P-Day change

Well P-Day changed, and that was a huge change for us haha. We all woke up at 7:30 on Monday morning wanting a free day really bad, buuuut we had to wait an extra 3 days. So we are all pretty tired and grateful that we have a P-Day.  The main reasons that P-Day changed was because all of the cultural things about Chile are all closed on Mondays and open all the other days of the week, so we are now able to do more cultural things on our free day which will be pretty cool!

So I am still with Elder Zazueta and we are still working 2 sectors. There is a lot of walking involved and a lot of time taken to go in between sectors and stuff. But it is really fun! I like the other ward where we are working and a few of the people there have grown on me and so I really like it. And one more week and we will be split up in our own sectors. It kind of stinks thinking about it because now Elder Zazueta and I are really good friends and we only get 3 weeks working together.  

This week we had a really cool service project in my comp's zone. We went to destroy a house! The stake president of the stake next to me bought a new piece of land to build a new house. The only thing is that there was an old house and a lot of garbage in the plot of land that he had. So, he asked us if we could help him rip it down and clean all the garbage in his land, so of course we told him yes! It was fun and we had a blast. We got to play around for a few hours and do service at the same time!

The ward I'm working in is starting to progress a lot! We have 4 missionaries right there, but since all the people in the states are going to start leaving for the mission, we are going to start getting a new flood of missionaries, so I think pretty soon we will get up to 6 missionaries in my ward.

We went to the temple today for P-day but we weren't able to do a session, we got there late and the session had already started.  We went to go with a recently baptized member to take out his endowments and since we got there late, so we helped in the baptistry a little bit but I was disappointed that we didn't make the session.

So I'll give you a before and after of the service project we did. Here is the before in the first pic,

and the after in the second pic.

And this one is me with a huge giant Chilean flag over my head.

And then this one because I like it!

Hey....   ...My responsibility here and now is to manage a whole sector by myself and work in another sector too. It is rough. Luckily, the walk isn't too long. Our two sectors border each other and so it isn't too far. But we have to walk about 30 minutes to get between sectors. So it is pretty tiring every day, but it´s a really good experience. I am learning a lot about managing my time and stuff like that. It is good practice. Just a lot of walking haha. My new comp, Elder Zazueta de Mexico is a really good guy! We came in together to the mission, and we get along really well! But that is what is going on here. Just to make it a little bit more clearer.

Other than being tired, I am doing pretty good. We have had a pretty good week. We aren´t able to work normally, but we manage it pretty well. And we only have to do it for about a week more, and then we are done and in our sectors for good, so we have got this.

Anyway, here are the pictures that I owe from last week. The first one is the woman that got baptized. She was really happy because didn´t know that I was coming and when I saw her it made me really excited haha. She was really nice to us.

The second is a picture of me and my first companion with a less active member we worked with before. His name is a Daniel and he is active now.

And the last one is me repping my USA soccer shirt. Today was P Day so of course there had to be soccer involved.

Pretty crazy week this week, I will try to explain it all. We had a pretty normal week up until the weekend, and then it got pretty crazy!

This week was a really hard week. We did not have very much to do this week. It is winter vacation, and so just about everybody left the city or are always somewhere else partying it up or something. Well we still had to work. Oh well, we powered through it. But our number of lessons went down a lot! It dropped pretty drastically. But we are hoping that this week goes back up but we will see.

Well, Saturday I went back to Poeta Neruda, my first ward, and saw a baptism of someone that I used to teach. It has been a long time, but it was nice to go back and see her. Her name is Maritza, and she was a really hard one hahaha. She was Evangelica (a type of religion, I don't know what that is in English) and she was pretty die hard about it. She told us she was never going to change. But then I left the ward and the missionaries kept working and then my trainer left, and they kept working haha. But finally she just showed up to church one day and told everyone she was ready to be baptized! Well that's great haha! We can help you with that! So she prepared really quick and she got baptized! It was really great! I have pictures so I will have to send them

But at the service I saw President. And that's cool that he would come, but I saw him talking to my comp looking pretty serious. And I thought oh shoot that doesn't look good... And then he called me over, oh noo..... But he just told me he needed to talk to me. So I went with him and he told me that Elder Tafur would be moving to the office on Monday (today) and that I would have a special assignment. I will be working with Elder Zazueta for 3 weeks, but there is a catch. We will be working in BOTH sectors and we will be constantly changing sectors and houses and people. So we will be in for a crazy 3 weeks. And when I asked him how we were supposed to do it, he looked at me and said, "Elder Burt, I have never done this before, this is the first time. You guys are just going to have to figure it out." Hmmmmmm... So we will have a pretty interesting 3 weeks.

And there we are, the week in a nutshell. And one problem, I am in a new ciber and it doesn't have a place to put my cable to send pictures, so I will have to send them all next week. Which really stinks, but I tried I promise! I love you all, have a great week!

Alright, well yeah I am writing on Tuesday. We had kind of a crazy day yesterday. We went and played an awesome game of soccer in the morning and got home just in time to do everything that we needed to do, but we got home to find out that we had a visitor fixing our floor in the apartment. So we had to help him out and didn't have enough time to write yesterday. Pretty stinky I know, but oh well.

But other than that we had a great week! We had a really good day tuesday! We went to the church at around 8 and left on divisions with all 3 members of the bishopric! Which was really great for us! We were able to get a lot of work done with the 3 of them and we hope to be able to do it again tonight.

Other than that we kind of had a pretty boring week to tell the truth. Nothing really out of the normal happened. It was just kind of a normal week. Sorry about that. Oh, I did try to make oatmeal cookies, but they didnt turn out that well. Thats about it.

