¡Hola mi familia y mis amigos!
Happy Halloween!! I still haven´t figured out if it´s a real holiday here or not. The grocery stores sell Halloween candy, but you can tell it´s a knockoff of what they see happens in the States. It´s basically Chile trying to be as cool as ´Merica, but I don´t think they quite get the concept of Halloween with the costumes and the payload of candy you get from door to door. I´m curious to know if Kenzie and Kylie are going trick or treating this year, I know I would! In fact, I might go knocking some doors tonight anyway, hahaha... But All Saints Day sounds like it´s going to be a party. It´s the day after Halloween, and everyone gets off work and sits around all day. I´m pretty excited for it because we should be able to get a ton of teaching in, and we already have the entire day loaded with appointments with people that we normally have to teach in the night or on the weekends and juggle between others who can only be taught at that time too, but we should be able to get around to a lot of them while they´re home.
Speaking of holidays, in response to your inquiry about a Christmas list, that´s a hard one. I´ll let you know next week if I think of anything, but really the only thing that comes to mind is good American candy. Skittles, Peanut Butter MnMs, Swedish Fish and Orange Slices could be some serious quality. I don´t need music, I´m content with listening to the music that every other missionary has out here, or none at all, since I can just play a good song in my head if I need to. It would be nice to have church DVDs of any kind, long or short, but only if they have Spanish audio. They can be really handy for teaching investigators, because sometimes they don´t really get a concept and looking at it from a different perspective than just teaching, like watching a 20 minute video of the restoration, can really make things click for them. We don´t get videos from the mission though, and we can just use whatever our families send us. It would be really nice, especially, to have the 20 minute restoration video in Spanish! If you send a bunch, it could also be handy to have a CD carrier that doesn´t take up too much space in my backpack to carry a few with me.
So the mission just pays for our pensions and then they give us money in our accounts at the beginning of every month. We then take our cards to an ATM and take out all the money for the month in cash and then budget it for our groceries, transportation, computers, letters, phone calls, and anything else for the whole month. If I need to take personal money out, I´ll go ahead and use the debit card with the ATM machines, probably, thanks! Also, I didn´t think of checking local pharmacies for contact solution, they probably have it there, good call.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANDY!! I can´t believe you´re already 4 years old!! I received your package last week and I absolutely loved the pictures you and Rydin drew for me! I have them hanging up on my wall above my desk! Marta, the gluten free granola is above and beyond my wildest dreams! I have big plans for it. Remember when I talked about the manjar I buy here, the kind of carmelly substance that I really love, well, I´m going to mix it with some granola and make little granola bites and experiment with granola in yogurt and with honey and all sorts of stuff. You just opened up my culinary possibilities as a missionary, thank you soo much!! I´m going to get a letter in the mail to you, but it may take a while to travel.
Last preparation day, after doing computers, we went to the sand dunes of Con Con with the Viña del Mar Oeste Zone and sand boarded down the dunes! It was a lot of fun, but pretty windy, so sand got everywhere. It was such a gorgeous day and the dunes are right on the edge of the sea. We rented little wooden boards from a guy and then used candles to wax down the boards before we would ride downs the dunes as far and fast as we could go. It´s basically impossible to steer, so you just go and enjoy it.
Last week, while I was on interchanges with the other elders in my district, we were talking with everyone in the streets and we talked to these two guys who were carrying paint buckets and were about 28 years old. They were super friendly and we said we wanted to share a message about how God has called prophets again on the earth, and they were like, yeah, come teach us while we paint our new store! So we followed them to their shop that they´re opening up together and just taught them the Restoration while they scraped paint off the walls and stuff. When we got to the part about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, they put their stuff down and listened intently and at the end were wondering why everyone doesn´t know about this yet! They said they really wanted to read the Book of Mormon and pray for themselves to know the truth of the message. One of them, Alejandro, has been to Aspen, CO, and about every place in between. It was pretty funny to hear his story about how he worked with some drug dealers in Colombia until he realized it was wrong and then how he was in Tijuana, Mexico, and snuck through the border into the US and lived in San Diego for a little bit until he got a job working on houses and then went to Aspen to help build some houses there, and then made his way back to Chile and is now opening this little game shop with his buddy, Camilo. He told us all about how sad it was to see so many poor, starving Mexican people in Tijuana trying to get across the border, and how if God really did establish his church on the earth again, people could learn a lot from it and be able to help others. So that´ll be interesting to hear how they progress and what happens there.
Hey Dad, could you let me know all the different areas you worked in while you were here on your mission? I´m getting pretty familiar with all the areas round about and where everything is located. I love you all so much!
Love, Elder Kimball
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