So a lot of things happened this week. I will start with the most important and just see where I can get to! I'm sorry if I can't get to all the personal emails I would like to!
The reason we had to do our proselyting and contacting this week(usually it is week 6 of your MTC stay but for us it was week 5) because it is Chile's day of independence on the same day of my birthday! And it is a huge deal! They start celebrating a week early and won't stop their celebration until this Sunday. Nobody goes to work or goes to school and there are just a lot of big events and festivals that go on. So because of that we did our week 6 activities during week 5.
Thursday we got to go contacting, in Santiago there are tons of parks and so they split all the companionship up and sent them off to different parks or sometimes there was a couple of companionship's at a big park. Some had to get on buses and others just walked. We just walked and we talked to 8 people but 3 did not want to talk to us haha but we actually got names, numbers, and addresses for two people and then handed out some pass along cards to other people we talked to! It felt so good to get out in the real world and talk to real people and realize how atrocious my Spanish is! Haha but it was incredible and at some parts I could not understand them but other parts I could!
Friday was the big day though, we went on splits with missionaries in the West mission!! We all went and got bus/metro cards and got on a bus(we had teachers helping us because the bus system around here is way confusing), walked to the metro jumped on that which was a first for me! Rode on line 5 to the Del Sol station where my companion and I got off and met up with missionaries and went on splits! My companion was Latino from mexico and spoke absolutely no English but honestly it was really fun, and hard, to talk to him but we had a good conversation whenever we weren't talking to people! During this proselyting time we taught 2 lessons, got two contacts, got laughed at(mainly me for my Spanish haha which was totally fine) and talked to a couple of people!
Our first lesson was with a man and the whole set up was pretty cool. We were walking around and my companion said okay lets go to this address and so we walked to the house and were waiting for someone to come to the gate but nobody was home so we were just waiting deciding if we should move on when a man walked down the sidewalk to us with a grocery bag and asked if we were missionaries and we said yes and he asked if we could come and say a prayer for his wife who is in the hospital in a coma. Well it turns out that the house we went to was actually his house and he was just coming back from shopping! So he let us in and we first talked about faith and he told us he has faith that we as missionaries could move mountains if we also had that faith so that was cool that he had that much faith in us then we talked about the importance of prayer and then my companion said a very powerful prayer for this man's wife and afterwards we talked about how God supports us through our trials. It was a very spiritually strong meeting and I can't believe I get to go do that for two years.
The next lesson was not quite the same, haha we went to this older ladies house and I kid you not I think I only understood one word that came out of her mouth the whole entire time! She was straight Chilean which means she dropped all letter "s" and shorted almost every word by not saying the first letter or first part of the word! When we were reading a scripture she read it for us (and i promise i was looking at the right scripture) but I could not understand a single word so afterwards my companion asked if I got any of that and I said no way did I understand that and we both just laughed. He said don't even worry because it will come with time!
When it was time to head back to the CCM my companion and I had to do the whole metro thing by ourselves and we had to get on then keep riding the metro to the end of the line where the rest of the companions were. We went to the Maipu station which is a huge metro station and then once all the missionaries were there we got back on and rode back into Santiago. The metro was a lot of fun because there were a lot of people so we were able to talk to a lot of people and practice our Spanish!
I have been able to understand a lot better though lately because all of our teachers now don't speak English(they don't know how to) and so we have to learn completely in Spanish and it has been a huge help! Sometimes they will even speak their regular speak and with their chileano accents and we don't notice it because we have gotten use to it! Things are coming along!!
This last Sunday we had a surprise for our morning devotional. Elder Ceballos of the first seventy and his wife came in person and spoke to us! Her talk was completely in Spanish and i got a lot out of it surprisingly and his talk was mostly Spanish with a mix of English and his was incredible as well. Also this Sunday was our first Sunday that was all in Spanish and so I have now said goodbye to English sacraments for two years, wish me luck!
We got new hermana's last week and they are all Latinas and are so much fun! They love to laugh at our horrible Spanish and I love it but there are very patient with us and help us a ton. We usually will sit by them at lunch to practice. Hermana Carmiento and Hermana Coronel are some of my favorites!
Thank you for all the birthday wishes! I wish I had time to thank you all personally but I don't think I will!
Also next week because I am going out in the field I probably won't have a P-day depending on what day their p-day is so I won't be writing for two weeks!
Love always,
Elder Gunnell
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