January 9, 2012 Lebu

So it is my first p day here in Chile so I will tell you what happened. My companion is Elder Corliss and he is from Highland, Utah. He loves BYU so that is a plus and he is a really good missionary who is helping me out a lot. So my first area is called Lebu. It is about three hours away from Concepcion and it is on the coast. So basically it has a whole lot of hills with tons of trees and forests, like you can’t see the hills cause there are so many trees. Then in the West the hills open up and it is just ocean. So it is really beautiful here. I have not been down to the beach yet but I think we are going to go there next week for p day and play football with the zone. I will send more pictures soon.

I do not get letters as much, like only when we have trips to Concepcion that is when I get letters. So it might take a little bit longer to write but that does not mean that people have an excuse to stop writing me...

Any way so my first couple days of work have been hard. I feel like Elder Calhoun (from the movie "The Best Two Years") when he said this was not the language they taught him in MTC… because they speak soooooo fast here but I am getting to the point where I can actually understand some of the people.

We have this investigator that I want to tell you a little bit about. His name is Roberto. He is like thirty five and lives in an unfinished house that he is building. We taught him on Friday. Well we know that he has an answer and can get baptized. In fact he goes to church all the time. But I feel close to him because he has a lot of doubts like I did. During the lesson I had no idea what was being said but I felt prompted to say something so I did (not really knowing if it was what was being said..) Well it turns out that it was right. My companion said that I said exactly what he needed and said he thinks it helped him a lot. We are trying to help him see that this will bless his life. He just needs to know the Book of Mormon is true.

I met some of the people in the ward and luckily only had to give a testimony my first Sunday instead of a whole talk. But I am sure they will make me give a talk soon enough. So anyway this has been a crazy, crazy week. But I am learning. Some people have told me I don’t have an accent so the Spanish is coming along. The important thing is that I follow those promptings that I receive because they are the spirit. But I can speak pretty good for five days and I think that I will eventually learn this. It’s scary because right after my training they might have me train... scary.. I hope I don’t have to do that.

This mission is great. It’s hard but it’s awesome. My companion is way cool. So I am lucky that I have a good trainer.
Guess what’s awesome? We can watch Disney movies on P days!! like we have a list of awesome movies we can watch!! So my mission is pretty cool. I have been able to meet a lot of great people and am learning slowly. I hope everything will not feel so overwhelming after a while. But I am good.

Here in Chile we don’t eat dinner at all. Just a huge lunch with members or others that almost kills me. This is a very different place but an awesome one. Oh and there are perros all over!! They don’t have a pound so dogs are literally everywhere. Man I wish you could see all this. They do a lot of funny things here. For example when they see us gringos walking down the street they always try and say hello!! how are you?? and it is sooo funny. And on Fridays we play soccer with the youth and investigators. It is pretty awesome!!

So here I am trying to learn how to do this. Well I love you all!

-Elder Butterfield