Loving his bike and teaching is going well!

March 18, 2015

Dear Mom,

Elders Henderson and Stam on their bikes!

I thought that is would have started cooling down by now, but it's actually just gotten hotter. It's the hottest it's been all year, or at least it feels like that. Things have been great with Elder Henderson though, he's an awesome guy. He really knows what he's doing and he's a great example. No offense against latinos, but the gringos are just so much easier to get along with. I don't remember what the city is called where Elder Henderson is from, but he's from a really small village of about 250 people, and he lives in a huge field haha. I don't need much help with Spanish anymore, I'm pretty much fluent. It's still just the vocabulary. He knows his scriptures more than any other missionary that I know, and that makes him a really good teacher. It's possible that I could train in 3 months, or not at all. I hope that I do though, I think it would be fun.

 There's not many things that I need! For my birthday, you could buy the Piano Guys books for piano, but I don't think I would get a lot of time to play them. For sure have them when I come home though. I will think of more things though.

Teaching with our investigators is going well. We gave away two of them to the sister missionaries, but we have been finding new people. We found a new guy named Felipe, and he's a worker for a super rich guy. Now that we have bikes we can go to different parts of the sector, and there's a lot of rich areas. The closest one to baptism is Maria Jose, her husband is an active member and everything. Here it's a requirement that they attend church at least 4 times before baptism, and only if the bishop feels like he or she is ready. The people here are stubborn to accept the invitation to be baptized. The majority of people we teach seem to like Elder Henderson more, Elder Tecun was kinda dead as a missionary. Burnt out in other words.

For my shirts, I went to a little store by our house and got clothe whitening stuff, I don't know, but I've tried using it and it only kind of works. We have been sweating a lot more now with the bikes, so they are just going to get worse (yellowing). I will try bleaching them though for sure.


The devil is real for sure, I have heard a few stories about demonic things happening out here in Chile, and even President Cook has a few, but he doesn't really share them with people. The devil definitely has a lot more influence here than God, which is super bad.

For service, we teach English, help fix or build houses, and build or destroy things ha ha. It seems like that's only what the people want here. I spoke in church, about chapter 6 in Preach my Gospel. I liked writing the talk about that chapter. In this Ward, we are the counselors for the Young Men, so we work with them a lot. We go to mutual every Friday and help out the president. And the bikes are awesome, I love them. They are pretty safe, so don't worry.


Also something that would be awesome is if you sent me pictures. Like of when I was a baby, the family, Everything. But physical copies to put in that little book so I can show them to people. That would be great :)

 Written letters are still great, at Christmas time I got like 10 letters from Josh and Shelly haha. They were small, but pretty awesome. All the other Elders were frustrated that I was getting so much mail and them not haha. It was funny. The mail here in Chile is pretty good. You can spell things wrong and it will still get there too. If they just see the word Elder, they know exactly where to send it. It's pretty good that we have Skype and all that fancy stuff now, because it's free haha.

I hope that you have a great week, thanks for writing me and have a fun time at stake conference!

Love,
Elder Stam

I think Caleb loves his bike!!