No new photos again! He has to figure it out! UGH!! But so grateful to know he is doing well and positive. I am so glad he has been playing the piano, he had to play the hymns in church already! If you know Caleb, you know how much he LOVES to play the piano and how talented he is. It's great having a missionary serving the Lord!! We miss him a ton but we are so blessed this is what he wants to be doing.
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| Elder Andrew Rietveld and Elder Caleb Stam at the Mexico MTC. They are brother in laws (kind of), their siblings married each other. |
Mom,
I am adjusting really well to Chile. I´ve realized that I do well with change, because this hasn´t really had too much of an affect on me. The weather here has been phenomenal. It was a little cloudy the first few days, but the last few days have been hot and sunny. It gets pretty chilly at night though, considering we don´t go back to the house until 10:30. That coat you got me from Missionary Mall has been my best friend during the night. It´s actually warmed up a lot the last few days too. We got a heater for our room, and we don´t even use it anymore. It´s been nice. They also gave us two warm blankets.
Yeah the mission president is very on top of things. He is really good at what he does. Elder Leòn is an awesome guy. I´m starting to get a little annoyed though. He´s making up rules. He got mad at me for reading the Bible during personal study. And he also wakes up an hour early every day and wakes me up and it´s so annoying because sleep is precious. Other than that he has been pretty easy to get along with. He´s 19 years old. And the Spanish is alright. I still can´t understand the latinos, but I can understand the gringos pretty well. Elder Leòn has a pretty bad accent and he is very hard to understand. He actually knows a good amount of English. We are teaching each other the languages. It´s really pretty here in Chile, but it´s a different kind of pretty. Santiago reminds me a lot of Cabo. It looks pretty similar. Except there are a ton more stray dogs here. They are always passed out on the side of the road in the morning, and it´s pretty funny. There are mountains on the east side that look a lot like Utah.
We have a pretty decent house. We have a kitchen, bathroom, living room, and three bedrooms. They´re all extremely small, but it´s bigger than what other missionaries have haha. The food here has been awesome. I´m a little disappointed that they haven´t had avocados as much as I would like, but it´s been awesome otherwise. They have a few different things. They really really like Coca Cola and Fanta here, and they have two other drinks called Ecco and Mate (pronounced Mah Tay). Ecco is a coffee substitute, it smells exactly like coffee, tastes exactly like coffee, but it isn´t coffee. All the missionaries here drink it. And mate is weird. It´s just a plant that they put in a little cup, then they add hot water and sugar and drink it through a straw. It tastes a lot like grass, but it´s pretty good. The other two Elders in our house are Elder Ware and Elder Richards. They are both from Utah. Elder Richards is from South Jordan and I can´t remember the other one. They´re really cool peope as well. Super super easy to get along with. La Bandera is the stake I´m in and La Pensamientos is the ward I´m in. There are six missionaries in this one ward. There is missionary work going on everywhere and it´s awesome! When ye are in the service of your fellow beings, ye are only in the service of your God.
White washed means that both of the missionaries are new to the area, and we have to start from scratch. Most of what we have done has been contacting. Proselyting and street contacting. It´s super tiring because we are just walking around all day. We wake up and do exercises for half an hour, have an hour to shower and get ready, personal study for an hour, companion study for two hours, language study for an hour, then contacting all day. We have taught a few lessons, and we have one person with a baptismal date already haha. November 1st. We have like 6 other possible baptisms, but I shouldn´t be too confident. We don´t have a cell phone yet but we do have a DVD player.
I don´t have my camera on me so I can´t upload pictures right now, but I´ll try to upload some next week. I have absolutely no idea how the wifi thing is supposed to work here, it doesn´t make sense to me. But I´ll try to upload pictures for sure. They are a little bit behind in technology in Chile. The iPhone 5s just came out, as long as the Xbox One.
We get to watch conference, but we have to watch it in Spanish, which is a little annoying because I don´t understand Spanish yet. We just attend the ward here, and only about 40 people go. Hardly anyone. Oh and yeah, I actually had to play the hymns in sacrament haha. Kinda funny. In the October Liahona magazine, there is an article about Chile that´s pretty cool, so you should read it.
Love,
Elder Stam
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