¡Hola mi familia y mis amigos!
Today is my first preparation day that I will not be in Viña, because we're staying out in Villa Alemana because Elder Rojas is done with his knee therapy. It's pretty nice to not have to travel to the city all the way out from Olmué, though. Elder Rojas only got 2 sessions of therapy, and he said the doctor told him the other 10 sessions would cost about $80, which would be a lot for Elder Rojas, but the bigger factor for why we can't continue the therapies is because we can't take the time out of our schedule to do 10 more weeks of therapy. They say that he can just keep going as normal and he doesn't require an operation, but if he does anything stupid, it'll be worse than in the first place. He really doesn't want to go home, so I guess we're just kind of ignoring his knee for now and continuing onward. He says the therapy helped a lot though, and now he knows a few exercises he can do in the morning to keep it stable. We walk the great distances of Olmué just fine and always put a big smile on!
Yesterday was pretty funny because no one, literally, knew if it was daylight savings time or not. I don't really understand how it works here in Chile, because some people were saying the time might change, some people said it might not, and most people didn't know either way. At church, they announced that daylight savings time didn't happen, but that some people's cell phones had changed the hour while some people's phones didn't, and it was all really confusing. After all the dust settled, we're still going at the same hour that we were before, so as far we know, daylight savings didn't exist here. If reading this paragraph was confusing, just imagine living it.
When I arrived in Olmué, there basically weren't any investigators, but all it takes is a little bit of faith, creativity, and gritty work to stock up the teaching pool. One of the people we're teaching is named Cecilia. When we first started teaching her, she was really Evangelical and didn't understand the need for a living prophet or the restored church. Her situation was such a wonderful testimony to me of the divinity behind the Book of Mormon, because only after she started to read from the Book of Mormon with real intent wanting to know if it was true did she come to feel and know within herself by the power of the Holy Ghost that Christ does not accept any other authority on earth than the one that He Himself instituted in the church of Jesus Christ. She even left her job for a couple of hours in order to come to church one Sunday. When we went by her tent where she sells yarn last Saturday for our teaching appointment, her cousin told us that her husband fell down a 15 meter well earlier that morning and was in a coma in the hospital of Viña. So right now she's coping with that, but we haven't been able to get a hold of her to see how she's doing.
We were walking down the hill from a recent convert's house, and as we passed this enormous house that is a pretty color yellow, Elder Rojas told me he always had liked the color of that house, so I said, "Alright, let's tell them!" So we rang the doorbell and told the lady who came out that we liked the paint on her house, so she gave us each a glass of juice and asked us what we were doing because she always saw us walking past her house for the last 6 months or so. We ended up leaving her with a Book of Mormon with Alma 40 marked because she had questions about what happens after this life, and when we came back a few days later for the teaching appointment, she had read the chapter and taken detailed notes of every single verse in her notebook. It was so awesome, because during the lesson we would read a verse from the chapter and she would read her notes first to tell us what the verse said and asked us any questions she had from it. Her name is Brenda and we've taught her a couple more times, and she has studied just as hard the other chapters from the Book of Mormon we have left her, and is progressing just wonderfully.
Another investigator we found, Alvaro, has this huge patch of grapes in his yard that we sit under to teach him. He is so chill and has a very good comprehension level, so it's easy to teach him, but he doesn't quite understand why all of this is important for HIM. Many people have that challenge, actually. Sometimes we can understand that Christ came to save us all and through him we can learn and grow in love and safety, but they don't quite get that spark of light that makes them realize what they need to do about it. Satan knows that Jesus is the Christ, but that does not mean that he is going to be saved. Everything has to do with how we apply what we know, how we follow Christ, and we can only follow Christ by accepting and living what Christ has founded on the earth. Anyways, he's really cool, and he always gives us a giant branch of grapes to each of us when we leave. He tells us to try out each of the flavors of grapes, because he has about 4 or 5 different types of grapes, and then he cuts off a big clump of them when we decide.
The church building here in Olmué is actually really pretty, and has a nice garden outside that kind of looks like a marriage gazebo or something. I'll try to take pictures sometime of it when I remember. I love you all!
Love, Elder Kimball
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