Week 13-October 27, 2014

Week 13-October 27, 2014

haha wow love the pics..lol great costumes everyone :p

and no we dont have warm showers still...they came to fix it but no luck...

and hmmm..i think making church first priority my whole life and all the traditions we had that incorporated the gospel that i look back on now and realize the best moments of my life and my best moments with my family are all memories of Easter and Christmas and blessings and such...i think things like that make me realize how much of an impact the church has made on my life and family and that is what made me want to serve...

and no i didnt get a package yet, but apparenly taylor wood sent one like two months ago that hasnt gotten here so im not sure how long it really takes..

tell benjamin congrats on his soccer game and mandy with gymnastics! where is her state meet?! thats awesome!

and im sure lydia did fantastic with chanteurs! also tell natalie good luck with whatever decision she makes :P either way she will have fun im sure...

anyway my week was good, SUPER HOT though...

we have seen so much success this week, its been awesome and super fun to see the blessings from all our hard work the last couple weeks with not many results..this week we found 7 new investigators! we even surpassed our goal of 6! first time ever,..

we are also trying to be more direct in our teaching...we taught an inactive woman this week and her son ( a returned missionary) wanted to share with us too and gave a killer lesson to his mom with super direct questions and got her to agree to read the BOM again even though she stopped believing it years ago...we were amazed and realized we need to be kind and loving but also direct and call people to repentance sometimes. haha

i dont know if it was in the ensign too but the Liahona did an article on the church in chile last month and one of the pictures is of my teacher in the CCM and one of the statistics said 1 in 30 chileans are members..we werent surprised because we meet people on the street all the time that say they were baptized years ago..many stopped attending right after they got baptized though and everyone has faith in Christ here but no one wants to go to church...ive had to learn more about the purpose of church and such..

but Hno Borquez, one of the men we reactivated recently, is awesome and we have decided to set him up with Hna Silvia, another recently reactivated woman who is super awesome now. They are both separated but have killer testimonies and we had her accompany us for a lesson with him and they hit it off and now we are all making French toast tmrw night and she is super excited...lol maybe we cant baptize anyone right now but maybe we will help create an eternal marriage ;) lol that adventure madefriday extra fun :P

also i have been called fat or pregnant twice now by people on the street and its been a joke of ours for a while until this week when the same thing happened to Hna Osterloh, twice in one week! lol now we are even and we are going on a diet this week :P lol these people are just super honest..lol and its not offensive to call people fat here, so people do it all the time.

anyway, it was a good week :) glad all of you guys are doing well too!

love and miss you!

sunsets here are amazing..also sunrises when we are running every morning! crazy cool with the Andes in the background and i guess the ozone is thinner here or something so the skies are awesome but we also get sunburnt super easily... and a house with some creepy statues we took a picture of, but thats what the houses we knock look like. and my district before the last change...

Week 12--October 20, 2014

Week 12--October 20, 2014

fun to hear from everyone :) sounds like all is well and everyone is busy and having fun..also cant wait to see pictures from halloween from everyone! :)

my week was good, we had the change meeting today (every 6 weeks) so it was a marking point for me. i made it through my first change and my companion is on her last! haha its kind of hard to not think about home and normal life thought when she is on her way out...oh well

our water heater broke this week so we have been taking ice cold showers every morning..part of the adventure i guesss :P

we found some new investigators this week but we have been having trouble holding onto them, they keep disappearing. we will see what happens though...we had a ward talent show sat night and Sara (the investigator who is basically a member but needs to marry her ¨husband¨first lol) brought Omar (her partner who has never really been interested but is now listening in on some of our lessons with her and has come to a few activities!) and this guy we found knocking doors showed up and i ended up talking deep doctrine and teaching the entire first lesson and discussing all his questions (he has read a TON about religion and had a bad experience with the church before but told us we were the answer to his prayer the day we stopped by and has been happy to talk with us so far) while we waited for the activity to start..haha kinda crazy. we sang a few hymns in the show and it went pretty well! sorry my emails are crazy scattered..it all just comes out stream-of-consciousness style and sometimes its all over the place, also i forget what ive said in past emails :P

