05 September 2011 - Nueva Aurora, Viña del Mar Oeste

¡Hola mi familia y mis amigos!

¡ESTOY EN CHILE! Holy cow, I can´t believe how happy I am to be here! As soon as I got through immigrations and was out of the airport, I just felt like I was home! Ok, where to begin...

Què cuello indeed, Dad, I was completely baffled when after 2 minutes of talking to you the payphone at the airport said I had run out of minutes!! I was so let out, because I thought I should have a full hour left on the card, because it said I could call other countries for the same price as the states, but after that one of the other missionaries told me that the payphones in the airports appernently suck up the minutes twice as fast, so that was the problem. Grrrrr. But Dad, I love you so much and cannot wait til Christmas to tell you everything I have learned and experienced, which happens to be a LOT already. The flights were great, they were all on time and we had no problems getting to Chile, except that one of my bags got lost in the connection flight, go figure. It was the one with my suits and all my white shirts, but I packed an extra shirt in my backpack and only had to wait til Thursday to get that bag again. The traffic was really crazy on Tuesday when we arrived, so it took a while until President Gillespie showed up to welcome us to Chile, and a couple hours more for the vans to get to the airport after picking up the 9 latino missionaries from the Chilean MTC, but that gave us a whole 3 hours or so to explore the airport and surrounding area for people to talk to, and I was able to talk to a bunch of real Chileans and got a few names and addresses that I gave to the President. This is the real deal, folks!

So we drove to Viña del Mar and stopped at a lookout point that had a sweet view of Viña and Valparaìso, and President talked to us briefly, and then we drove to the big hedge clock thing, I think I had seen it in one of your pictures, Dad, and then took pictures, and then were split into groups of 4, given a piece of paper with the mission home address, and were set loose on the streets to find our way there. So we got to ask people for directions and found our way to the mission home in about 25 minutes (my group was the fastest!) where we had lunch (empanadas...I had vegetables and cheese) and met our trainers! Elder Pilcher is the best papì I could hope for!! He is from California, has about 8 months in the mission, and has a high energy enthusiasm for the work! He is very loving and shares my views on the meaning and practice of obedience in the mission field, which is "obey the letter of the law, follow the spirit of the law." That´s kind of hard to explain in words, but it works really great and I´m super stoked for these next 12 weeks. We then grabbed my bag and hopped on a micro and drove to my first area! Drumroll...

I was born in Nueva Aurora in the Viña del Mar Oeste Zone in the Coastal Region!! It is seriously the best area I can even imagine being born in! We have, apparently, one of the 2 best pensions in the entire mission, and my area is stinking HUGE. Seriously, my area is about 5 or 6 times as big as the area of our pension mates. That means a ton of walking, hiking really, up super steep hills and all over the place to get to our investigators. There are so many people that I can talk to and visit with, and I am so excited to just jump in and do it! My pension has a gasline, so we have heated showers and has two bathrooms, two study rooms, and a big room where we have 2 beds and a bunkbed for the 4 of us, and a kitchen, and 2 patio balconies. We´re on the 5th floor and we look out over Valparaìso and can see the sea and the flowing hills with houses all the way up them, it is seriously gorgeous.

The ward is so tight. The way it works in Chile with the members is they are either hot or cold, straight up. We have 900 members in our ward, and only about 80 to 110 show up every Sunday. The ones that show up are way active, though. We have 2 ward missionaries who are 17 years old, and they already know the missionary lessons in Preach My Gospel and are teaching all the recent converts and go on splits wuith us a lot, they are seriously so cool and they will be super missionaries. We also have about 4 or 5 recent return missionaries who are all way active and go with us teaching, and we get lots of references from them because they are such great examples to all their friends.

Ok, I already have a few of those typical awesome "mission stories" from my first 5 or 6 days here, so here´s one. Yesterday, after teaching a few lessons, we walked back to the chapel to wait for Alan, one of the ward missionaries, to go teaching with us. The chapel is on the busiest street in our area and there is literally always people walking everywhere (actually they are always walking everywhere, busy street or dark back alley, it doesn´t matter, the people are just out and about, ripe for the picking), but all of a sudden there was no one anywhere in sight. It was kind of weird, because I wanted to contact people while we waited for Alan to show up. So we sat down on a small wall. By the way, my comp was a little sick with a cold and we were both pretty tired from working nonstop. After about 20 seconds, I got to thinking that it was really strange that there was no one around, and said a silent prayer that I was willing to talk to whoever the Lord would send in our path at that moment right there. Then, I saw a man walking on the other side of the busy road, but I kind of thought, "no, he´s over there, and Alan´s almost here, probably..." and the man kept walking on. Then, my heart kind of constricted, and I knew that we had to talk to that man immediately, so I said, "we have to talk to him" and we started running across the street and catching up with him. My comp is thinking in his head "oh no, this stupid MTC greenie has the same mentality as all of them, and this is totally going to be nothing," but as we neared the man, he changed his mindset and decided maybe we could just get a name and address out of him. Anyways, we caught up to him and started talking to him. The problem was, I literally could not understand a single word he said. On average, I can understand 40 to 50 percent of what the Chileans are saying, enough to kind of keep up and add comments here and there, but this time was different. Not only that, but I couldn´t think of a single thing to say, seriusly. It was like my brain all of a sudden hit a wall and was completely blank. I opened my mouth to talk, and literally nothing came out, it was embarrassing. Also, my comp was thinking, "I´m going to make him talk, because this is his idea to talk to this guy," so my comp isn´t saying anything either. Finally, my comp starts talking to the guy, I still can´t understand anything, and we (my comp) talks to him for about 5 minutes. The whole time I can´t even pick out a word from his conversation. But at the end, we gave him a Book of Mormon, marked Alma 7, and got his name and address and set up a visit for Tuesday. We then walked away and my comp said that was the coolest experience he´s had yet on the mission. I was like, "oh cool...what happened?" Haha. So this guy apparently said he has problems, and my comp said we´re here to help people with problems, and the guy said his problems were too big and he has to hide behind them by drinking himself away. After more conversation, he told us that his son killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself, and now the man is left alone and lost and is desparately searching for an escape and really wants our help and told us to come teach him and help him. Yeah. So that was a really, really cool lesson for both of us, because it taught us that we are a team. I had the impression to talk to this guy and my comp was able to talk to him and say the right things to open him up and offer him our solution, the Lord´s solution, and that is exactly why we are here.

I wish I could tell you more, there is so much, but the work is good, Chile is beautiful, the poeple are incredible, and I hit the ground running. Oh, real quick, it´s really funny when the members see my name, because every time without fail they go "oooohh!! Kimball! How powerful!" It´s great, so I´ll do my best to uphold the name and more importantly, the name that is below it on my plaque, that of Jesus Christ! I love you all!

Love, Elder Kimball