June 27, 2011

Well, I never saw anything about the volcano, it was way way way far away from where I was, but yeah. Anyway...

I made it to Punta Arenas. What ended up happening is that Hermana Bertagnole and I took the bus down to Valdivia, where I met up with Hermana Baum and we took the bus to Osorno and spent the night in the mission home. It was awesome, but also sad because President and Hermana Lovell are leaving tomorrow so everything was empty. We drove down to Puerto Montt in the morning and took a flight down to Punta Arenas. Yes, my ear drum did pop, and I´m taking amoxicilin to make sure there´s no infection. So the housing situation is... complicated. We´re homeless. The hermanas here before me wanted to move, found a place, and terminated their contract for the house they were living in. However, they forgot to get the new place checked by the zone leaders. The zone leaders didn´t approve it, so as of right now we´re living in the Elders' house in another sector and they are living with another set of Elders somewhere else. We have been working on finding a new place to live a LOT this week. We found a woman who is in the process of gutting and fixing up a little side attachment that she has to her house, so as of right now that´s our most promising bet. I´ll be sad to leave the Elders' house though. It´s the best house I´ve lived in thus far in the mission. It's SO WARM and toasty and the bathroom is suprisingly the nicest of any of the houses I´ve lived in. Oh well.

So I´ve discovered I really like the snow. Who would've guessed that one? The houses here are heated by gas instead of wood, so they´re all really nice and warm. Punta Arenas is really different from the other parts of Chile I´ve seen. It feels a lot like Utah. That might just be because I´m associating it with snow, but all the same it feels like Utah to me. I love it.

Hermana Lovell gave me a pair of her boots to take down here, and it was a good thing too because just two nights ago some dog decided it wanted to follow us around all night and when we tried to lose it, it ran after us and all of the sudden I looked down and my ankle was in it´s mouth! I´m not sure if he was really trying to hurt me so much as he wanted to play, but all the same, I screamed.

I love Hermana Contreras! She is probably one of the sweetest people you could ever meet in your life.  I love the members here. I LOVE our mamita and her family. They have 3 kids. 15, 8 and 5. Damian just had heart surgery on Thursday, but is recovering really well. I´m teaching Tommy his times tables (yeah, I know, right?), and we got to help Reinato with his school project about birds. They are all awesome.

Anyway, I have to charge my batteries, so I´ll have to wait till next week to send pictures.

Love you!