More Mission Happenings & Mother's Day Skype

 Hey family and friends! This week was a pretty good week and ended amazing because I got to Skype my family for Mother’s day.  I’ll start with last P-day and what we did.  At lunch time we met with about 30 other missions in the center of Temuco and we all went together to an all-you-can-eat restaurant!  It was amazing, and we stayed there for quite a while socializing and eating.  I had a lot of fun chilling with some missionaries who are really good homies and I met some other new cool Elders too.  I’ve said this before but there are people that I have met on my mission that I will be friends for life with. 

Another very cool thing that happened this week is we had interviews with the president of our mission, President Bluth.  My interview with him went very well and I was able to talk to him about many things. The man is so smart and helpful.  I feel like I could talk to him for days and days.  He’s a very impressive guy and I have a lot of respect for him  I don’t think I could ever be a mission president, with all the missionaries who they have to deal with and help with all their problems and questions. Haha  I find that it would be excruciating!   But President and Sister Bluth do it very well and in a loving manner. 

We had a pretty exciting Friday that started off in the morning with wind that I thought was going to blow the house down.  It turned into a hard down pour and it just happened that it was on the day we had to head into the center of Temuco to go to a doctor’s appointment for my companion.  We didn’t know exactly where the office was so we had to search for it for a while and when we finally got there, the doctor wasn’t there so we had to wait for an hour until she finally arrived.  He got his check up and then she told us that we had to go to a clinic to set up an appointment for him to get a scan. So we had to start our adventure in getting there at night in the busy city of Temuco, with millions of people in the street and on the micros, it made it quite hard.  It actually reminded me a lot about the adventure that I had with Elder Rivera one of the first weeks I was in the mission when Elder Miller was sick in the hospital in Temuco. However today was different because I was having to translate everything because our mission doctor was talking to me in English and then I was having to translate it into Spanish to the other doctors and receptionists.  It was quite the fiasco.  It was pretty cool to see my Spanish tested in an area outside of talking about religious things with people.

To end the week, Saturday night the other Elders who live in our house had a baptism for two of their investigators which went very well, one of the best baptisms I’ve seen.  After the baptisms when we were waiting for them to change back into their normal clothes, there were Mormon Messages playing.  The videos of them really touched the families of the people who got baptized, who aren’t members, and a lot of them were crying. The dad of one of the people, I could tell was so proud, it was really cool to see.

Yesterday, being Mother’s Day, I got to Skype with my family and grandparents!  Even though it was the second time, it feels like it had been such a long time since I had seen them!  It went really well,  I love and miss my family.  Distance away really brings out the emotions for people, but makes it that much better the few chances you get to see them , and I am sure will be the same when I return.

One last thing to end this letter, Brian, my convert in Coronel called me last night.  He told me that he is doing really well that he’s thinking about serving a mission.  He blessed the sacrament for the first time yesterday, got called to be the Young Single Adults Leader and a bunch of other things! Such a stud!  That’s it for this week, hope you guys have a good week at home!  Love you all!

Elder Clay