The first picture is me with the cookies I tried to make. They didn't turn out at all to tell the truth.

The second is just to prove that they didn't come out well. I just ended up eating the cookie dough.

And the third is why we didnt get time to write yesterday. That is our new friend Gerard. He is a cool guy and helped us out a lot!

Well, there flew another week here in the mission.  It went by pretty fast, just in case you were wondering. I dont know how the time is going up there in the States, but it is flying down here. We had a pretty interesting week down here, but I will go one part at a time.

So this was the first week of the new change, and it went by quick. We were working really hard, but then had a few fall backs haha. Lets see, on Tuesday we killed it! We had a really good day with 5 lessons, which just to let you know, thats about the record high for me in one day, so that was a really good way to start the week! It was really awesome, and it got us in on a good foot for the week!

Wednesday went pretty well, but nothing too cool to tell you about. Thursday was the most interesting day of my mission. My testimony really grew about Priesthood blessings. We were on the way from picking up lunch. We were walking to the bus stop and we got a call, and we were asked to stop by a members house and give a blessing to their son, and it was really urgent. We get in to their house and he was crying he was in so much pain. He has broncitis (I think is how you spell it) and it is such a bad case that it sometimes can affect his whole body. So he was in a lot of pain. But we gave him a blessing and it was really powerful. He had stopped crying before we had finished and when we stopped by that night, he was finally sleeping. So that was a really cool experience!

Then today, we went as a mission to a huge hill in the middle of our mission, (its actually the only hill we really have because our mission is so small haha) and we hiked it as a whole mission and had a devotional at the top with President, so that was a really cool experience and I got to see all my friends in the whole mission, so it was an awesome P Day!

I didnt take hardly any pictures this week. The ones I did were just of the hill I hiked, so just to give you an idea, we climbed this in about an hour. It was pretty rough because there were no switchbacks.

So there goes another week, and another month. This past week I hit 8 months, pretty crazy right? That came out of nowhere.

Well, changes were today. I didn't change! Neither did my companion, so that makes me really happy. The only thing is that not a single person changed in my district for the second time haha. That will be interesting. In other news, Elder McMullin finally left the sector after 7 months of being here haha. A little sad, but that means I am now the oldest missionary here in this sector! That will also be interesting haha. We now have a Canadian in the house, Elder Purnell is his name. I don't know too much about him, but I am sure I will as time goes on.

Chile was knocked out of the world cup, which is sad, especially because of the way it happened. Penalties stink to lose a game. We pretty much heard all about it, so we knew when they lost. It stinks, but that means it is a little bit easier for us!

We didn't have too interesting of a week, but it was still really fun! The best part of the week was last night. We had a fireside for the Birthday of the Mission! That was really cool! We are still one of the youngest missions in the world, we only have a year. But still, the progress we have seen is incredible! In the past year, we have raised the Sacrament Meeting attendance in the mission by over 1,000 people! I'm really glad I have been able to take a part of that!      President talked to us about how important it is to have a vision in missionary work. And in everything really. It was good!  I found a lot of Elders there and it was awesome! Among them were all the people I knew in the MTC and everyone I had ever shared a ward with! It was really awesome! Pictures will follow!

Also, just before I close this out, I need to recommend a video that we use all the time. It is incredible and really powerful! So check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spGtVY6L5jY

Alright here are the pictures:

Here is me sending off McMullin. He's a great friend.

The second is a good friend of mine. Elder Mateus from Colombia. He was the last AP and left to go home today.

AAAAnd what we do during the Chile games. Completos (which is the chilean hot dog. It is a hot dog with avacado and tomate.

soccer

Well, I am writing on Tuesday, not Monday. And you must all be thinking, why is that? Well the answer is kind of simple really. The World Cup. Hahaha, Chile played yesterday and so we were only allowed to leave the house for a few hours. So we were all going to go play soccer as a zone at a really good field, come back early and write. But long story short, the bus and train system was so crazy we wound up getting home late because it was full of people trying to get home for the game. So we did not get the time to write yesterday and here we are!

Anyway, Chile had 2 games this past week. Last Wednesday when they killed Spain, like they weren't supposed to, the streets went crazy!!!!!!!! We are in an area of the sector that doesn't have too many houses and our house is kind of isolated. But still. They killed Spain which is a huge deal, AND they qualified for the next round, so we heard people horsing around and making all kinds of noise and trouble just about all night. It was pretty crazy! Yesterday wasn't too bad because Chile lost, so we didn't hear too much.

Anyway, this week was pretty rough. Having to stay in the house, some things that happened to where we couldn't get to teaching and stuff, so we didn't get to teach too many people. But we did have a really interesting experience one day.

We were walking in the streets one day before lunch, and we were going to back from to the house after a lesson when all of a sudden the both of us just stopped. And we looked at each other and asked "Did you feel that?" And sure enough we both did. So we had no idea what to do, so we just starting knocking on doors that were near us, and just contacted. Doors shut in our faces and it kind of stunk for about 15 or 20 minutes, but we kept going. So we were kind of thinking like we both felt it, was it to have doors shut in our faces? But sure enough, we got to the last door on the street and a lady opened up and we talked to her for about 20 minutes, and we set an appointment for a few days later to go back and meet with her. Her name is Teresa. We haven't seen her since, but we are still hopeful!

Well that was my week, and I didn't take too many pictures, but the two I took was one of me, my District Leader and my Zone Leader in a face thingy. I'm on the left with the shades. The other is me and my DL contacting a random door on the way to the soccer field.