Final Email: "LOVE!!!!"

Email sent: 7/11/2011

Hey family,
So, it´s my last P-day on the mission. It´s weird. I still feel like it´s a million years away that I¨m coming home, but it´s actually next Wednesday (you guys received the itinerary).
This week was kind of normal. I don´t really remember what I wrote about Alan last week, but he wants NOTHING to do with us anymore. That´s one of the worst feelings ever. And it´s happening a whole lot here in Arica. All of the missionaries have the same stories. Remember last year when a member of our ward said in his testimony that Satan lives in Iquique? I think he moved to Arica recently. On Tuesday morning we had district meeting and we spent the majority of the meeting talking about Alan. The DL and his companion agreed to go visit him with us that afternoon. Elder Vergara, the DL, was convinced that the best way to get someone to accept a baptismal date is to threaten to drop them. Hermana Canto and I did not feel like that was a good idea with Alan, because he has SUCH low self-esteem that we knew he would just agree with us and even if he felt differently, he wouldn´t do anything to fight back. And that´s exactly what happened. We had to take Alan to a member´s house, because his family doesn´t let us teach him there, so we went with the Elders AND a young man from their ward named Jean, plus us two and Alan, to Hermana Cortes´s house. They just let us sit at the dining room table alone, which was probably better. We had a really intense lesson for an hour and a half, trying to really understand WHY Alan didn´t want to accept a baptismal date. We got some information out of him, but then Elder Vergara just told him that we wouldn´t visit him anymore and he was soooooo depressed and just let it happen. We tried to secretly set an appt (behind Elder Vergara´s back) but he wasn´t having any of it. He said he would keep going to church, but he didn´t go on Sunday. When we went to visit him in the afternoon, he said that he would like it if we never came back. So. Weird.

The most ridiculous part of this all is that Elder Vergara told his mamita that I´m “chucara,” which means untameable. Me?! He´s the one that goes around killing our investigators when we don´t even want him to!!!! Haha if I still remember this when I get home (probable but not certain) I´ll explain more about the chucara thing, it´s pretty ridiculous. So anyway, Alan will NO LONGER be getting baptized. Hopefully at some point in the future.

The other notable thing that happened is that Marco and I got in a yelling fight last night. He´s our investigator that´s getting married on Friday and baptized on Saturday. He thinks that we expect too much of him, and I wanted him to understand that we HAVE to teach him how to be perfect, but that we don´t actually expect that he becomes perfect right away. Hermana Canto and I totally have this good cop, bap cop thing going on with him, which isn´t really fair because she´s supposed to be the senior companion, she´s supposed to be in charge of the investigator´s progress and totally acts like she´s in charge, but has NO spine when it comes to stuff like that. But, I hope she learns. That´s why we´re companions, right? To learn from each other. Anyway, in the end he´s still totally getting baptized and he still totally loves me, and I think it was a pretty good experience.

We don´t have anymore time, so I´ll just be seeing you guys next Wednesday at 12:55 pm. Umm, please don´t leave me hanging like that one time when I got back from Spain. I´m going to feel REALLY weird traveling alone for the whole day, after spending 18 months with someone attached to my side. I love you guys! Have a great week!


Hermana Coppins

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