Pages

Monday, September 23, 2013

Moroni 9:6 -- "Let us Labor Diligently"

Hey dearest family,

   How is the life of everyone?  You all missed out on the delicious asado (barbeque) that I ate this week.  You know how in the United States the barbeque only lasts for July 4th and maybe leftovers the day after?  Well, here in Chile the meat started cooking on Monday and didn´t stop until last night!  I´ve had more share of meat for the year and am content with no more meat until Christmas. (Is anyone as shocked as I am that Christmas is only 3 short months away?)  I´ll describe how each asado goes.  The man of the house starts the whole meal by cooking Chorizos (sausages).  Once those are cooked after 5 minutes, he throws on the slabs of meat (cow or chicken) and then we begin eating Chorazcos (Chorizos in bread with ketchup and mayo) while we wait for the meat to cook.  During this whole time that the meat is being cooked, the woman are inside making the salad and potato with mayo mix. Depending on the family, there can be more vegetables if desired.  Once everything is prepared, we sit down and have a delicious meal until we can´t fit anything else in.  That is when the fruit comes out.  A little something to top everything off.  Or that´s what I thought until I saw the ice cream!  Those are the usual details that are including on a holiday meal here in Chile.  Usually there are empanadas as well full of meat, boiled egg, and olives (bleh).  To make things short, I ate this food practically everyday this week.... but don´t worry because the amount of walking that we did burned off what was eaten.  
   We weren´t able to find 15 new investigators this week, but we worked extremely hard to try to accomplish it.  The hard thing was that most Chileans spend the rest of the tarde after lunch sleeping until the nighttime.  Then the whole night is spent drinking and having a good time in the eyes of the world, something that we try to avoid at all costs.  Nothing bad or dangerous every happens to us, but every once and awhile someone will yell Gringo (the Chilean word for white person) at us and try speaking in English, but that never works because they have no idea what they are saying.  We wave our hand with a happy smile and continue walking.  
   A little update on our investigators.  Remember Nico?  He had his Baptismal Interview yesterday and will be baptized on Sunday!  We had an amazing, spiritual lesson with him last Friday and in that moment he made the decision to be baptized.  His friend, Seba, will baptize him and he has asked me to confirm him the Sunday after.  We have changes this Wednesday but I believe that I will be staying here after only 6 weeks.  Nico is now more comfortable with the members because we have focused a lot on having the members come with us in order to make a friendship with him.  Our other baptismal candidate for this month is a boy name Dav.  He was the joven that went to church last Sunday without us inviting him, and stayed for all 3 hours.  He has a baptismal date for this Sunday as well but we will need to work really hard so that he is fully prepared to make this covenant. We had the chance to meet his mom yesterday and she is fully on board with his baptism.  She is very interested in the message that we share and knows that it is the best thing that her son could learn. Dav´s dad died a few years back and he has been taking care of his sick mom ever since then at the young age of 13. He loves the church and has attended all 3 hours the past two Sundays.  Due to this weeks of Independence, we weren´t able to have much contact with him but his desires to be baptized are still present. Hopefully in the next email I send, those 2 will have already made their baptismal covenant.
   This week our ward had an activity to celebrate the dieciocho.  We were given permission to spend 2 hours there just to watch and we enjoyed every second of it.  I´ll try to explain all that we saw.  We came after the asado because we had already eaten enough meat for the day.  Some of the members were playing with trompos, toys that look like dradels (spelling?) that you wind up with a rope and then throw down at the ground to make it spin.  The Chileans play an awesome game with these twos.  They begins by placing an old trompo in the dirt in front of them, and then everyone makes a circle and begins throwing their trompos at the one in the center.  The person who breaks the old trompo with the tip of their own trompo wins.  (Last Pday, a member gave us 2 trompos as gifts and we practiced for a bit.  It took me many tries to get the trompo spinning but I had no hope in throwing it where I wanted it to land.) The other activity that we saw was kite wars.  Each person would deck out their own kite but putting a point on the tip and then, once the kite is in the air, they would try to cut the line of the other kites. Hilarious.  The rest of the activity was spent playing musical chair and dancing The Cueca (a Chilean dance that every Chilean knows).  That is a short summary of the activity!

   Have a good week!

Love you all,
Elder Weidman  

No comments:

Post a Comment