hey you beautiful people of the world!! this is the newest DISTRICT LEADER in the Santiago south mission coming at you! yep, i've been promoted people! this week was absolutely insane!! there is a lot to talk about. but i will make it quick!! so the miracle that happened this week!! so cherisner's the guy we baptized last week) job is literally the worst. he has to take an hour and a half train ride to the centro of santiago to work as a cook. they overwork him literally so much. he told us that we weren't going to be able to confirm him until like the middle of february because his job isnt going to give him a day off until a lot later. we were kind of bummed out, but we agreed to confirm him in february. we came to sunday that day, and he WALKED IN THE DOOR AND SAT DOWN NEXT TO US. rigby and i almost screamed while we were in the congregation! but we were able to confirm cherisner a member of the church of jesus christ of later day saints!! rigby and i were able to sit in on the confirmation too, and it was so awesome. the lord loves his children, and will always give us a way to complete the things which we has commanded. in other news, rigbys (my companion) foot has been acting up a whole bunch lately. there is a tendon in his foot that is really messed up, and he can hardly walk. we have been to the mission nurse a lot, and nothing seems to be working out for him. its literally so hard for him to even walk...if you guys could keep him in your prayers so that his foot can get better, that would be awesome!! i hate to see him in pain! we found a WHOLE bunch of new investigators this week on the west half of our sector!! we were about ready to teach all of them this upcoming week, but then changes happened. no no no, rigby and i arent splitting up. the sector, however, is. the sector that i have right ow is literally huge. the mission is going to split our sector down the middle, and put two more missionaries in this ward. we just got magadan, and he is training gutierrez!! they are the coolest pair. luckily they dont have to live in our house (thats the size of a boot), so it will be awesome to work with them and get to know them a little more! this week, i was thinking a lot about the atonement again, and how much it has influenced my life here on the mission. there are a lot of people that think that the atonement is meant to change who you are as a person and completely change your talents and the things that you like to do. im pretty sure i talked about this in a previous email, but the atonement is one of the biggest blessings we have here on the earth! the atonement is meant to make us more like christ, but not to make us all the same person. there are people down here that i have seen, who have become sooooo much more spiritual, but at the same time, they have been able to keep their jokes and hobbies and everything that they know and love! i just am so grateful! i have to scram, but i hope all of you have an awesome week and that you have some awesome spiritual experiences!! love you to the moon and back! EKW the new zone leader and me and rigby this is what weekly planning looks like in my little book update...i named this dog beurre, which means butter in french. he is my butter from now until forever
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hey all yo beautiful people on the other side of the world! i dont have much time to write this huge email, but i will for sure let you in on a couple things that had happened this week. i had my first baptism!!!! it was such an awesome experience to see cherisner get baptized! rigby and i had to get to the church at 7 in the morning to start filling up the font, and we were absolutely dead tired, not even joking. we had our normal services during the day and then after church, we had the service for cherisner. i guess the heater broke while it was filling up with hot water, so when cherisner got into the water, he was shocked from how cold it was!! needless to say, he left the water so energetic and ready to take on the world. one of the tender mercies from this is that we are just now starting to teach one of cherisners friends who came to the baptism. we are putting a date with him soon! the next steps after baptizing someone is that you have to teach them all the lessons over again. while rigby and i do this, we are going to teach him spanish so that he understands the missionaries who dont speak french or creole. one of the funny stories that happened this week was when we were teaching one of our new investigators named natasha. we found her a couple of days ago, and this was the first time that we met her. we were introducing ourselves, who we were, where we lived, how much time we had in chile. the normal lax and chill vibe conversation. she asked us how old we were, and she about lost it. i have 18 and rigby has 19 years, so when she found out, she was all like,"YOURE JOKING OH MY GAHSH. LILI, LILI COME HERE AND LOOK AT THESE HUGE PEOPLE" (rigby and I are both tall giants down here) she was literally choking from the laughter. she is the coolest gal though. she is a Haitian and lives with like 19 other people in this super small house. (Haitian hive..remember) she is super humble, and loves helping me while i try and learn french. things are looking up for her! other than that, it was just a lot of contacting and a lot of cleaning the font for cherisners baptism. the ward that i am in hasn't had a baptism in over a year and a half, so you can imagine how much dust and bugs would be in the font....ummmm, yea.....it was horrendous. i love all of you to the moon and back! hope that you all have an awesome experience this week! EKW cherisner and the baptism! crew! me and the man of the day! cleaning the font edgy font picture