but ya so saturday night was good. also jocelyn is our investigator who came with Ornella, the daughter of the menos activo family to church when Ornella brought her pelolo and she has a son who is about 4 but she didnt really like church cuz it was so long and she has problems with depression so it was really hard to track her down and help her and teach her last week and we almost lost her i think but this week we stopped by and she was so much better! we invited her to baptism again and she said no right now but maybe later on and she wants us to keep visiting :)

we also found a lady this week that was super interesting..her name is pamela and she basically told us her house is haunted and she is very sensitive to spiritual things, such as the bad energy in her house and she has had some crazy spiritual experiences in the past. she was pretty receptive and we are hoping she will be able to feel the power of the book of mormon and start praying again (she is scared to becasue in the past when she prayed scary things would happen to her daughter). it made me think about how one time dad and i discussed how Satans tactics have changed since the time of Christ and how now he mostly just tries to convince us that there is no devil and therefore no God and that is why there arent possesed people anymore or something..but i guess people like Pamela are common here and i realized its probably different here since everyone already believes in God. Satans tactics can be different. its a little scary to realize how real the power of evil is..but we are excited to see what happens with Pamela´s family.

the family that came to the english class was the one who said they arent really interested (at least the mom who has family that are members), but maybe the husband and daughters (the ones that dont know english and are in our class) will become interested. the daughter is the one who gave me the bracelet she made...they are so sweet. i really want something to happen with them...

also i dont know if i already told you but we have 6 missionaries in our ward, 4 elders and us. its crazy to be in a ward with so many missionaries and the members know the missionaries well since there are so many, not like our ward where there are only two..

ok im going to finish reading emails now and such but im glad everyone is doing well :) love and miss you all!

ashley

ps...i lost my camera cord but took more pictures this week..will try to get a new one or find it and send some next week,..it just takes like 10 min to upload them on this comp, so i might just print some and send them...

Week 11-Oct. 13, 2014

Week 11--Oct. 13, 2014

anyway heres my week since i dont have a ton more time :

we did a lot of contacting this week because we desperately need new investigators and didnt have a ton of success but we are being patient. Hna osterloh has had like two companions go home early because of back problems, so she is a big believer in working hard, but at a reasonable pace lol .. so now we get chocolate or some sort of snack every 9 rejections :P it makes things more fun... (there are tiny little corner stores owned and run by people living there on almost every corner).we got to start our english class this week, which i was really excited about. we only had one student because we hadnt announced it yet, but she was an 18 yr old girl that the elders are teaching (with her family) and it turned out to be super fun and it sounds like her family might get baptized so thats awesome :) it was pretty funny though becuse the elders have been having tons of sucess and now we are spending our time helping with their investigators :P but its all good, it was pretty fun to teach someone english.a also we met a family contacting the other day who wanted to come to the class and i think they will come this week but we stopped by to visit them and they are awesome. unfortunately the mom has already been taught by missionaries and was honest with us in saying she isnt really interested, but is happy for her family to come to our class and such and they are super nice. maybe one of her two daughters will be interested or her husband. her 9 yr old daughter who is super shy gave me one of the bracelets she made :) super sweet.

also im learning to develop a fear of men. my comp has a deeply ingrained wariness of men in general now lol and is constantly worried about me when i say hola to men on the street or something. we get a lot of creepy man whistling or making kissing noises or calling out when we pass and i have learned (with her help) to not look or respond in any way lol its been somewhat entertaining. i feel super ignorant sometimes cuz i will say hi to someone on the street while we pass and they will start talking to us and ask us where we live and such and my comp has to walk quickly away so that ill catch the hint and follow lol. also we taught a lesson to this guy the other day who decided to confess his experiences cheating on his wife with us, including a lot of details and such that we didnt want to know and we had to bail out of the lesson quickly. obviously my companion was the one who said we had to leave suddenly because i was just trying to figure out what he was saying..lol pretty entertaining. anyway i am learning never to trust any of the males here i guess...

but overall i am doing well and can understand so much more every day and i am starting to really feel comfortable talking to people without my companion by my side to help. so that has been exciting!

in general, its fun to be so fully involved in something so important. its weird to have your entire life revolve around the work. rewarding though when old women tell you that you are their angels or little girls give you bracelets :P i cant wait to have real success with an investigator that wasnt already basically a member when i got here ( like Sara) haha ..we are praying for a miracle to help Jocelyn..we arent sure how to help her depression but maybe we will have success soon :)

love and miss you all! i will try and send pictures...

