:)

email sent 5/9/2011

It was so great to talk to you guys yesterday! Except that I got so worked up talking that it got really hot in the house and both my companion and I forgot to bring water and the family only had tap water, which is not okay to drink. After I talked my companion still had to talk, and I just started eating cookies. Which made me more thirsty. But I had to do something! Haha then we had headaches all night. But it was worth it. Such great news about everyone! It´s wonderful.
So anyway, there are two things from this week that I didn´t talk to you about that deserve space in this e-mail.
a) We are going to have a miracle baptism on May 28. Aka a golden investigator that just fell into our laps. On Monday night we were cruising around Puerta del Pacifico II, which is an apartment complex in our sector, looking for people to teach, and just as we were leaving this woman is coming in the gate and goes "Oh, good thing I saw you! Do you have time to come to my house right now?" Umm, sure. Are you a member of the church? Yes, and my son is 9 and he´s baptized, and my daughter is 7, but I have another daughter who is 12 and isn´t baptized and wants to be. Peeeeerfect. We went to her apartment and met Danaees, who´s the 12 year old. They´ve been here in Arica for just a month or so and never found the church. They were active in Copiapo, where they lived before, but they have a pretty complicated situation and have had to move around a lot. We taught them three times during the week, and they came to church yesterday and LOVED it. They said that something happened that had never happened before-- people went up to introduce themselves and talk to them and offer them books and rides to church and to go to their houses. ·Everyone says the people in the north of Chile are really cold but that is TOTALLY not true in our ward-- they are so great. I think I´ve talked about it a million times, but I TOTALLY love love LOVE my ward. They are a huuuuge blessing for me. Anyway, Danaees really loves the Young Women, and had been thinking about moving back to Copiapo to live with her grandma but now doesn´t want to anymore. So we asked if she wanted to get baptized on May 28 and she got sooooo excited. Thank you, Heavenly Father. That is just a straight up blessing because we have been working hard and basically nothing that we do turns out, so God decided to place someone in our path that invited us to teach her and baptize her. Wonderful.
b) On Saturday morning we had a stake Primary activity about how to be a missionary. All the 14 missionaries in our stake went, and we had a little devotional and then had the "MTC" where we taught them how to do contacts and share their testimonies, and then we went out to work with them! I was with these two girls who were reeeeeally eager (one of them says she goes out with the missionaries every day. Suspicious, but let´s hope that she´s just exaggerating) and they talked to 20 people on their own. For the most part, people were nicer because we were with little girls, but we still unfortunately talked to a few jerks. Plus they had no shame about anything, and when we passed this huge group of drunks they gave passalong cards to all of them. I´m pretty sure they didn´t notice that they were drunk. Menos mal. But, the activity was waaaay great and really inspired the kids to go on missions. Our eternal investigator, Raul, went and loved it. When he came to church yesterday he still had his fake nametag on (it says Futuro Elder Cortes). He reeeeeally needs to get baptized.
Anyway, that´s about all I have to say, except for the pictures. The first photo is us with the Bishop´s family. My bishop is hilarious. He is named Mario Bascur.
The second picture is us with our hijito, Daniel, the one who´s going on his mission to New York next week (where we did the phone calls yesterday). He went to the Primary activity and they gave him a nametag too, so if you look closely you can see that it says "Futuro Elder Albornoz." Not so far in the future! By the way, can someone tell me what ward McAnnie are in? They need to look out for him!
The third picture is my companion reading her Book of Mormon in a tree at our P-day activity today. We have the goal as a mission to read the whole Book of Mormon in May, and she´s so dedicated to it that we didn´t play paintball today with the rest of the zone so she could catch up. But we did go to the paintball site and read there. How naturey, right?
Well, I love you guys! Hope you´re all doing well! Keep up the good work.