A RAINY WEEK IN SANTIAGO

Much-needed rain came to Santiago this week. The temperature is not that cold but the humidity chills to the bone! It was gloomy and rainy every day and now the Andes are covered with snow.

Often times it is colder inside a building than it is outside. This is today at church. Not sure why they didn’t turn the heat on.

IN THE OFFICE

We worked in the office all week to submit ten projects to the area approval committee. The goal was to have all our budget spent by the end of July and we are grateful for divine help to have accomplished that. We have thirty-plus projects to manage in various stages of progress. We will continue to accept project requests. If we are not allocated more money for this year, we will have a lineup of new projects to submit next January. But we are hopeful to receive more funds for 2022.

We continue to be frustrated with the bottleneck that occurs with our projects. No matter how hard we may work to try to get them to the point of delivery on the dates we expect, oftentimes we are not able to do so. We are many times at the mercy of others who don’t have the same priority we have. We are learning that mission life is like non-mission life, with ups and downs and opposition. We thought of President Hinckley’s advice this week.

“Anyone who imagines that bliss Is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he’s been robbed. Most puts don’t’ drop. Most beef is tough. Most children grow up to be just people. Most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration. Most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is like an old-time rail journey- delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.”

Regardless of our frustrations, we know that this is the Lord’s work and that through the generosity of people across the world we feel blessed to be able to be His hands to help those in need. During the discouraging times, we remember the joy on the faces of the elderly, the children, and the hospital patients that have received donations and carry on. We are grateful for each other and the stretching experience we are having together.

Allow us to introduce Élder and Hermana Bentley. They are our counterparts in Argentina. They began their mission three months before us, and they return home to Utah next month. We do not know what we will do without them. We have spent many hours on Zoom together over the last year. We have shared such a journey together. Who will we text during a tense zoom call, who will answer our questions and be our sounding board? We are amazed that we can feel so close to people we have never met in person. We hope to do so someday but our guess is, with their service hearts, that by the time we get home next summer, they will have embarked on their fourth mission. They are our heroes!

OUT OF THE OFFICE

We finally left the office Friday afternoon to buy seeds for one of our projects- a health clinic that incorporates holistic healing in their treatment plans. We arrived in Santiago Central at about 1:00 with a list of over 90 different requested seeds.

The young man that helped us was from Easter Island and when he found out that we will be traveling there in September he was very excited. As he began counting out 20-30 individual seed packets for each type of seed and measuring and weighing out others, we could tell that our quick errand was going to take all afternoon. Especially since it is impossible to count seed packets and tell us all about Easter Island. So, to speed up the process we left him to count and walked one block to La Vega Central – the open market where the locals shop for a wide variety of products, principally fresh fruit and vegetables that come from the Chilean Central Valley. We visited there several months ago. We never know exactly where we are going when we head out on these buying sprees and were excited that our seed store was right next door! We wandered the vast aisles and purchased beautiful produce and artisan cheese and stopped at a bakery on the way back to the seed store.