The moment you realize the mission is real

July 24, 2017

Hey Everyone!

So I guess the big news of the week is we had changes! I stayed in my sector, but I am now going to be training a new missionary!!!!!!!! I am so stoked!  I have been looking forward to this responsibility for a while now. I am so excited!  Normally when we know the changes we find out Saturday night who will have changes and then Sunday morning they tell us all the details, but we didn't know any of the details until late last night and even then everything wasn't that clear.  As we all got together this morning I found out that I am also district leader now.  I am super excited to be able to work with my district.  We are all super young in the mission and there is a lot of faith and a ton of energy.  I know that this all will be hard at first, there is a lot of stuff to do, but I really am feeling blessed for this opportunity,

So one thing that I expressed was how hard it is to get investigators to church.  After having 11 people committed to come to church and having only 1 of them show up after passing by every single one of their houses was a little frustrating.  I decided that I will have to go about this in a whole different way, not really sure exactly how I will do this right now, but I am excited to see how things will go.  With my new comp there will be lots of learning on both ends and there will be lots of changes made in us and in the sector and in the ward.

One thing that has changed in the ward since I have been here is that we are now getting all the priesthood brethren together every 2 weeks and we visit alot  of the people that are inactive.  It's actually not showing a whole ton of results on the side of the inactive members, but it is for sure changing the hearts of the people in the ward.  There may be very few members, but each and every one of them are starting to help in the work and eventually we will see the fruits of our labors.

So with my new comp I won't get to meet him until tomorrow late.  Today all the trainers were in meetings with President as he was giving us council on training.  At this point he says he doesn't even have the assignments made.

I am excited to write you all next week and to tell you how everything is going! At this point in my mission it is great to look back on myself and change and become even better! My goal is to train my new missionary to be a beast of a missionary, so I need to be a beast of an example! 

I love you all.  I hope you have a great 24th!

Elder Anderson

The struggle is real

July 17, 2017

Hey Everyone,

This week was a pretty normal week, super slow at the first of the week and super busy at the end. Not a whole to tell you guys about either, 

First off  these past few days have been super cold, ha ha! President is even making jokes in our emails we get from him about how cold it is! Here in Chile it snows once every like 20 years, and I guess its has been one of those years cause snow fell a few days ago in Santiago.  Not here on the coast though.

On Sunday we finally had a few people attend church and we now have a baptism date with a man named J for the 5th of agusto.  We have lots of hope for him.  He is a super great guy! He is a little older like in his 60's, but he has a very strong testimony.

So last week I got a call from the office asking what we were running in our house.  They explained that our electrical bill was running 5 times higher than normal.  In our house we have less things than most of the other pentions have.  After doing a little inspecting I found a nice cable running from my house to my neighbors, haha!  They were stealing our power for the past 2 months.  I called the office and they sent a guy to take a look at it and in the end the guy just cut the cable and threw it away, nothing more.  I had a good laugh at it because who would of thought to do something like that?

So today for p-day an Elder from the next sector over stayed with me in my house.  He is a great guy from California and his parents are both from Mexico.  We had a good time scrubbing the house.  I am sure our mom's are proud of us! We cleaned everything we could.  The fridge, everything!

So talking about the struggle is real...just a reference to how life is.  The mission is super great, but it is always a struggle to get people to church, but it is such a reward for them and for us when they finally go.  I have found that once a person goes to church once, somewhere down the road they get baptized.  That is why it is such a goal to get people to go to church!

I hope you all have a great week! 

Elder Anderson

My Mr. Rogers Sweater.

Cable connecting to our apartment.

Grongo Vacation

July 7, 2017

hey yall!

this past week has been one full of miricles, many things happened this week that showed us that the lord has been watching our hard work, to start out this past week we now have 4 people that have committed to babtizm, 3 hatianos that speak good spanish and english and 1 chileano that is an older guy that has stomach cancer, each of these people we litteraly stumbled upon them, the only problem is we cant make anything offical with any of them becuase none of them have come to church.

jose, jose is the older chilean that we met on tuesday, tuesday we had interviews with president and so our day was kinda a little shorter on time to work, we had just gotten out of a lesson and for some random reason we started contacting up in this part of the sector, which we normaly would not do at this time of night, like 8:30, elder quipildor then said lets go visit jose, i had never even heard of this guy, but we litteraly were headed straite for his house without knowing it, turns out my comp had seen him around the change before i got here but had never had a lesson with him. as we nocked on his door he let us and we had a great lesson with him talking about babtism, we then commited him to be batized, it will be a little harder to teach him becuase he cant read but it will all turn out good, we have high hopes and lots of faith, one thing that i have learned about is that with everyone we really need to have tons of faith in them, all to often we classify people after we leave there house as if they are going to progress fast or not progress, as we have tried to put all the faith in the world into these people and extend a lot more invitations and dates for babtism we are seeing the results.

today for p day my comp had to go get his visa done, since it is a couple hours in bus to get to santiago he left last night, with some other elders from san antonio that had to do there visas as well, so i am on divisions with elder johnson, the zl, he has only 2 weeks left in the mission, so we decided to go up to el quisko today and hang out with all the other gringos in the zone, litterally all the latinos are gone today, haha we ended up walking around a bit looking at the ocean and we went and ate a churrasko in a nice little resturaunt. it has been a really great day, nice and laid back, haha and i havent spoken this much english in months!