hey all you people on the other side of the world! elder wattles here. i hope all of you had an awesome week!! this week, elder rigby and i have seen some pretty awesome miracles!! so we have been teaching this hatian investigator named cherisner. he was taught by literally so many missionaries in the past, and wasnt able to come to church for a long time because of his work. we recently started visiting him again. the hard thing about him, is that he only speaks creole and like a little bit of spanish. my companion has been working his butt off to try and learn creole, and so we have been teaching him in creole and my broken french. he went to church for the past three weeks, and we just had a baptismal interview with him. and guess what. HE IS GOING TO GET BAPTIZED THIS WEEK!! my companion and i are literally so excited for him!! this will be my first baptism on the mission, and i am beyond excited. my companion is going to do the ordinance for him. pictures coming soon! i had the chance to go on divisions with my zone leader this week over in their sector. i went with elder bellido, an argentinian guy who is leaving this next change! he is the coolest guy. crazy lesson story though. we were going to visit this guy that he and his other companion contacted the day before. we walked in the house, and we sit down with this guy. we start with a prayer, chillin vibes whatever. he then literally EXPLODES with so much information about the bible. i am not even kidding, he knew every comma, semi colon, period, and punctuation in the scriptures that he was pulling from his head. he knew the time periods of when jesus was on the earth, as well as the national relations between countries during that time period. on top of that, he talked SO FAST, and didnt give bellido nor myself even a nano second to try and teach him literally anything. my zone leader got heated, and started fighting him a little bit. (not physically....lol) i sat there and kind of just watched until we had to go. this is how the conversation went: elder bellido: "ok we have to go. i am going to leave you something that is concrete for me. my testimony. look, i know you are really good with the bible, and that your knowledge of it is vast and extensive. you have so much potential to be great in the future. i know that even though there isnt an angel moroni in the bible, or that no where does it explicitly say the name joseph smith in the new testament, i still know the church is true. i know that if chirst established his church with apostles and prophets and the priesthood, we have to have the same three things on the earth today in order to have the correct church of jesus christ. i know that with this church, you can find happiness in your life, and that you can resolve whatever doubt you might have. now, if you would like to continue with the lessons, we can set a return date to come and teach you, not fight you." cherisner: "oh yea, ok, when can you guys come back?" it shut him up so fast. my zone leader was in shock. the power of a testimony is true people! sometimes you dont need to fight someone with 50000 scriptures, you just need to express to them the love you have for the gospel and how it has changed your life for the better! i have to scram right now. ugh. but i love all of you so so so much!! have a good week and chill vibes! EKW me and bellido! (on exchanges) look i messed up on the 8, sometimes i put 16 and then i just give up. it's still senior year right? this dog always comes up between my legs EVERY DAY when we come home. i give him a little scratch every now and then
hey all you awesome people on the other side of the world! down here in chile has been crazy!! still hotter than ever, but this past week was absolutely amazing! this past week, elder rigby and i have been studying a lot on how to contact people and how we can share the gospel in the street. there was a section in preach my gospel, where it talks about how to you can relate the restoration to the family. it really touched my heart reading about the blessings that we have gotten from the restoration of the gospel. like, god gave us family on the earth to establish an environment of learning and growth. we have all been given the natural ability to worry about the wellbeing of our families and wanting the best for them. sometimes, it is hard to maintain a family that is strong and spiritual, what with all the influences that we face in the world today. the crazy thing is, is that we were all made as a family before we were born on the earth, and god being our heavenly father, wants us to come back and live with him after death. he has restored the way we can achieve this, through a prophet! not only are we able to live with our father in heaven forever, but he has given us the covenants and ordinances that we can use to live with our family forever! thinking about all of this made me so flipping grateful for the family that i have, and i feel so lucky to be sealed to them for all time an all eternity. thats forever kids! ugh, it just makes me so happy. you miss your fam out here on the mission, but when you think of how long you get to spend with them, it puts it in perspective for me. i wouldn't want anybody else except for my very own fam! so...a miracle happened this week! rigby and i were fasting so that we could try and find some new investigators. we invited the ones we had to church, but when we sat down, none of them had showed up...we were kind of really bugged. leave to to heavenly father to put us in our place...right as the sacrament was about to start, all three of them walked in the door and sat down. rigby and i almost flipped our lids, we got so excited. they were able to take the sacrament and feel the spirit during the meeting! the power of fasting works people! i just hit 6 months this past week...time has been going by pretty fast. the past 6 months have been really crazy, and i hope that i will be able to learn even more during the next year and a half! i gotta scram, so chao for now my dudes! EKW little babies at the temple today chillin at a bus stop....cause it is too flipping hot to stand pretty cute campo (field) next to my house art for this week! i miss the ocean!
