8.15.11

 So. things in Chile... well first off the new cambio. im not so sure how good this cambio will be haha my comp is great, he´s been out a year, so just a few months more than me, and im not sure if he really knows how to work. it feels like we just waste time sometimes,  and he teaches lessons a little differently than im used to, but it works i guess, but we get into a lot of discussions about that haha and this new sector is HUGE. even bigger than teno. so we´re walking a ton. but the ward here (yes it is a ward :) is like 120 people, so thats a good change :) OH, and the other night, we were walking down this dirt road at night, and we heard a big "thump" next to us and didnt think much of it, but then we heard it again closer and were like "what the heck??" and we look over and theres some guy on the other side of the street throwing ROCKS at us! luckily, we think he was drunk, cuz he was a bad aim. so we just kept walking away. and he eventually stopped :P Other than that, the work is going pretty good. we´re working with alot of less active/part member families. and theres a lot of those here. Here in Chile, everyone needs 2 sets of missionaries. The first set to come and baptise them, and the second set to reactivate them :P haha it seriously happens to like every family here, but after they get reactivated, they´re really strong members. All the Schools here on in "Paro" or on strike. i guess the government here wanted to make all the schools private schools and charge more money from everyone, but the people didnt stand for it and now none of the kids are in school, and all the college students are rioting in Concepcion and Santiago pretty frecuently :P but yeah thats about all thats interesting thats happened here. the house here is pretty nice. its like a small appartment in the states, and it actually has carpet! haha and we´re on the top floor of our building, so we have to climb up a ton of stairs like three times everyday :P and i really hope no earthquakes happen during this cambio, cuz being on the top floor would suck in that case :P haha But other than that its a nice place :)
Until next week....
Love, Elder Philpott

8.8.11

Hey Everyone,
Things are good for me here, i found out today that im finally getting transferred!! Im going to a place called Piduco, its in the city Talca which is just a little south of Curicó which is the zone im in now, so its not too far, but it´ll still be hard saying bye to some of the people here :( and i´ll have to give the guitar back to carmen moarales haha :P but i think its about time that i get to know more of chile. My new comps name is Elder Call. he´s pretty cool. he was up here in curico for a cambio, so i already know him a little bit. and he´s from south carolina!! which isnt utah. hahaha so this should be fun. not much has happened this week, just a lot of rain :P oh and last night was pretty funny. while we were planning for the next day, we started hearing noises in the house, so we got up and looked around and figured out that it was coming from the attic, so we started banging on the roof, and we heard something crawling around up there, so we´re like oh crap, sounds like we got a huge rat up there! so my comp put a scarf around his face and a hat on and i gave him a flashlight and a spear that i made from our broom handle and he poked his head up there and looked around and saw that it was actually a really big black cat haha then we we tried to go up after it, it got away somehow, and we never figured out how it got in or out. so that was pretty funny. Then theres this other thing thats fun to do. so i bought a little candy thing, and the container it comes in has a little squirt gun on it, so i took that off and filled it up, out it in my pocket, and now when ever theres some annoying dog barking at us through a fence they get a nice face full of water haha :D they get pretty ticked. but other than that, its just been a lot of work haha im getting pretty good at telling who´s from what religion without even talking to them, theres usually only 3 main groups here, you can tell the Jehovas Wittnesses, cuz they wear jeans and a dress shirt and have a bible under their arms, and you can tell the evangelicos, cuz they´re always shouting and playing music in the streets, and you can always tell the catholics cuz theyre either smoking or drinking, or their daughters pregnant :D haha so thats always a fun guessing game lol but yeah life is good. Thanks for the letter :) i miss and love you all