Ashley and Hermana Osterloh in District T-shirts!=)

Week 10-Oct. 6, 2014

Week 10-Oct. 6, 2014

as for my week..

tuesday we did service for one of our investigators, who we are no longer teaching because she didnt really have any desire to read or pray, but it was fun to do something different. we helped her clean her house and i washed her dog :P it was such a mess and literally had dreadlocks in its fur, so i took scissors and sawed dreadlocks and washed it and that was fun :P i love scrubbing and washing things, especially animals haha we also got to visit Pablo, the 17 yr old boy we found that was inactive. he makes us so happy cuz he is so sincere and told us coming back to church had made him feel more ¨complete¨ and he is praying for peace in his home, which is inspiring coming from a teenage guy..he also always buys chocolate milk (there is no real milk here reallly) and cookies for us ..haha 

tuesday and wednesday we had tons of lessons and our people were doing fantastic and we were on fire! but then thursday we had nothing...it was a loonngg day of knocking doors basically all day and no one would answer and the only people who really talked to us answered because they wanted to practice their english with us (which is always funny haha). But there were a few potentials, so we will see what happens. at night i pet one of the dogs in the park and so it and its friend decided to follow us the rest of the night and as we went running the next morning and it made us so frustrated because the dogs would make all the dogs at the houses bark like crazy and it made it impossible to talk to people the rest of the night...but basically we came home sunburned, my foot was bleeding from a blister, and we were freezing cold. haha so we made chocolate chip pancakes...haha

friday we ran into a jehovah witness, of which there are tons here, but we didnt know who she was until she started asking us allll kinds of questions and accusing us of not knowing God because we didnt know the Bible and such,... it was kind of crazy. she wouldnt even tell us what religion she was but we knew. its very good that i cant speak spanish well becuase i would have a really hard time not arguing with people like that....its completely pointless because conversion is by the Spirit but its hard not to get defensive of what you know is true. a similar event happened yesterday when a lady and a man in the street that we contacted told us that Joseph Smith story was impossible. it was right after conference and i thought of the talk about Joseph Smith being known for good and bad and had to take a deep breath and testify and walk away..haha

as for conference, we watched it live and in english! (its just 3 hours later here so it was at 1 and 5 oclock). i was so grateful we got to watch in english because there is no way i would have gotten as much out of it in spanish..there are just so many good one liners and beautiful wordings that the general authorities, who are fantastic speakers, use that i would have missed in spanish. and yes the different languages were fun :) we watched in the stake center, where they show it for everyone in spanish, but we were upstairs in a room watching it with all the gringo missionaries in english ...

anyway, hope this week goes well for everyone! love and miss you all!

All the Hermanas in my District....

Week 9-Sept. 29, 2014

Week 9-Sept. 29, 2014

ok here goes my email...

