This week has gone by pretty fast. I just completed five months in the mission yesterday. Time flies by pretty fast. My new companion is really cool. He only has one more change in the mission than me, so we are both fairly new. He is a little timid so I have been leading all of our lessons and stuff. It is really good for me because with my first two companions I let them take the lead, but with this guy I have started to do it. Mission life has been really good, and really busy. It is still scorching hot down here. We have stake conference coming up this week, so I´m guessing that getting investigators to church is going to be even harder than it already is. We have been teaching this lady for about a month now, and she wants to get baptized, but she smokes, and she is having a really hard giving it up. But everything is going really well. Talk to you later.
Love,
Matt

Hey, I just finished my second change in the mission field. I got a new companion today but I´m staying in the same area for another six weeks. My trainer, Elder Ramos, went back to Mexico today. That kind of sucks because he was really cool. My companion from the last change is staying in the same pension so I´m going to be seeing him a lot still. My new compion is named Elder Aguirre. He is from Honduras and doesn´t speak any english, so it´s going to be fun teaching him english phrases. This last week was really fun. On Tuesday all the Elders who came with me to Chile and I went to downtown Santiago, which is actually outside of our mission, to get our ID cards. It was really cool and there are some really cool Catholic Cathedrals in downtown Santiago. I got some pictures but the computer I´m using today is not working with the pictures so I´ll try to send them tomorrow. Things are going good, I´ll talk to you next week.
Love,
Matt

This week has been pretty good. I got the package today, I was really surprised it came so fast. Thank you so much for everything. All of it was perfect. So I am sending some pictures. The first is me and my companion Elder Zárate. The other is a picture of the average bus here in Santiago. Elder Hansen, my buddy from the MTC, and I went on splits on Saturday. So we worked together all day, it was really cool. That was the day it rained. When it rains here it pours, and I guess in the winter it rains off and on all day every day. But it is fine with me, it kind of reminds of Seattle. We have changes next week, so in one week I could be in another area with another companion, but I don´t know yet. But everything is going good, not too much to report on. The other companionship in our ward is having a baptism next week. The whole family, wife and kids, of the guy that is getting baptized are members. And I know the family really well and have taught the guy a couple of times, so this baptism is going to be really cool this week because his son that is 18 years old is going to baptize him. We are pretty excited for that. Everthing else is going good, thanks again for all of the stuff. The bag is perfect. Talk to you later.
Love,
Matt

Pictures!

Mom just thought it would be funny to put me and my cardboard Edward up.

Matt and his companion, looks like he's lost some weight!

The bus system.

When it rains, it pours in Chile.

Hey this week has been crazy. On Saturday my whole zone was at a plaza doing a public presentation. Where half of the missionaries sing hymns and the other half do contacts. We have a little table set up with pamphlets and picures and this really drunk Chilean started singing with us, then he started preaching some apostasy, like God is a spirit and stuff like that, then he tried to stand on our little table with pamphlets and preach. It was hilarious, I honestly couldn´t stop laughing the whole time. We were going to have a baptism yesterday but the lady bailed on us because she got really sick and she´s moving in with her daughter who lives in Southern Chile. So wasn´t too good. Also, there is a guy in our ward who got his car stolen and his life is just going really hard right now and he needed some shoes for work, because he does manual labor. So Elder Hansen and I each gave him a pair of shoes. So I am going to have to buy some soon, but it is ok because I barely ever use them. One of our rules is we can´t play soccer because I guess missionaries get in fights when we play. But it was really cool to help that guy out. I´ve got to get going, I´ll talk to you next week.
Love,
Matt

Life here is good, we have a baptism scheduled for this Sunday, so hopefully everything goes well with that. There really hasn´t been anything too exciting to report on this week, everything is going really well. People are funny down here, they like to bash on America. It is really funny, one old guy asked me if I was in Chile looking for Osama Bin Laden. I thought that was a little weird, but some people are just crazy. Thank you so much for sending all of the stuff. I think it takes about three weeks to get here but that is alright. I love you, talk to you later.
Love,
Matt

Viña del Mar is North East of Santiago so I am probably never going to see it, but that is ok. There are tons of inactive families here in Chile. So many that when we are knocking doors we usually find a family or two that hasn´t been to Church for years. So that is a big part of the missionary work down here, reactivation. But this week was insane because we found a ton of new investigators. The mission goal is that each companionship find twenty new investigators a week. But that is insane, the average is like six to eight in a week. But this last week my companion and I found twenty, we reached the goal and we were pretty proud of ourselves. But now we have a lot of work ahead of us to get all of these people progressing. On Wednesdays we have a zone meeting and at the end of the meeting we get mail, and I got two of your letters. One form Jan. 16 and one from Jan. 22. But also we got the rule that you can only open mail on Preparation day. We have been getting stupid rules like that every week since I got here. But I was talking to another Elder that has been here a little longer that me and he told me that the new rules every week started in like November. So I guess something happened and now he is cracking down hard. But I read your letters this morning so I´m going to answer some of your questions. Every day except for Preparation Day we eat a big lunch at a members house. Lunch is the big meal down here. But breakfast in the morning and a small dinner is up to us. But we don´t have time to cook at night so we don`t ever eat a meal for dinner. I am in a ward that has about 90 to 100 active members. The area is so big that there are two companionships in this ward. My companionship and Elder Hansen´s companionship. Elder Hansen was in my district in the MTC. The person that we baptized a few weeks ago was baptized three weeks after we found her. So I knew her from the beginning. Also, this week we have a baptism scheduled and this lady has a really strong testimony of the Book of Mormon so that is really cool. You said that you were going to by a memory card reader and send it, if you haven´t already sent it could you also send a pocket knife and a scripture bag. The scripture bag from missionary mall is way too big and is annoying. Elder Hansen told me that there are scripture bags at the Distribution Center that are good. I just want a bag that is big enough to hold my scriptures and a book of mormon and some pamphlets, but it also needs to have a shoulder strap. If you have already sent the memory card reader don´t worry about this stuff, it isn´t life or death, I can wait. Also, you said that you had to give a lesson on following Christ. I had to give a talk a couple weeks ago about that. And your lesson about enjoying the journey. That is really important. In my first weeks here in Chile I kept thinking to myself, things are going to be so much better when I know Spanish, and things are going to be better when ... But then I got that Christmas package with the Christmas card and Dad wrote on that, enjoy every day. And after I started to have that attitude things went so much better, and all of the little things came together, like Spanish got a lot easier when I stopped worrying about it. Thanks for everything, it was really cool to get those letters. I love you, talk to you next week.
Love,
Matt