06/26/26 New sector again

 Happy Monday! 

I'm writing from a bus because I'm traveling 8 hours to antofagasta for a meeting with all the leaders in the mission (wasn't I just there??  yes, yes I was). 

This week has been overall very good honestly!! With my previous two sectors I struggled a little bit to adjust to the members and the friends, but here I feel like I'm at home. It's been really comfortable, and I'm honestly not sure why. 

Some things about the sector: 

Maray is super flat, there's just one hill which is amazing because my last transfer was all hills and mountains. And it's also really small, so we can go from end to end in like a half hour (my last sector was HUGE, it would've taken hours to walk from end to end). 

We live right next door to Líder which is Walmart but Chile, which is great because we can buy stuff really easily, but terrible because we can buy stuff really easily haha. 

The ward is really supportive of missionary work and have received me really well!! 

Actually I met most of them at a funeral that I found myself playing the piano for. Not the first time. 

It's super green here and there are lots of trees. That's served as a blessing because there's lots of shade. I live in an apartment alone with my companion and that has been wonderful because we're both super clean!! So the apartment is spotless 24/7. I love it! 

My comp is hermana Méndez who's from Costa Rica and is 28 years old and goes home in 3 months (I go home in 4 months so she's one transfer ahead of me). We're both hoping for two transfers together (so I would kill her-that's a term we use when someone is the last comp of someone else). 

Things about this week: 

Funeral. From what I heard she was a wonderful lady. I never met her, but I played piano at her funeral. Funerals always make people think, this sister had a long and full life and kept the commandments to the very end. No one cried, but everyone was reverent and it was really beautiful to hear the stories everyone had about her. Primarily about how she always taught the gospel and always shared her wisdom and testimony. I think it would be cool if no one cried at my funeral someday. Not because they hated me but because they knew i had lived my life to the fullest, they knew I fulfilled my God-given purpose. 

Anyways. 

I've loved this week because I've had lots of opportunities to serve others using talents and gifts that I have. Besides playing piano at a funeral, I was also able to teach someone how to crochet. She wants to be able to maybe sell things that she crochets or at the very least make clothes and hats and things for her 3 small children as a way to help support her family a little more. They're a very humble family and don't have much, but the dad works in some place with fruits and vegetables so he's always coming home with a ton of fruits and vegetables, and they've given us lots of oranges and apples. They are going to get baptized in October when they can get married (they're unmarried living together with 3 kids), but they have to wait because of legal things because they're from Bolivia. 

We also had a service project as a zone, and the other zone here in copiapo went as well. We painted cement onto the outer walls of an child rescue center to help them last longer (the walls), and they want us to come back next week because even with 20 missionaries working for 2 1/2 hours we didn't get all the walls done. 

Saturday was kinda the worst in that everything we had planned fell through, everything we tried didn't work, and we ate lunch at this place that charged $6 each and it was just a little sandwich instead of a big one like we thought, so we were starving all day as well. I also had to buy new shoes the day before and they were killing my feet. So I was not having a good time haha. We literally walked our whole sector back and forth, knocking doors, talking to people in the streets, trying to talk to friends we already have or people that other missionaries have taught, but nothing worked. Nobody wanted to talk to us. 

In the evening we were starving so on the way home we were looking for a place to eat, and the first one didn't look very good, the next one was too expensive, the next one was closed, so we went to the last place, and it was perfect. Not too expensive, fast, it even smelled good. So we get all excited to order, aaaaand... they don't accept card payment. And we don't have cash. 

Sigh. 

Oki fine we're going to Líder to buy stuff to make completos. But then they announced that these packages of chicken nuggets that they had were on sale for only $1.50. Perfect! Less work than completos and cheaper. So we bought them. Go home, open the package aaaand... they were burnt to a crisp. 

Inedible. 

We ate them anyways. They were terrible. Next time I'm making my own food. 

Something else that happened this week is that they released a new Preach My Gospel. My current goal is to read all of it before next week. What I've read so far is really good. There's a focus on working with members and serving others, and also on using our personal talents and abilities to help others and to carry out this work. Obviously we're supposed to help people get baptized, yes, that's important, but that's not the only thing we do. I've loved studying about the importance of charity and loving others. When we have charity it's easier to want to serve others, and it literally makes us happier (I would site my sources but i don't have internet connection hehe). 

I have the opportunity to serve as hermana leader for 5 hermanas here in copiapo, but the 4 who aren't my comp live in the other zone and we're not generally allowed to cross over to the other zone so I'm not allowed to hang out with my other 4 hermanas except for through technology. I made a group chat and I'm hoping that will be a fun way to express ourselves together, and we were also able to have breakfast together this morning since we had to go to the other zone to travel. I've been trying to think of other ways I can minister to them, but the biggest one is I'm going to ask for permission to have at least one P day with them because they want to learn ti cook... and I happen to know a lot about that!! 

If anyone has more ideas let me know  

That's about it! I probably missed something but... if I think of it I'll send it later. 

Love you all!!