Glad Tidings of Great Joy

Happy Thanksgiving!! Hope it went well for everyone! We made our day a little special-er by buying some truffles and chocolate covered, manjar-filled stick things. The truffles were chocolate, but tasted more like bubblegum.....not exactly sure why. Interesting enough though. We also got home and cooked some french fries and chicken patties so we had our own feast. Also saw our neighbor's turkeys, chickens and ducks wandering free and I would be lying if I said   my mouth didn't water just a little bit when imagining one of those turkeys baked in the oven. :) Missed out on the pumpkin pie, but just means I will eat double next year! We had a good day though. Yesterday we taught a couple named Francisco and Julia. They live in a newer neighborhood in the city and are currently adding on another room to their house. We found him a couple weeks back when we saw him unloading big plywood from the roof of his car and ran over to help him before he killed himself....

We had a good week here in San Pablo and found 6 new people to teach! The goal has been set that each missionary does 10 contacts everyday so we are trying to do that even though it can be hard in a smaller town. There are still lots of people though so it is doable. According to the mayor, there are 4,500 people that live in the city and about 6,000 or so in the campo that surrounds the city center. We just work in the city itself because the countryside houses are too far and spread out to be efficient. We had another lesson with the Mayor and met the rest of his family. We taught and showed them  familysearch.org  and they really liked it. Started filling in there family tree right away. I wish I knew better how to help them with that but maybe in the future we can get them to a family history center. They're a wonderful family. We also started teaching a couple of teenagers and one of their mom's. Another couple we are teaching are 65 and 66. Oscar and Mary. They a...

This week we started working with a few new investigators! One is Leonardo. He is college aged and had met a few times with the sisters before we got here. At the end of the lesson, he prayed for the first time. It was awesome. He thanked for the visits that we did and asked that they would continue and that he could learn more. It was a very gratifying experience as a missionary to be able to hear that.  We also had a lesson with the alcalde of the city and his wife. Or in English, the mayor of San Pablo. They were super friendly and receptive and his wife started to read the Book of Mormon right away when we gave them one. They also fed us once, or a small dinner. It was a really nice experience and we have planned to return later this week. We had stake conference this weekend and it was incredible. I really enjoyed all of the talks. A very common theme was the importance of establishing the home as a safe place from the world. The stake president here is 35 and full of ...

San Pablo! It is a little city but very very pretty. It is about a 25 minute bus ride heading into Osorno. The branch here had 21 people attend on Sunday, so pretty small but with over 100 members on the ward list. We'll be doing our best to work with menos activos and part member families here. To put it into perspective, the other day we came across a man in the street (not too many people in the streets here) and I started to contact him. We talked for a sec but he said he was busy because his pigs were on the loose! Hearing that, I practically begged him to let us help catch and he relented and said we could. Pig wrangling!! Basically just consisted in us standing in the intersection and shooing, herding them in the direction of home but it made for a great story and good memory. Lots of chickens loose on the streets and of course the normal amount of stray dogs, with a very surprising representation of greyhounds too. It's an interesting little town. Lots ...