4th of July in Dehesa!

Dear family,

Things here in La Dehesa are pretty different. We see Porsches, Jaguars, Lamborginis, and all other types of beautiful cars up here. Our sector is gigantic. It might be bigger then Pirque. Not sure. It is huge though. I still don´t even know half of my sector yet. It has been extremely fun though. I love my companions, I love the ward members, and I only have 5 weeks left in the mission. Life is good.

One thing that is pretty legit here is that our mission leader´s name is Brother Abe Smith. He is from Mesa, AZ. He works for the US Airforce and is here in Chile for a few years sharing ideas and helping out. It felt amazing to have a mission correlation where the mission leader actually writes stuff down, plans activities, prays to receive revelation during the week and then shares his ideas with us in the correlation. They even plan out baptisms here. In advance! Supposedly the Bishop is from the states, one of his counselors is Chilean but has lived in Switzerland as well as the states. And yesterday for our Sunday lunch we had an early 4th of July Celebration! We ate with the White family and the Headquist family. Gringo families. We took pictures with them and the food to show you what it was like. We ate BBQ chicken, chicken wings, potato salad, corn on the cob, salad with dressing, and Apple pie with vanilla ice cream for dessert. It was a super weird feeling. Spanish was not spoken the entire time. I realized that it is super easy for me to have conversations in english, but introductions and saying goodbye to people in english feels really awkward. Praying in english is nearly impossible. I love the new sector though and the ward is great.

One of our investigators here is Kati. I don´t remember if I told you about her last week. She is from Colombia and is very black. She is super nice and super cool. She has a little baby girl named Milady (my lady). At the moment she is living and working in the house of a recent convert here named Hno Ojeda. He is the assistant to the ward mission leader and is awesome. He hated the church at first. His son secretly filled out his mission papers and then went and told his dad with the help of the bishop. They had a huge fight, but somehow overtime he changed and was baptized a little over a year ago. He is incredible. The rest of his family still isn´t too into the church yet, but he is working on them. He hired Kati to help her out and now he is working with her spiritually as well. She had a baptismal date a couple weeks ago, but we are putting her baptism off till the 24th so she can understand and be converted fully before her baptism.

We also have a kid named Kevin that has a baptismal date, but needs to go to church. Then we have a lady named Claudina that will be getting married on the 8th. She will also be getting baptized soon.

Things are going great though. My companion Elder Stephen Owen is pretty much a clone of Jared Bishop. Haha he reminds me of Jared all the time. Facial expressions, jokes, everything. The only difference is he has an accent. So you can imagine that we have had some fun. Elder Miller and Elder Daines are crazy too so between the four of us there is always something going on. We are trying to be good examples for them and have a lot of fun.
Thank you for your emails. I love and miss you all a lot. I hope that California has been treating you all very nicely. You are the best!

-Elder Mooney