Elder Dirkmaat in Chile: If God told you to climb a hill...

Sector- San Filipe, Chile

Companero- Elder Wiseman

Carta #21

What Up Family,

That camp-out you guys went on looks siickk! haha... Wow dad... I'm so disappointed in you... you choose to go to the gym over surfing where has your head gone?! haha just kidding! But yeah, my Companions sick, he plays football (huh gay) hahah but he's super funny and he speaks Spanish with the perfect accent because his mom is from Chile and he lived in Chile for 2 years when he was 8, haha!! So I'm learning alll the slang from him because sometimes they say stuff still that I have nooo idea what they're talking about and its always the slang haaha!! He is on the verge of going home from his mission too... I wonder why I always get all the people that are about to go home? It's good though because I can learn so much from their experience and I can learn the best ways to work and the most effective ways so that's the good part!! I definitely have learned from him how to not just do contacts or just make the goal for the day but when you do a contact truly trying to help the person and truly trying to tell them that this gospel will bring happiness then you are more successful... hahah!! Last week we got into a home every 5 contacts!! Such a good ratio"!!! hahah The mission basically is teaching me to be a salesman... Haha!

This week was good too! Not as successful as last week but still good!! This week we put 3 people with dates to be baptized and two of them went to church and that was such a miracle for us because here it is so so hard to get the people to go to church. One of the people is named Diego and he has 17 years. He is on the verge of being a pro soccer player for the cities team... He practices with them and he is still one of their substitutes but still, he's only 17 so I'm sure that he's going to be super good! haha We played with him and he plays goalie, he's pretty stinkin good! He gets so so serious when he plays! haha its funny like every Chilean does. He's super cool! We brought him to church and he loved it because we introduced him to all the youth and they were super good at befriending him so he's going to mutual and stuff... When we teach him we have to teach him much different than all the other people because he's a teenager and they get bored so easily so it was funny when we were talking about faith- we said, look if God told you that you need to go climb that hill right there would you do it? And he was like yeah and we asked why and then he said well, because God said I should do it and then we explained yeah, that's an act of faith you do because God commands you to do it... and then we were like you don't know what's on top of the hill, you don't know whats waiting for you on top of the hill, but when you get there there's a fat party and its sickk there's like 90 chicillas and its sick and he started cracking up and he's like yeah now I understand hahah!! So that's the kind of lessons we have to do with him. But he's super good at praying and stuff, I'm sure he's going to get baptized and then I hope that he can go on a mission that would be sick!

Yeah the work keeps moving forward the gospel is being preached to the world here in Chile... Its crazy for the Peruvians here because there's a huge conflict between Chile and Peru because Peru is trying to take their land so everyone thinks that a war is gonna start and stuff haha!! That wouldn't be good! but that's what's going on here in Chile!!!