HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!!
Wow, this last week went by really fast. But it was a good one. Not much happened, but we´re getting better. We haven´t had a lot of lessons, and we´re still searching for more investigators. But we´re working a lot with inactives. Actually, remember Permaneced, the program that the Chile Area came out with? It´s for working with inactive members. We have key indicators for it, and one is “Visits Made.” The "standard" is 10, with some sectors getting 4-5 and others making 12-15. Two weeks ago our whole zone, 12 sectors, did 119. This last week we did 51. We have also done a lot of contacts. The "standard" is 140, 20 every companionship every day. Recently, contacts have been dropping and companionships are doing 40-70. We did 200. We´ve had very few lessons, and have almost no investigators, but the only two indicators that we can control are Permaneced visits and contacts. We hope that with what we´ve done we can find more people to teach and eventually baptize.

One thing we´ve started doing to get so many contacts is sing on the bus. We have to take a bus for half an hour to get to our sector and again going home at night. So we take advantage and sing a few hymns. Some people listen, others don’t. Then we give the interested ones pass-along cards and do contacts. There´s a family that has been on the bus four times when we sing. One time the dad was on; the other times just the mom and the little son, David. They always enjoy it when we sing, and last night I talked with her to see if we could pass by some day. She said that she doesn’t have much time, just weekends. So I invited her to church. She seemed interested, and we´ll see if she comes.

Last week we got a reference from the Zone Leaders. It´s kind of an interesting situation. They were at a member´s house who had a friend, Rosa, visiting. She was interested, so they taught the Restoration. She accepted a baptismal date for March 6. They called and passed us the reference. We found the street she lives on, but they didn´t give us a number; just hints on how to arrive. We couldn´t find the house, and no one in the neighborhood knows her. So we have to wait for more information to be able to visit. Until then we have an investigator with a baptismal date that we don´t even know. :)

Today we had a zone activity, where we went to some hills in the middle of nowhere and climbed around in some rocks and had a picnic. It was really fun. I loved climbing the rocks and all. Next week I will send pictures of it. It was awesome!

So the weather here is really wacky now. Summer is ending, but it´s still really hot. This last week we had a couple of cooler days, and it even rained a couple of days. That is not normal for Chile. It is good, though, as they are in a water crisis. Besides the rain, there were a couple of small earthquakes as well. One day there was a 6.8 in Concepción where the big one last year was. It was smaller here, but they still scare me. My companion wants to have another one as he was not here for the last one and thinks it would be cool. As for me, one is enough. I´m not hoping for any more. It´s so crazy how fast time goes. In two weeks from yesterday we will complete one year since the earthquake. Wow!!

Well, that´s about it for now. We got home late from the zone activity, so there´s not much time. Have a great week!!

Elder Murdoch