so last monday i was on divisions with the dl elder nicolas  from peru, we were leaving a car of a member and as i was getting out i heard a big rip! the back of my pants had gotten caught on something and had oppened of the back end of my pants pretty good! luckily i was wearing thermals underneath,

so today i took some time and bought some new pants for a super good price, it was like 2 pants for 25 bucks, this week i will take them to a ward member and she will slim them up for me. haha always the custom fit pants for the missionaires!

thankyou for all the support you all give me, i hope you all had an amazing 4th of july, please have a great week!

elder anderson

Fly Over States, Jason Aldean

July 3, 2017

sup fam!

welll my subject this week i decided to give a shout out to my good old country! 4 july for sure wont be the same out here in chile as it will be there, this song by jason aldean if i remember right explains alot of how america is, small towns and country, thats what america is, i am super greatfull to be able to be from this country, and to be able to have the rights and things that i have there, you never realize how great it is to live in the states until you dont live in them anymore.

well this week was very much the same as last week, lots of trying to find people, some of the people that we found over the past while have started to progress, its a little hard to teach them though, these people are all friends with our retention joey, so in this case many of them have very bad drug problems. i haved worked with serval cases of things like this, it is hard for them to progress and change but when they do, it for sure is rewarding,

this past week we have been seen several miricles happen, we can see the lord trying to bless us, we have found a few people that are really receptive when we are there, its just hard to get them to church because here in the port everyone works all the time, the fishing opperations here have been hitting gold this past week so alot of people have not been home much. 

this week i have planned a ward activity, my hopes are that this small ward of 50 people will be able to be a little more united, the activity will be this friday at 7, we have a few activities planned that hopefully will turn out great!

so i got to give a shout out to friend weller, haha for teaching us how to lead music, the ward found out that i can lead so thats what i am doing now! haha also when i have time i am trying to remember what i learned from piano lessons, hopefully i can remember enough to play then we can have a piano durnig those hymns!

other than that not a whole lot to tell! i hope you guys have a great week! and remember to always remember to retain your knowledge that you recieve, not going to really explain it, but you will always use the knoledge you have throughout life! no matter what!

love you all!

elder anderson

Beach Town Chile

June 27, 2017

hey fam!

another week in your typical beach town in chile, dogs rain and coastal breeze, this past week has been pretty good. just a typical week where nothing and i mean nothing really eventful happened, as i had mentioned last week my sector was kinda in the low part for people progressing, this past week we spent a very large amount of time contacting, we talked and talked and talked, and we now know that if we want to work this sector it is not through contacting, the people were not receptive, now dont get me wrong we did find a few people that we are going to pass by, including a family where the dad is a member and the mom and daughter arent, and they have tons of questions! so we will follow up with them this week to see what we can do.

one thing that did happen is it rained and it rained, here in chile they dont have good drainage systems, expecially when the the rain just doest stop! haha but it makes for a fun adventure, all the streets turn to rivers, and we get to go have a fun adventure in the rain, 

sunday we had stake conferance, it was a pretty good conferance, the missionaries had to sing in a chior, we sounded pretty good for a bunch of missionaries, the conferance was really sentered on the faith and how in life our faith will have its ups and downs but we need to make sure it is in the general direction of up!!! which reminds me alot of the talk from general conferance called look up! i invite you all to read that again.

yesterday since our p day was changed we had to make arrangements for lunch, luckuly a great family offered, when we were over there the family had all there grandaughters there, as we were all eating one that had like 7 years kept looking at me, me being me i asked her if i looked different or something, haha it was really cute of this little girl to be so curious as to why i looked so different. at times i forget that i am white out here, until someone in the streets screems hello! sometimes i forget that i am different, i really feal like i am a chilean, people say i even have the accent.

i love you all! have a great week!

elder anderson

Well I did say I like to work

June 19, 2017

hey fam,

so to start off i wont send pics again, this computer has more viruses than the people here know what to do with. 

so this week has been pretty real, haha as i started the week i spent as much time as i could cleaning up the house and the sector, the house that we live in is your typical beach house with tons of sand!!!! all the streets here are sand streets, so it gets in the house, also not a single elder has really taken time to clean the house in probably ever! so i threw out tons of old clothes and junk that was in the house, after burning most of my freetime the house is finally a little better. 

so the sector here has been left out to dry for quite some time, it hasent seen a babtism in a while, but the retention here is good, cause the other elders were visiting them every day! when i got here they wasnt anyone that was progressing or even was being taught really, the people that my comp took us to visit the first few days were a bunch of hatianos that dont speak english or spanish so we cant teach them. 

so all throughout my life i have always said i like to work. haha so that is for sure what the lord put me in this sector for. there is tons of work to be done here, this past week we spent a good amount of time in the streets looking for people to teach, chileanos! not hatianos, we found a good number of people that we are now helping progress,

one of the retentions here is a very cool 24 year old kid, he has had a really rough life, before he was babtized he was one of the largest drug dealers on the coast. after visiting him a few times he introduced us to some of his friends that have seen the change in him and we are now working with them to make the same change. they are all super nice people, one is named kevin, he is 20 years old and he really wants to not only change his life but help change a lot of other lives as well.

so the ward here is really small, my job this week is visit them all and get them helping us. this week i spent some time studying in alma 26, it talks a lot about how we are all called to do this work, and how the lord has prepaired us, and how we can keep prepairing for things. i invite you all to read this chapter!

i love you all, have a great week!

elder anderson