Week 61

Hey Friends and Family!

Llanquihue is BEAUTIFUL!! I love it here!! And our branch (it's not even a ward) here is AWESOME!! It is more than twice as big as the WARD that I was in in Valdivia.  The members here are soo willing to help us! So not much change there haha but I am soo excited to work with the members here!! On Sunday, it was cool because we brought a calendar for the sisters to sign up to go out to visit people with us and we just had to hand it over to the Relief Society President and she told us that there is a sister in charge of helping us find people to go out and work with us! WHAT? How awesome is that?? And they have the goal in this ward that each of the sisters are going to think of a referral and that they not only give us the referral but they come with us to visit them! They introduce us and teach with us in the first lesson! I have never been in a ward with so much member-support and this is a BRANCH! I am so excited.

Our sector is HUGE and BEAUTIFUL!! I honestly feel like I'm in some sort of paradise.  There is a huge lake (Lake Llanquihue) and on the other side of the lake there are two huge volcanoes :) it's gorgeous! I cannot even close to describe how gorgeous it is here and the pictures don't get even close to capturing the beauty.  But I can tell you that I just feel super peaceful here.  Like you can feel that it's a good place and that there are lots of miracles waiting for us here. I'm so excited!

Hermana Alvarez is amazing!  She is so sweet and humble.  I love working with her!! She is from Chile!! Northern Chile in a city called Quintero.  So she is teaching me a lot!! :) I just know that I am going to learn a LOT more from her than she is ever going to learn from me!  It's refreshing being with a companion who is just starting her mission because she is so excited about the work!  We have been running around everywhere trying to find new people to teach and trying to get to all of our appointments on time in our HUGE area! :) haha It's great!

The other day, we went to teach a lesson with a sister in our ward named Hermana Carrillo.  She had a referral for us named German so we went together to meet him! Hermana Carrillo explained him why she wanted him to listen to us and bore her testimony about the way that this gospel has blessed her life and explained a little bit about our message and invited him to church and to keep listening to us! I can just feel that German is going to understand and accept our message!!

I love you guys so much!!

Hermana Harvey

So there are these awesome swans on the lake. I guess Llanquihue is famous for these swans.  There are two volcanoes behind me... You can't see them because of the clouds but they are gorgeous! And yes, they are active :) haha one of them is the one that erupted a few months ago.  But don't worry, nothing happened here when it erupted! Amazingly, the ash didn't even get here in Llanquihue.

These pretty wood sculptures are all over the place in Llanquihue.

More wood statues

By the lake. Gorgeous!

Walking the line by the lake! :)

Las Hermanitas!! That's us! This is a little store close to our house :)

Week 60 - Big News!!!

Hello Friends and Family!

Soooo... After spending all of 4 weeks in this ward, I'm being transferred! I'm headed to a little town called Llanquihue.  President Obeso called us last night to talk with Hermana Marinho and he told us that he needed to make a few changes in Holzapfel.  So Hermana Marinho is going to be senior companion (that's how they say it in English, right) and is going to have to teach the new missionary in the sector all about the area. I'm going to be headed to Llanquihue where I will be finishing my companion's training.  She has been in the mission for about 2 months now. I'm super excited because I know she's going to have lots of energy to work and to learn and I know that I am going to learn a LOT too!!

So, as many of you know, this week was 18 de Septiembre which is a huge holiday here in Chile in which there are a LOT of drunks in the streets all week long and we had the pleasure of talking with lots of them!  One of them was yelling "¡Rubia! ¡Rubia!" which pretty much means "Blondy! Blondy!" and following us as we walked by very slowly because of Hermana Marinho's bad knee.  The good news is that drunk men also walk very slowly because they almost fall over every other second and they get distracted super easy.  So after a little while of walking, he gave up and started following another lady who was walking by.  But the bad news is that Mamita Edith (my mamita from collico) saw us walking and began running after us to talk to us and was yelling "Harvey! Harvey!" sooo this drunk man learned my name.  He started following us again and he then was yelling "Harvey!! Harvey!!"  He obviously thought... hey... it worked for her so it better work for me too!  Hahaha soo funny!

