March 15 update

Another week, another area, another companion! Elder Kenison has been transferred to an area called Las Industrias and is working with Elder Tucto, who is a native of Peru.

We asked about the new area:

HAHA I'm in a place called Las Industrias. It's closer to Santiago. It's a little poorer area kinda I don't know. Really Maipu was all kinda the same. Here has more of a rich and poor area.

And this is the story about his new "compy":

haha his name is elder Tucto. He's from Peru. I was actually in maipu with him before. He's a stud. Time… Haha we both hit our year mark this last week. Haha personality. Well a stud. I learned a little bit about his story yesterday. He's a convert. He was 17 years old when he got baptized. Just him and his brother out of his family. He has 4 brothers and 2 sisters. The two sisters are the oldest but they actually both died from some disease. First one and then the other. He was living on his own when he turned 14. working and going to school because his family lives in the… campo… like an area with a lot of fields. HahHaha (I forgot what it's called… country, maybe… hahaha) so he moved to the city to be closer to school. And then later closer to church. His family lives 12 HOURS from church. Him and his brother are the only members. His brother is actually the bishop. (he's 34 years old) so yeah pretty but I told him hes a stud for serving a mission. haha

Elder Kenison has had quite a variety of "Latino" companions:

• Elder Mejia - Honduras
• Elder Urbieta - Argentina
• Elder Alonzo - Ecuador
  
• Elder Tucto - Peru

The area where Matt is serving had 4 missionaries temporarily; there were two elders serving there who were called to Concepcion and just arrived in Chile, but had to wait temporarily in Santiago right after the earthquake. Now, they are back to two, but it sounds like they have the benefit of a large pool of investigators, thanks to the temporary help from the other elders:

Kinda crazy. And apparently they worked hard. They had 27 new investigators last week. So needless to say. Planning at night has been really easy because we have so many appointments set haha. We had one baptism set but she didn't attend church yesterday so we have to make a new one.

It sounds like a bigger apartment:

hahahaha in comparison its HUGE!!! The last house was two little rooms. This house has one huge room for like studying and eating and then it has an upstairs. Haha kinda crazy

We asked about how strong the ward is:

there were 81 people in church. Haha so A LOT!!! Elder Tucto said that there were a lot of people. It was pretty cool. Oh there are actually like 3 people that speak English so they were pretty excited to hear a gringo came. Haha so ve been able to "practice" haha so my English won't be so bad when I call in MAY!!!! :D

Not that any of us are excited for that Mother's Day phone call... a little over 7 weeks from now....

The impact of the earthquake continues. The missionaries have felt a number of the stronger aftershocks. There was a massive power outage last Sunday evening that covered most of the country:

yeah. We were at a house getting our clothes and all of the power went out I mean ALL of the power. Haha so we quickly went home. We locked up everything good and tight because lots of gangsters (haha) leave and break into houses. Lucky our cell phone has radio so we listened to figure out what was going on. Were lucky we came home. Haha there's this thing called "toke de keda" and it's really just permission for the police to shoot, SHOOT anyone who is out of the house. So that got rid of the gangster problem. Kinda crazy.

Finally, here are a few photos taken with members and investigators in Maipú as Matt was leaving: