It's a Little Chile Down Here...But Kinda Warm in Brazil: Fourth of July and Sushi???

Fourth of July with Elder Packer

Sushi!!!!!!

Yum!!!

Dear... EVERYONE!

Well, thank you so much for the weekly update, Mom and Dad, and I love, love, love the pictures! It sure as heck looks like everything and everyone is doing well, which is great to hear, and hopefully everyone had a fantastic Forth of July, wherever you were! Mom, its great to hear that you are feeling much better. Sounds like it was an eventful week. It was an eventful week for us here in Chiloé too. I'll get to that....

I've been emailing Dusty every week, and I want to try to meet up with him sometime... but I am not sure if I can or not...... BUT I REALLY WANT TO DO IT. Yeah, I see Hna Jennings from BYU every once in a while. I think I have seen her like 4 or 5 times since she has been here. I think she's training right now, so she's doing a really good job. The Dolls come on the 15th, and odds are that I WILL see them because the sister missionaries that are working in the branch that the Dolls will be going to are in my DISTRICT. So, the odds are very much in my favor that I will be seeing them soon. By the way, it is rainy and cold here..... :/

Okay, and SADLY, I
am almost out of computer time, so I am going to have to run through everything super fast. Also, I just sent an email full of pictures that I hope you got......

Okay, so this week we did lots of Family Home Evenings with lots of members and investigators, and it was way cool and fun. We must have done like seven Family Home Evenings... We really zeroed in on some less active families this week and got to help them out a little. I know that I am being super general but I really can't think of anything too specific...OH! So, on Tuesday we visited Alex and talked to him about the lesson that we had with him and President about sacrifice. And during the lesson, President gave an example of a sacrifice that he and his family did a while back that turned out to be a huge blessing. They decided to their cable on their TV to spend some more time and focus on the family..... awesome example. WELL, on Tuesday when we visited Alex, he told us that he decided to do the same thing! Ahaha, my jaw dropped when he told me, so that was kind of cool/funny. Hno Ponce is doing well. He came to church and we are having scripture studies with his family now. (Now that his daughter is on a mission, I feel like they really like the presence of missionaries in ther home... I bet mom and dad can connect to that feeling).

Anyways, the 4th of July was good. We had a zone class and the zone leaders bought us all milk and oreo's, and that night we drank Dr Pepper, and made Chocolate Chip cookie sundaes, and ate sushi -- a kind of weird mix of things but it was nice. Oh, and at our zone class we sang the Star Spangled Banner -- the latin missionaries kind of got a kick out of that.

Today, we went to the Costanera Center, a really big building/mall in Santiago. There we met up with an Elder Neher who is a cousin of the Palmieri family, and I am pretty sure that he met Andrew during a Thanksgiving or something. He told me that he knew me through finding the blog when he got his mission call!!! How cool is that! So we spent the majority of our P-day together -- way nice, way good missionary! And yeah.

Okay, spiritual thought of the week: 1 Corinthians 13: verses 1 and 2.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not ^acharity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of ^aprophecy, and understand all^bmysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

At a family home evening this week, a member shared these verses which talk about Charity -- that really without charity, we are nothing. It does not matter how much we know, or how skillful we are, if we don't have charity, we will never know how to use those things in the way that God wants us to. I really liked that thought. I love you all so much. Keep being amazing people. I miss you and I look forward to hearing from you again next week!

With much love,

Elder Schwartz