It's Chilly in Chile: The Sandwich Challenge

Hello! Family,

What a week! It has been a crazy last 7 days.

On Monday, when we started to work at 6pm there weren't very many clouds so we didn't have a jacket for the rain, only for the cold. But as southern Chile is very rainy, it started to rain so we went back to the house for a rain jacket. As we were leaving, the Mamita yelled at us "Elderes, lo atropellaron a Papito" which means, "Elders, papito was ran over". So we threw our backpacks in the garage and ran about 4-5 blocks to the place where Papito was hit. (Papito is the husband of the mamita and is about 80 years old and a bladder cancer survivor) He was there on the ground with a big crowd. My companion and I made our way through the crowd and saw him. He just had a little blood running out of his nose. He wasn't talking and his eyes were open. We were going to give him a blessing but the ambulance came. Finally the mamita came, she was babysitting a 7-year old girl at the time and left her in the house, so when they were taking papito to the hospital in an ambulance, the mamita asked us to go with him. We were going to ride in ambulance to the hospital but the paramedics said only one of us could go so we went back to the house. When we got back to the house, we gave the mamita a blessing of comfort and we went to go work. I couldn't find my backpack. I knew where I had put it, which was inside the door right next to the backpack of Elder Barriga, but I couldn't see it anywhere. I was thinking that someone moved it to another place and then went to the hospital so we decided to say a prayer and leave to work the rest of the night. We left and had a family home evening with a family then came back to the house.. I was pretty discouraged because it had my scriptures, camera and videos. The next day, during our studies, I heard the mamita talking with someone and it was a guy from Lipigas (a company that sells propane house to house). It turns out that they were there last night when everyone was gone, and another person who lived there answered the door and said that nobody was there, so they left. Well this guy from Lipigas said that he came with his friend and thinks that his friend might have taken my backpack so he left and came back in about 5 minutes. ( It was obvious that he had alot more to do with my backpack not being there than he wanted us to know). He had my backpack back with all of the stuff in it, which was good. Everything had been in ziploc bags and they took everything out of the bags. The only thing missing was all of my pictures from one of the cards had been deleted. So that was the fun and excitement of this week.

We have found some good people lately. It has just been hard for them to come to church. This weekend the ward here did a temple trip to Santiago. They returned home on Sunday morning at 8:30am and were all exhausted for church at 9:30. When church started there were about 8 people but soon about 30 arrived. It sure made me miss the temple. What a blessing to be so close to a temple as a short car ride. I sure do miss it.

Today as a zone, we decided to eat at a place that had really big sandwiches! There was a challenge of eating the biggest one in under 14 minutes and it was free. Me and another Elder tried it out and I was doing great until the last minute. I ended up leaving the bread. I felt sick but it was a good effort haha. The sandwhich was a kilo (2.2 lbs) of meat with bacon, lettuce tomato, avacado and mayonaise.

Well, we are finallly getting back into the normal motion of work without any problems or injuries, it feels good but it is always difficult after a little time without working and so now we are trying to make up for it by working twice as hard.

Well I hope that everything is going great with everyone.

Love, Elder Nelson