As you also might have heard, there was a huge earthquake in the north of Chile this week.  It was pretty scary because we heard about it when it happened and they sent out a tsunami warning in our area.  Hermana Marinho always says that she just knows that something is going to happen here in our mission because she can feel it so I was a little freaked out.  Our leaders called us and told us that we had to prepare ourselves just in case something happened and we had to leave quickly in the middle of the night.  So, we decided that we wanted to be extra prepared so I made bread real quick and we made some hard-boiled eggs and put it with a bunch of other food and all of our other emergency kit things in a backpack and packed our backpacks with the things that are most important to us like our journals and cameras and our leaders also told us that we had to sleep in our work clothes (skirts) so that we could be ready to leave at any moment.  Hermana Marinho and I even did our make-up so that we wouldn't be too ugly if anything happened. haha sooo obviously, nothing ended up happening but it was super fun getting everything ready :)

I hope you all have a great week!! 

Hermana Harvey

Chilean flag with my companion!

 Cueca! Chilean national dance!! We saw a lot of Cueca this year!... It was hard to take pictures so sorry they didn't turn out very well.

Week 59

Hello Friends and Family! 

This week, as you know, Hermana Marinho wasn`t able to leave the house because of her knee pain.  So I had LOTS of companions!! :) I'll have to take pictures this week with each and every one of my companions because I had a different companion every day!! Like 6 different sisters! :) It was great!! We have seen lots of miracles while working so much with the members!! 

Cesar got baptized this week!!! :) The baptism was beautiful!! Cesar is a little bit different from the rest of our ward, his personality is just different, so we were all really surprised when he showed up to church yesterday wearing a SUIT!! It was amazing!! And he looked so happy!! He was nervous to be confirmed because he doesn't like being in front of so many people because he's very shy but he said that afterwards, he felt at peace and knew that he had made the right decision! He us now praying to know if he should serve a mission!! :) He's 23 so he still has time to decide!! 

We have also been working a lot with in-active members! It is awesome because all of the members who go out to visit with us know where they live and it's a lot more likely that they accept us in their home if they see an old friend.  So we visited some members that haven't gone to church in YEARS one of these families came to church yesterday and last week and another family that hasn't come to church in about 10 years came to Cesar´s baptism!! It was so great!! :) We are seeing lots of miracles here in Barrio Holzapfel and we will be seeing lots more!! :)

Hermana Harvey

Week 58

Hello Friends and Family!!

Everything is still going great with the members here in my ward! They're still super excited to go out and work with us and that is going to be a HUGE blessing this week.  We had one day that we had 3 members come with us to our appointments and also to talk with people in the streets and it was great! We were with members ALL DAY! And they were all different members! :) 

This week, we weren't able to leave to work for two days because Hermana Marinho was having a lot of problems with her knee.  It hurt so bad that she couldn't walk at all and she had to put all of her weight on me just to be able to get back to the house.  So we spent a couple of days in the house.  After two full days of pain, Hermana Marinho decided to call President Obeso and let him know what is going on with her and to ask for his help in knowing what she should do.  We then talked to the mission nurse and she told us that Hermana Marinho can't leave to work at all this week.  So I'm going to be working a lot with members this week while Hermana Marinho stays with our mamita and tries to get better!  I know that God has other plans for us lots of times, but lots of times, the plans that he has for us are pretty gosh darn hard.  But I know that we are going to be seeing LOTS of miracles now that we are ALWAYS going to be with members in order to work! :)

Other big news!!! We had a lesson with an investigator that the Elders had decided not to teach anymore because he wasn't progressing.  (We didn't know that they had decided not to teach him anymore because we came here in a white wash and we just saw his name in our area book and decided to pass by his house.) We talked about the Book of Mormon and how he could know if our message is true if he reads it and prays about it. Then he told us that he already knows that it is true.  He had received his answer little by little, but he knows that it is true.  We then talked a little bit about baptism and invited him to be baptized this month. He said yes! So we invited him to say a prayer right then and there and ask God what day he should be baptized.  (we were thinking maybe in 3 weeks.... or 4...) He looked up at us and said.. "I'm thinking Saturday...  Not the day after tomorrow but next week.  I think it's the 12th, right?"  I think we were in shock and all that we could get out of our mouths in this moment was "uh huh." Haha so we organized his baptismal interview and everything and he was interviewed on Saturday and will be baptized this following Saturday!! Wow!! He was so prepared!! He was just waiting for someone to ask!!

Have a great week!

Hermana Harvey

Hermana Marinho got to see the sea lions today!