President Laycock Goes Home This Week

President Laycock

Sister Laycock

"Our mission president goes home this Friday.  I´ve only cried about it once though.  But we do have a farwell we are doing as a mission tomorrow night and I´ll probably be a wreck.  The new Presdient, President Wright, is from Oregon and looks really nice, so we´ll see.  The mission home is actually in our ward, so we´re planning on going over with the Bishop to greet him and his wife this weekend.  The other mission presidents have chosen to go to other wards where there are more people who speak English, but we think it would be a huge help for our ward if they would participate with us.  So we´ll see how that goes.

We´ve had a great week. We worked really hard and it paid off.  We saw a lot of results.  I can´t remember if I've told you about them before, but we´re working with a whole family,  Familia Catalan.  And the first time I went to visit them, the Hermana told us that she wasn´t interested in religon, and she would never get baptized so we shouldn´t waste our breath.  But that they loved to receive the missionaries so we are welcome to stop by whenever we want.  Well I can´t remember if it was that night or a couple nights later, but I had a dream of the lesson that we needed to teach them, and the way we needed to teach it and everything, so that they would be willing to listen to the discussions.  Well yesterday night, we gave the lesson and the spirit was so strong,  It was amazing.  We invited them to give us a chance and listen to what we had to say and they all agreed!  It was a miracle.  The hermano even talked about getting baptized.  It was amazing.

We´ve also been working with an inactive family, the Familia Guzman.  We´ve been struggling with them because we´ve been going by but we haven´t really seemed to click with the family.  So every visit was awkward and a little uncomfortable.  But this week we were finally able to talk with the mom and gain her confidence and now we´re doing super well.  Two of the kids actually came to church yesterday.  

Camila is going great.  We weren´t able to teach her this week, but she came to church yesterday and we had a class about fasting.  So she is going to fast to see if she should get baptized!  Yay!

We taught Karen again,  She's doing great.  We´re nervous about baptizing her because she's only 10, and we don´t want her to go inactive because she doesn´t have the support of her family.  So we´re going to try and meet her mom and her brother sometime soon and see if we can start teaching the whole family.  But she came to church yesterday as well."

1 knife and 3 plates...and a waffle iron!

"It's been raining like crazy these past few days.  Today it finally stopped, but it was wet, cold, and miserable there for awhile.  It looks like we're going to have a really cold and wet winter.

We've had a really good week.  Our investigators are all doing really well.  Especially Camila.  Poor thing, her boyfriend left for the mission this week and she's been so sad.  But we had a great lesson with her on Friday.  Unfortunately, the rain detered a lot of our investigators from making it to church yesterday, only two showed up.  But this week will be better.  

We had another great meeting with our Bishop.  He's great.

Mom asked more about the ward and our aparment...well the ward is good.  There are only about 8 active families.  But the attendance has been steadily increasing. When I got here the average was in the 70's and last week we had 98 people in church!  It's lacking in Priesthood, and all the presidencies of the organizations are all incomplete.  It looks like a lot of people are extended callings and then turn them down.  I'm not really sure how to help excite the members about serving in callings and doing their visits for visiting and home teaching. 

Our apartment is normal.  We live on the last floor (the 4th) of a building (theres no elevator...)  It has three bedrooms and two bathrooms.  We are living there just us two for now, so we each have our own bathroom.  We use one room to study, and one room to sleep.  And the other room is just storage.  We only have 1 knife and 3 plates but we do have a waffle iron which is a huge deal. They don't eat waffles here and the waffle makers are expensive.  There's no centralized heating in Chile, or air conditioning for that matter,and our apartment is freezing. But we have a little heater that we tote from room to room wherever we are.  We have a washer, but no dryer.

I think that's about it.  I'll talk to you next week!"  

One of the best week's of my mission!

"This week has been super, super good.  Probably one of the best in my mission.  The sector is great.  It's a lot different than Cordillera.  Half of it is SUPER rich and the other half is just normal.  But we´re up a little bit more against the mountains so there are a ton of hills.  We were so tired today that we took a 4 hour nap! 

We have some amazing investiagtors.  We have one named Luis, he is the sweetest thing.  He is in his 50's and he is the only member in his family that isn´t a member of the church, but his sister is menos activa, and his mom just recieves the sacrament in her house on Sundays because she´s super old.  He's autistic, which makes it hard for him to interact with people socially, even to be with us while we´re teaching.  And he's had such a hard life.  He's going through some really hard things right now, but we had a wonderful lesson with him this week where we read the story of Job.  The spirit was so strong.  At the end he gave a beautiful prayer.  It was so sincere.  And he talked about a promise that he had made with God recently to follow his path.  We´re pretty sure he knows it's true and is ready to get baptized, the only problem is that he works on Sunday, so he can´t go to church and there is no possible way he can quit right now.  So we´ll just have to see what happens.

We´re also teaching another girl named Camilia.  She's 19 and super sweet.  She was a reference from her boyfriend who leaves on his mission in a week and a half.  We taught her the first lesson and it went super well.  She accepted a baptismal invitation and is super excited to learn more.  I´m not sure if we´ll be able to get her baptized before he leaves, but she went to church this week and things are going really well with her.

They have a few more investigators, one with a baptismal date, but I haven´t been able to meet her yet.  But 

we´ve recieved some great references this week, so we have a lot of work to do.  I´m excited.  

Hermana Achucarro and I get along great.  We´re already bestfriends.  We laugh all day long which is super fun."

Transfers: out of the ghetto and up into the mountains

"I´ve been transfered.  I was taken from the most ghetto sector for Hermanas in our mission to one of the richest.  I am now in a sector called Apoquindo, which is in the community Las Condes.  It's a little bit more up in the mountains and it's beautiful.  My new companion is named Hermana A.  She is from Paraguay and she has 3 months in the mission. She is so sweet.  We already get along super well and I´m super excited to spend this change with her.  We´ve had some time to talk already since we´ve been together and her life has been pretty hard.  She comes from a really broken home, a mom who sleeps around, a father who abandoned their family, a step-father who is an alcholic and abusive.  Shes been in charge of raising her younger siblings since she was 5.  She told me was in charge of caring for her 4 month old baby sister when she was 8!  And her family wasn´t really supportive of her coming on the mission, so she arrived with basically nothing.  Just one suitcase and only things for the summer.  And she had a great first change with her trainer and then got put with the worst hermana in the mission.  Poor thing.  She's had a hard life and so far, a hard mission.  But I´m excited we´re together.  

We´re going to have a good change together."