Cold & Rainy in Santiago

Dear Todos,

I had my first cold and rainy day in Santiago! It was nuts, most days here have been pretty warm, but the other day it was dark cloudy and rainy. Best thing about that day too was that we had almost no appointments so we knocked doors in the rain for hours. We had on our raincoats, rainjackets, and we had our umbrellas and we still got soaked. The draining systems in Chile are horrible so after just a few minutes of rain the streets are full of water. Our shoes were soaked through and through. I felt like a REAL missionary that day.

Another cool thing that happened was that I got cussed out for the first time. My companion and I were walking down the road when a man in a baby blue car stopped in the middle of the road and started yelling at us. We´d walk by, he´d yell at us for a while, we´d pass him, he´d drive past us, stop the car and continue yelling at us. He did this for a couple minutes. Luckily I could not understand a word he was saying so my companion translated some for me. Supposedly he screamed the F word a bunch of times, told us to go back to our country a bunch of times, and insulted our mothers a few times (sorry mom...) But yeah, my companion just smiled and waved at the guy.

One of the customs here in Chile is you have to saludar or greet everyone. If you don´t shake every persons hand when you enter there house or leave, it´s rude. We shake hundreds of hands every day. We are also supposed to say hello to everyone on the street. It´s pretty cool. Another custom I like is that the women in Chile are basically obligated to offer us jugito or juice every time we enter their house. We drink a lot of juice in Chile.
The food is still pretty darn good. Yesterday our friend Paulina just returned from the beach with a huge box of famous desserts. She made us try a bunch of them. Basically every dessert was made of manjar and a different kind of pastry. My favorites are the manjar and merengue? cookies (I´m pretty sure mom would love them). I miss food from the US but I´m definitely not going hungry in anyway.

SO the other night the zone leaders ditched me and Elder Okleberry to go to a meeting and it was faaaaaantastic. We had 3 hours in the night to teach by ourselves. I actually taught a 30 minute lesson by myself about prayer. It was terrifying, not gonna lie. Elder Okleberry did his thing and I did my thing. I don´t think it was a great lesson at all, but it was a lesson none the less. Crazy huh?

We still don´t have many investigators, but we met two extremely nice families who are truly looking for the truth. It makes our job so much easier when people want to know the truth for themselves. I pray that things will continue to go well and continue to improve. I love and miss you all. Your emails and letters are incredible and help me so much! No joke! I wish i could respond to everything, but there´s just no time. I´m doing good! I love the mission, it´s hard, but I love it. I feel good about what I´m doing even when things aren't going well. Thanks for everything!

I love you Mom, Dad, Diana, Becky, Melissa, Grandma, Tom, Tim, Martha, Uncles, Aunts, cousins, friends, etc...

-Elder Mooney