¡Hola mi familia y mis amigos!
Elder Burnett is so right about the start of letters. Writing missionary letters really is a science, and the hardest part is always the beginning. I feel like I waste time at the start of my letters sometimes, just to get the juices flowing so that I can deliver big time and keep all the fans appeased.
I´m so proud of Jonathon Farr for his high standard of excellence and the great trust that the Lord puts in him to be called to the great nation of Chile!! What a stud. All I know about Antofagasta is that it is pure desert and that the only people that live there are miners. Something like that. Jonathon, you are absolutely not exempt from writing me a letter telling me the results of your mission call, even though I´m already informed.
Although it is pretty hot in Olmué now, Elder Rojas tells me stories of how much hotter it was in the last couple of months. It´s always nice to know that things could be worse, it just puts a nice, positive spin on things. Olmué, being the country, has a lot of dirt roads, so I´ve pretty much given up shining my shoes. It only takes about 3 steps out of our pension to turn my shoes a light color brown and undo any kind of shining that I might have done. I seriously feel so comfortable and at home in this town. It reminds me a bit of Aurora, Utah (my favorite place on earth). The ward is SO good, they are just humble and full of love. Many of them are pretty well off, but they are all very selfless. Dad, did you happen to know Julio Carrasco? He was a counselor in the stake presidency when you were here, so you may have worked with him when you were in the office or something. He says he often had to do things with the office missionaries in that time. Anyways, he´s a member of our ward, and happens to be absolutely loaded with cash. He has about a million acres of land and 4 or 5 cars, and about 4 houses, not to mention whatever else he owns in the city. He is very humble, though, and is very warm with everyone. He feeds us every Thursday.
Apparently, there´s a lady in the ward who has celiac, too, but hasn´t been to church in the 2 Sundays that I´ve been here, so I haven´t gotten a chance to talk to her yet. There haven´t been any problems with meals from the ward, and I´ve been told by a few missionaries that Olmué is one of the best wards in the mission for the food. There are a few return missionaries in the ward, and we have a great youth program here, so we´re going to instill some excitement in the young men to come and teach lessons with us. We visited the primary on Sunday because the teacher wanted us to share a little bit about what missionaries do with the kids. I always like talking to the primary kids, because they look at us like superheroes and I remember back to when I was in primary, looking up to my brother, Brandon, as the superhero he is. It was kind of interesting though, because there were only 3 kids in the entire primary.
I´ve just been using my broken backpack because I never get around to going to buy a new one, so I always walk around with my backpack half open because the zipper doesn´t shut. However, I bought a new zipper that I saw in a market, and I´m going to sew that onto my backpack next Monday so it will be good as new.
One of the projects that Elder Rojas and I wanted to do in our pension is fix up the front yard, which was way overgrown with scrub brush, and just made our heads hurt every time we came home to such disorder. This morning we tackled it big time and filled up 3 large garbage bags of unnecessary grass. We´re going to finish the job next Monday morning, and then I´ll send before and after pictures. Also, for whatever reason, the dogs always leave us little presents every night in our front yard in front of the gate, which can be really annoying as you walk past it every morning, all pumped and ready after studies. There is a really cool bush that grows here in Chile that has these enormous thorns, and when the branches are cut off and left to dry, they get all hard and are like spikes of death. We found a pile of dried branches as we were out doing the good work, so we grabbed a few handfuls and carried them back the 40 minute walk to our pension. It was pretty funny, because I still wanted to talk to people as we went, so we stopped and did street contacts with our arms full of thorn branches. I´m sure people thought we were kind of crazy, but it was easy to start conversations. Anyways, we brought those branches back to the pension and laid them down on the ground in front of our gate, and now the dogs can´t take a dump anymore! It was so gratifying to walk out the next morning without a fresh pile to walk past, until we came back that night to find that someone had stolen almost all of our thorn branches. It was even more annoying the next morning to find that the dogs had returned as well. However, we stumbled across another pile of dried up thorn branches about 3 minutes from our pension, so we carried those back and placed them down this morning, so hopefully they don´t get stolen again.
We were just informed that the next mission president for Viña del Mar has been called and will be coming to replace President Gillespie in July. His name is President Kahnlein and he is from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and is 42 years old!
As for the offer concerning "the package," I´d actually really like a bottle of mapleline so I can make maple syrup! Brandon and Marta sent me Gluten Free Pancake Mix for Christmas, and I´d love to compliment it with some real syrup, and I can get vanilla flavoring here, but I haven´t seen any mapleline anywhere. Other than that, I´m assuming the package won´t be that large, but I really enjoyed that trail mix from Walmart that you sent me for Christmas that had the chocolate, white chocolate, and butterscotch chips with the cashews and all that. If that´s too big, don´t worry about sending it, I´d be content with a small bag of Peanut Butter M&M´s or something delicious. I love you all so much!
Love, Elder Kimball
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