 Love Elder Philpott

8.1.11

 This letters gonna have to be short n sweet, cuz i dont have much time :p we had to go to a members house(the family of the little girl i baptised) early and get everything ready for a family home evening we´re gonna have there tonight. and then we had to go to curico and buy 2 new matresses cuz ours are terrible :p haha so that took a long time cuz we went to the bishops house over there and he helped us get them back to our house in Teno. they made us food and showed us videos of their daughter playing the guitar and singing and stuff haha she´s actually not bad ;D but yeah life is still good here. We had another baptism :) it was this great guy named sebastian(theres a ton of those here :P) he´s 25 and super funny. the baptism went great. we had a nice turn out of people and we bought some food for a refreshment. it was great.
     We had another mission conference thursday. it went great. OH and Elder Thomas is in my zone now!!!! :) :) lol so we have fun all the time together now haha and i saw him at the conference. and i also saw Hermana Plowman. but thats it. Hna. Young and Hna. Child are both in the other half of the mission, so they dont go to the same conference as us. so the gang wasnt ALL there, but it was still fun. this week was really rainy :P and cold... and the day it was pouring the hardest we just happened to be out in a part of the campo looking for a reference my comp got on the bus on a mini cambio, it was some 17 yr old girl named marcela lol she lived in house number 1 on calle Cristóbal, so we looked for it, and it turns out that cristobal isnt just a calle, but a whole big area that has like 4 houses that say number 1 lol cuz we went and asked this first house and he was like "yeah this is house number one, but the numbering system is different here. We just choose what number we want" :O lol so that wasnt good news. but we continued looking in the rain, but didnt find a thing. But we did meet some cool people out there that want to here more of our message, so it wasnt a total loss haha but yeah not too eventful this week. maybe next week will be better.
Love and miss you all!
Elder Philpott

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7.25.11

So yeah lifes good here in chile. Earlier this week our power went out :P but only in our house and we forgot to do anything about it that day and had to do everything in the cold that night/morning and then finally called the owner of the house and he gave us the number of the electric company and we called them, and they came and fixed it finally, but it was SOO cold without it haha i know you guys are all complaining about the heat right now, but i´ll be glad to trade you here soon haha not much happened this week, the only sort of funny thing was that we were waliking in Curicó last monday, and there were these girls walking the other way just starring at us, and the one on the end didnt see this electric box sticking out and hit her head on it lol it was pretty hilarious, she was so embarassed lol oh yeah and ten we kept going and saw this little door on the side, and it looked like a chinese place, and so we were like eh what the heck, and went in to see what it was. so we opened the door and found stairs and then went up and opened this door, and inside we found this super nice chinese restaurant! it had all sorts of crazy chinese stuff and had all these fancy tables with plates, silverware, napkins, and wine glasses all set up, so we were like crap i think we need a reservation, but we went up and asked this chinese lady at the front counter. we were like "how much is it to eat here?"
 "did you bring food??"  lol
"what?? No. We want to see a menu."
"OHHH ok. yeah take a seat"
lol so yeah there was a bit of miscomunication going on, but i mean what can you expect when there two gringos talking to a chinese lady in SPANISH lol but it turned out not being expensive and really great food haha so i think we´ll be eating there a lot more haha
things are going good in the branch. the thing is, is that we keep meeting all these less actives and new investigators that know people in the branch and are just like "yeah if that person goes there im not going" so that gets pretty annoying. But we did just have a new family move in, and the dad has been everything from primary teacher to stake prez. so that should help us out some. but theres still quite a bit of apostasy going on haha for example the branch prez. works for a wine factory, the ward mission leader is living with someone he´s not married to(we´re working on that) and the 1st councilor has a big painting of a naked lady in his house... so yeah, needless to say, theres still some work that needs doing lol and a lot of the people that go to church are excommunicated.. like i passed ther sacrament this week, and my comp only gave me about 20 pieces of bread, and i was like crap theres like 30 some people here, this will never last. but at the end i was left with about 4 pieces left over haha so yeah thats never a good sign..., haha but the work goes on and we have a baptism scheduled for this 30th.so that should be good. be praying for us :)

Thanks for the email :) i loved reading it :) i miss and love you all

Love Elder Philpott

7.18.11

Life is good for me here, we had a crap load of rain this week, and its been pretty cold haha i cant wait for summer. the work is going good. we got quite a few good people we´re working with. this one sebastian is pretty much ready to be baptised. he just needs to stop drinking tea, and chilleans LOVE their tea :p haha this one girl taught us how to dance the Cueca this week haha thats the national dance of Chile i guess, and its really funny cuz everyone always asks us what our national dance is, and we always tell them, its the bunny hop lol its also funny when people come up and ask us what things mean that they hear on the TV, like the other day we were eating at this members house, and in the middle of the conversasion, she was just like "so what does F$%! You mean?" haha we just laughed and were like yeah you might not wanna say that one to any gringos haha, but to other people that ask that, we´re just like that means "i love you" and then they´ll be like "OOOhhh ok. Hey mom F$%! YOU!" hahahaha its pretty hilarious. 

