I love being a missionary!!

Friends, family, 

First of all, I love all of you.  I´ve been overly blessed with an abundance of absolute awesomeness in my life...so thank you...each and every one of you....you make life beautiful. We have an awesome zone conference on Wednesday and my zone got chosen to sing the musical number.....our musical talent ability is so low in this particular zone, that my zone leaders are forcing me and another Elder to sing in front of everyone....holy shrapnel...poor people listening.  I´m going to try and get in touch with my  high school chamber days ....pull out that hand drum and pink satin blazer we wore...maybe even some panlettes.Ahh, the good ole´ days...

People, I LOVE being a missionary way too much.

Oh wait....HAPPY BIRTHDAY ASHLEY on the 20th.  I love you.

Where was I? No, I really love being a missionary.  Radimadi has turned into a gold mine.  This was the one sector that I did not want to come to.  Every missionary who has ever served here has told prez to close the sector.  This Sunday, I looked around and saw so many changes that are happening in people´s lives.  A broken Colombian family is getting ready to go back to the temple and get resealed...we have four people progressing towards a baptismal fecha, people are praying and reading and wanting this in their lives.  I look forward to Sundays now because it means I get to receive the remission of my sins.  All I can think about are the scriptures that we are going to share in our next lesson and how we can get a ward activity going.  Sure, we coud focus on the bad or the boring or the really, really horrific things that still take place (members robbing converts and fun stuff like that) but I´m going to focus on the good.

Prez visited the branch for the first time in a year and gave the best talk ever...about HOW we should serve in the church.... He is the best man in the entire world. The Hermana Lovell snuck homemade cookies into my backpack and said I could have them all if I wanted...but don´t worry! I shared them with my compy and our cutie little investigator that we walked home and put with fecha that day because she absolutely LOVED church.

So we´re trying to establish the beloved ¨Noche de Hogar¨ Every week in the capilla. (Family Home Evening...you South American missionaries know what I´m talking about....The most important things to the latinos are the temple, Noche de Hogar, and futbol :) ) Our mission leader showed up super late because of work and a member of another faith was his collectivo (taxi) driver.  Alexis LOVES being Mormon (convert from 10 years ago...was going to be a Catholic priest, but then served a mission and got married in the temple, has a child, and is our strongest member).  He said to the driver ¨leave me here on the corner at the church.....the true one¨ And then he smiled and got out.  He is super soft spoken and looks like he´s 14 (he´s 32) and he just laughed as he told the story.....

There´s all sorts of hidden beauty here in Chile.  Today, our Zone Leaders and Distric leader and his comp (us 6 make up our whole district...we are the only people in the whole city of La Union) thought it would be an awesome idea to take a bus an hour out to the countryside (campo) and hike an hour through cow fields to find where the Rio Bueno starts.  It DID turn out to be an awesome idea and we had a fantastic time. 

I don´t know what else to write you all.  I´m ridiculously happy (missionary happy...the best and most innocent kind), healthy (aka fat), and working hard (my body is dying).  I think if I sat and wrote for days and days and days I could never capture what one day holds here...I´m going to try really quick:

Wake up, pray, pray sola, excercise, shower (well....light the gas shower on fire and THEN shower), eat cereal and yogurt made down the street  (I´m in the yogurt capital of Chile...MOOO!), Study an hour by myself (best best BEST!), study and practice and memorize with comp, go out and serve or talk to random people in the street or to a meeting of some sort (an hour away), eat an awesome chilean lunch with the mamita and our mission leader and wife, go home and study Spanish, study and do outlines and practices of lessons we want to teach, leave house at 3 and from that second on walk miles and miles, knock a bazillion doors, run away from dogs and drunks, talk to every person we see in the street, try to get members to come out with us, think and scheme for the week, sing in the street, pray, listen to the Spirit, be happy, be rejected, be rejected again, walk through cow fields looking for an address that probably doesn´t exist, get in houses, try to find out when Heavenly Father wants us to say to them, pray really hard and hope to speak by the Spirit, have some lame lessons, get rejected by someone who knows it´s true, castigar the less active who didn´t come to church, find some really weird people. find some really lovely people, have everything I believe questioned, walk, walk, walk, call people to accompany us, pray, feel happy, sing again, talk to more people in the street, walk in the rain, death sun comes out, visit someone progressing, have an idea come to your mind and you follow it and it works and you help someone (THE best), run home to arrive just in time to pray, call the District Leader, write down goals and make a million plans for the next day, pray, pray sola, DIE into my bed.

THAT is what I have been doing for months and years and months.  THAT is what makes me happier than anything else I´ve ever done and THAT is what will make you happy too.

That is just a normal day, sometimes there is a cool conference or we get to go to church.  A mission is the best.

Love you all

Hermana Bourne