hey all you beautiful people! i hope that you all had a safe and super lit new year! this week was filled with some awesome miracles for the two of us down here in los castaños. let me explain. for two days last week, my group and i from the ccm had to go to the centro to get all of our visa stuff figured out. before i came on the mission, it thought that chile was going to be some rugged and pretty run down town, where i was going to have to cut through vines and trees in order to get to my investigators. when i got here though, all of my thoughts were kicked out of my head because all of santiago is kind of like a mix between new york and los angeles. my area is like los angeles, and the centro is literally like new york; paved roads, HUGE buildings, american fast food (like mcdonalds and subway and KFC) and a whole bunch of cool stuff. needless to say, going to the centro for two days was really fun. the beginning part of the week was a little bit challenging just because our lessons kept falling through, and so we went out contacting for the majority of the week. we found this one girl that told us that she pours boiling water on the testigos (jehovah's witness) they come and pass by because she is a devout catholic, but that she respects our religion cause i guess we dont go over to her house and bug her. heh. ok.....please dont burn us lady....heh we have an english and spanish class every week in this ward on saturdays in the afternoon. i normally teach the spanish class to the hatians, and rigby teaches the english class to the hatians and the chilenos. this week only one girl came. her name is marabella, and she is 16. she has come to this class for the past like 4 weeks apparently, and absolutely loves it. the other day at the end of the class, she was looking at us and was like,"hey so i want to be mormon. how do i do that?" rigby and i almost got whiplash from the question. to make the long story short, we are going to start teaching her and her mom! its going to be so awesome to see where they are going to go. i will defiantly going to keep yall updated. down here in santiago, there is a huge population of hatians that move here from hati to have better living conditions. what normally ends up happening, is that 20 or so hatians live in one house. they love to play loud reggae music and just have fun because they know that their lives are better in chile than they are in hati. i was walking around with my french book of mormon, and thought that it would be kind of fun to go and contact a hive (a hive.....what we missionaries call the places where there are a lot of hatians living in one house). we knocked on this door, and one hatian came out. i asked him if he could help me pronounce a couple of words in french. after helping me with a few words, he started talking to us about our religion and then let us come into his house. his name is James, and he moved from florida to come and help his family out in chile. he doesnt speak that much english, but he has been studying spanish for like 2 years, so he is pretty easy to talk to. he introduced us to his family.....he has a wife with a little girl and then a whole bunch of people that live upstairs. we got so many new investigators!! and we are going to teach them in the upcoming weeks! much excitement! i have to scram right now, but i love all of you to the moon and back! the lord watches over us while we are out and about doing our little daily tasks. i know that he is watching over you, dear reader, and that he is making sure that you are a-ok. EKW basically the modern version of diagon alley from harry potter off to do the visa stuff cotton candy new years sky in my hood <3 they have this place called tommy beans thats basically chipotle and its so good. sent this poloroid to my fam for christmas
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Elder Karson Wattles
Chile Santiago South Mission apartado postal No. 544 San Bernardo, Chile Archives
May 2019
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