needs to be in order to fluidly communicate with the people here without pausing every 3 words or so to think about what i´m saying... the hardest part though is trying to understand! THEY SPEAK SO INCREADIBLY FAST, IT´S NOT EVEN FAIR!!!!

I´m sorry no pictures or funny stories this week. It´ll take me a while to figure out this whole deal but when I do, i´ll send an email with all my pictures so far. 

Ciao,

Elder Mundell