Nathan's Letter Dated 5-27-13

Greetings from.... La Serena! Haha I stayed here, and here I will finish my mission. My new companion is.... Elder Larsen! He was trained by my old comp, Elder Hancock. Elder Nicholas Andrew Larsen has lived in both Utah and Florida, and has been in Chile almost a year now. We have had an awesome week of work together, and I think it will be a very fun month and a half together.

  This week we worked hard with a few of the people we are teaching and we had Vanessa and Felipe at church. I think they really liked their first time there, and all the ward seemed to fellowship them well. Vanessa is a teacher and Felipe is still studying in college, they are just a few years older than I am.

So this week we had seven new missionaries in our zone, and we lost five. Therefore, we had lots of work to do getting all of the new missionaries at 3 and 5 in the morning and coordinating with members to take them to their new homes. Even though we had lots of work to do with the new missionaries, we were still able to teach lots of families and we even found a few new investigators. Elder Larsen loves talking with everybody, no matter where we are. It is definitely contagious, and I have been doing my best to keep up with him. 

Today we have planned to go play racquetball with two other elders, and so I am going to have to show them all how the game is played ;D 

We also are planning on going to a family´s house on Monday of next week in order to learn how to make Chilean empanadas, which should be a blast.

I am more and more amazed at the amount of sister missionaries that are arriving at the mission. Six months ago we had maybe 25 sister missionaries in our mission. Now, we have over 70. Also, they are hard-working and obedient missionaries that are going to be very successful here. It is exciting for me to be a part of the mission, Viña del Mar. I love it here! 

I hope you guys have a sweet week! 

Un abrazo fuerte,

Elder Hales