But yeah life is still good.

 really cold still. but summer is on its way, and then im sure ill be complaining about the heat or something haha but i miss and love you all,

Love, Elder Jared Philpott

7.11.11

Tings are still good in Chile. things are looking up in Teno. we have like 15 people witha baptismal date. and we had 2 investigators in church yesterday, but we were expecting 6 :P haha so we´ll have to work on that this week. BTW if you start getting a lot of baptism pix of a bunch of 19 yr old chileans dont get any ideas haha but seriously like 3/4 of our investigators right now are 18_20 yr old girls haha DONT ASK ME lol oh and good news, i found out the story behind girls passing the sacrament here, turns out it didnt really happen, it was just cuz back in the old days they met in a house here, and the guy that ws blessing the sacrament didnt know how to read, so a sister in the ward would read it, and he would copy. so thats where that rumor came from, but we did have some pretty apostate leaders :p haha but the work goes on anyways haha we were doing contacts the other day, and sometimes dogs like to follow us around everywhere, so what we like to do is open up the fence in front of peoples houses, and then walk in, Knock the door, and then if no one comes out, we go out before the dog can, and lock him inside their fance lol its pretty funny. OH and then this one night, we were talking with a recent convert, and she started going off on some tangent about her family, and was telling us where they lived, and it was in a place called Maipu, which is pronounced (My Pooh) so i was just dying trying not to laugh when she was saying stuff like "yeah they all live in Maipu, but they moved away for awhile but then came back and lived in maipu for a little longer" lol it was torture. and then this week we had to do a hack job on the electricity in the house cuz our stupid heating thing melted again, but we bought a new one. but this opne doesnt work as great :P haha but thats ok cuz we only have like a month of real winter left. so yeah life is good still. dont worry about me :) so yeah i hope you all have a good week, i miss and love you all.

Love Elder Philpott

7.4.11

Hello Everyone,
Its freezing here. my fingers are numb just typing this, but life is still good. i got my new comp, his names Edler Lundell, he´s from the factory in utah. but he´s pretty cool. and we get along good. Ha especially after dinner on saturday, we went to this one house that always gives us tons of food, and its usually pretty good, but that day we had the worst luck,  so we go back in this room to eat, and she comes out with a nice bowl of CHICKEN FEET soup. haha we just looked at it at first, then poked it, and just looked at eachother and were like oh boy... so we just ate around then at first, and then we started trying to use our fork, but that didnt work, then the lady came in and we were like "ummm... how do you eat this??" then she said you have to use your hands, so she left and we tried eating it with our hands,but still couldnt get any meat of it, so we just gave up. then, thinking that the worst was behind us, she comes out again with a nice steamy plate of rice and chicken liver :P :P lolby now we´re just ready to go, so we shoveled down what we could, and then used bread and pop and whatever other tricks we could think of to get it down.  and in the end, i ended up putting some ofthem in napkins and throwing em away lol after we left the house we just walked home and brushed our teeth haha  so yeah that was interesting.. lol and then sunday was good. we had 3 investigators come to church and then had 3 baptisms after church :) and i did my first baptism. it was awesome :) one was a 15 year old kid named  williams, it went good. then the other was a cute 10 year old girl thats pretty little for her age. we reactivated their parents, and now they wanted us to baptise their kids, so i baptised cecilia (10) and Elder Lundell baptised Sebastian (8) it was great, but after getting out of the water, it was SOOOO cold. but being cold and wet never felt so good..

So yeah the people are all pretty drunk right now watching the american soccer cup, and the other night we were doing contacts in the street and this super drunk fat chick, comes up and is like "hey hwere are you from??" 

"the USA"

"OH. well i better go then, cuz im a chilean girl, and i dont want you guys tryin anything funny with me!"

 and then she started walking away and was like "i mean you gotta admit, us chilean girls got it goin on, i mean check me out" and then my comp just turned aroun and i gave her a thumbs up lol  so she started laughing and then stumbled away lol it was pretty hilarious.

I love and miss you all!

Elder Philpott