Fleas, Carnival, & More Bucket Showers

This one will be short because I don’t have a lot of time:( But this week went really well!! I hit the two month mark! It’s crazy to think it’s already been this long! This week flew by! I’m kind of disappointed! The time I want to go slower flies by and the time I want to fly by goes too slow! Haha I want to be in this training period as long as I can so I can learn as much as I can from such a good trainer as I have now! I grow to love and appreciate Elder Casperson more and more every day! Also I grow to love and appreciate the scriptures! That’s one thing that before the mission I never really took advantage of.  I regret it every day. I should have studied more, but by the end of this mission I will be a master :)

Some crazy things that happened this week... I got destroyed by fleas. Haha like literally my back and everywhere is covered by flea bites. They’re kind of like mosquito bites and they are impossible to avoid here, but they are healing slowly. Just waiting for the next round haha.

One night we were walking home for the night and this drunk lady approached us screaming ELDERS, ELDERS. Well she talked to us for a while, nothing I could understand, but the whole time she was just staring at me like rubbing my hands and arms haha. She had a real thing for me. And she was amazed by my hair, calling my cabeza de choclo, which translates to corn head. hahaha the elders in my casa think that’s about the funniest thing that has happened. But yeah, it ended with her giving me an even bigger kiss than last week, except this one was right on the cheek. She was going for the mouth but I dodged last minute. My comp thought it was hilarious.

Nights in Temuco Catrihula I will never forget. Talking with Elder Miller and Casperson about things and life after and before our missions is one of the greatest and funniest things I have done. Elder Casperson says that I need to appreciate being born in the same house as Elder Miller because I will never have another experience that like ever again. I am grateful.

Teaching has been going very well! We have two baptisms that should be golden for the 20th and the 27th. Two amazing people. One kid who’s seventeen and is a professional soccer player and then his sister. But other than that we have amazing investigators who just need to receive an answer! I know that they will at the right time. I am learning more and more Spanish every day and trying to improve in my qualities of a missionary every day!

I had my first sacrament fast Sunday in Chile yesterday and really it was one of my most favorite testimony meetings I’ve ever been too. The people here have the most amazing testimony’s. I am so grateful for the opportunity to be here. The grace of God is amazing. I know that if we will do our part, the Lord will make up for the rest. But we have to do our best!

We talked about three things on our mission that we are grateful for and have loved the most. For Chile in general I said the scenic aspect, it is so beautiful here. I will return with my family. For the spiritual aspect I said for the opportunity to grow and change into the person I’ve always wanted to be in the gospel, also the people I’ve met. The last thing was a random, and I said the people I have gotten to know, missionaries and people of Chile. I can’t express how grateful I am for everything. I am doing well here. It is very hard but I continue to receive help from the Lord. Love and Miss you all. You all are in my prayers!

Elder Clay

This week in Chile has included a bunch of things that I haven’t experienced yet so it was a good week! I can’t remember if I talked about Return and Report last week but just a little more about that. It was so fun to see all my friends from the CCM again and hear the experiences that they have been having. I was the only one who had baptized someone, what’s up...:)  They all thought and said it wouldn’t have been anyone else but me to be the one to baptize the 16 year old girl model the first cambio haha. But yeah it was good to see them all again and I hope that I somehow get to be companions with one of them down the road.

This week I started running with Elder Miller, it is incredible! Waking up and running down a kind of mini highway, idk it is just perfect. I get to think about stuff, perfect temperature and it is beautiful out at that time! We had to start running because here in Chile it is kind of impossible to not get a little bit of chub and I refuse to let it happen to me. Weight gain is a constant danger and worry for a missionary. That and balding.  I bought some hair clippers so this week me and my comp took turns cutting each other’s hair. We saved some money and we look dang good. We’re professional. We’ve done some more planning of our future lives, we take turns telling what is going to happen to the other after the mish. Elder Millers is always the funniest. He’s set on proposing to his ex GF the week he gets back and marrying a month later haha.

Still been taking bucket showers, but I think we are getting it fixed soon. Oh haha our adventure of trying to fix our vacuum cleaner. Four missionaries arguing on what piece goes where after we took it all apart to clean it. Pretty funny stuff. But we did get it working! Missionaries can do anything:)!

Diego is going to be baptized this Saturday, then his sister either the next Saturday or the one after! We also have this amazing woman named Maria who is honestly DE ORO. Of gold. We met her a while ago but she went out of town for a while. She is so into everything of the church and I’m sure she will get baptized this month, She came to church for the second time yesterday and was answering all the questions in the class already! She is 70ish and is the most happy, outgoing, loving person you will ever meet.

Also this week we had the ward party for the 18th of September, (Carnival)that day for them is like our 4th of July except for they go hard core, all out. It is a week-long of partying, so I should have some crazy stories to write about next week! But the party was crazy enough! There was so much food, meat cooked by the bucket load! They have this tradition Chilean dance called the Quaka danced by a bunch of people, as missionaries we aren’t allowed to dance:(  We then sang the Chilean national anthem, I and two other gringos just smiled and mumbled along during that part. They have this traditional Chilean game which is essentially horseshoes but instead you have these like brick things and you throw them in mud. It’s called Tejo or something like that. There are also these top things that you wrap up with a string and then throw it. It’s an intense top, it’s called trompo. There are also a bunch of other games. I and Elder Casperson dominated the three-legged race. I dominated the sack race, and there was a bunch of other crazy games. All way fun and funny. Oh my, I forgot about the tug of war. There were a bunch of tug of wars but the last one was between some of the guys and ALL the girls. I have never seen such determination on faces such as those of the Chilean women, kind of scary. They wrecked us. But they had soooo many haha, Hermana Cofre on the end... what were we supposed to do??? It was an impossible task for us. Yeah it was a good party and I’m sure I’ll have some more this week because we heard that nobody wants to listen to our message during this week. I can’t wait to hear "No no no, estamos muuuuuy ocupado ahora" a million times.

Contacting is pretty fun! Especially the people who say they already know our church well enough. Some things I have learned from the people of Chile about our church: Joseph Smith is our God, Joseph Smith lived in the times of Jesus Christ, the Book of Mormon is a story of Joseph Smith meeting and talking to God!  

It’s been great. Other than that I continue to grow in my knowledge of the gospel and language. I’ve been focusing on trying to change myself to the person I want to be which includes all the Christ like attributes. Trying to have love for everyone around me is pretty difficult at times, different missionaries with different personalities.

And this has been my report for the week. Love you guys, thank you for the support.

Elder Clay's address:
 Make sure to write Connor because there are 2 Elder Clays

Elder Connor Clay
Mission Chile Concepcion Sur
Castellon 1063, Of. Sur
Casilla 3560
Concepcion, Bio Bio
Chile