this week was kind of intense again because of the noche de blanco (night of baptisms). i already told you we fasted last sunday for more success and we had another meeting with our zone on tuesday and basically our zone leaders are crazy lol they basically just lectured us like crazy about how we should baptize 40 people sat and the mission changed the rules for church attendance before baptism so that we could invite everyone to be baptized this month before they send the numbers to salt lake..it was kind of weird for me because i feel like we have so many menos activos and such that we really shouldnt be baptizing people unless they are really ready and committed, but maybe i just lack faith haha  but we fasted again tuesday like they told us too and challenged our investigador (the one that needs to get married) again to get baptized, this time for this last saturday. she of course said she still needs more time to decide what to do about her partner but she told us more about her fears about marriage and stuff and we were able to help her i think so it was good. she is a better member already than lots of the members of the ward! haha comes to church each week in a skirt with a notebook to take notes and reads her scriptures every day and attends all the meetings during church, its pretty funny... also her partner came to the baptism night with her to watch with her which was awesome since he has never been interested! we also had one of our other investigators there, but she wont read the BOM so we might have to stop visiting her soon...which is sad because she is obviously a lonely old lady and could talk to us alllll day. seriously the chilean people love to talk. we never have problems getting them to talk or tell us things about their lives and lots are just happy to chat with someone. The trick is to get them to talk about the gospel and listen to us teach :P the other problem of chile is that basically every family we visit has problems with the men in the family. none of them will come to church and so many of them have problems with violence in the home and adultery. so many of the ones we meet with are cheating on their wives or on trial for domestic violence or something. i have no idea how to help them :/ ...also its totally normal to be a young single mom. they all have kids and are either just living with the dad or are single. we have one investigator that has been really exciting for us because she was not at all interested at first but is friends with a menos activo family we are also visiting and has been going through some hard times and the hermana from the family told her to listen to us and so she has been meeting with us and came to church yesterday with the family and brought her little son! the daughter of the menos activo family is her age and had not been active at all until this started happèning and now she is coming too and helping our investigator (her friend) and even brought her pololo yesterday to church too! fun to see how missionary work can help members too... (also pololo basically means boyfriend, its my fav spanish word right now haha, its even a verb-pololear haha basically means to date someone or go on dates) but anyway it was a good week and basically all of our menos acitvos came to church so that was amazing!

im doing well and the food is good ( just kind of painful because you dont get to serve yourself so they give you soooo much food, so thats hard because you have to eat it all or you will offend them) and my companion is great and my legs are holding up with all the walking, so thats good :P

this week is conference and we are excited and hopefully we will get to listen in english! womens conf was in spanish...elder holland just isnt as powerful through a spanish translator...not the same. so grateful to speak english haha

i got a new camera but dont have a lot of pics yet so i will try to send some but these computers take forever....

love and miss you all!

first pic is the view from our apt! love it!! second is my comp and i :) haha not the best pic but i needed something to send :P

Week 8--In Cinco de Abril

Week 8--In Cinco de Abril

hey so i havent read any emails yet but im going to write mine first cuz otherwise i forget everything and dont write every much...so here goes.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TAYLOR!! hope it was fantastic!! ur an adult now! how does it feel?!

so this week was Dieciocho de septiembre, which is their independence day here, so we had a ward party all day wednesday with Chilean dances and food and games and such, pretty fun :P we found a great empanada place afterwards on the way home and we decided empanadas de queso are delicious but we DO NOT like ones with pino, a weird meat and such thats just gross. but of course one of the inactives wanted to make us some because my companion told them i hadnt tried any homemade pino empanadas yet so now we have some in our fridge that we will have to try sometime...haha fantastic..

also they barbeque all week, TONS of meat, for the holiday (which basically lasts all week), and we ended up having two lunches on thursday because one of the less active families that we visit a lot got us cake and also barbequed for us and they serve SO MUCH meat when they barbeque that we literally had to eat like four steaks..it was pretty bad...lol

during the ward party, we invited a random woman and her granddaughter off the street and they ended up coming, which was exciting, so we had some nonmembers there as well as a bunch of our inactives! Our ward here is fantastic compared to some of the others here in Chile, ive heard. We reached our goal for attendance last week at church and had 209 people in the chapel! the members are all super welcoming and helpful and some of them even speak english :P like our ward mission leader who served his mission in sandy, utah. my challenge to you guys this week is to go ask the missionaries in the ward if they need help and make an effort to befriend or at least welcome every inactive or investigator that comes. i never understood the importance of this until i came here cuz we can work all week to get the people to church, but once they are there we can only hope that the members befriend them and make them want to come again...

its pretty cool the relationships we have with the menos activos though, they love the missionaries and we visit them at least once a week. the only problem is that some of them dont come to church unless the missionaries visit them..they are basically converted to the missionaries, not the gospel, and they get offended if we dont visit them all the time, even if they are too lazy to get up for church..kind of frustrated.

The other group of people we work with a ton are old ladies..lol seriously we as sister missionaries spend entire days just going from lonely old woman to the next. its nice to feel so appreciated and feel like you are helping someone not feel lonely, but we are supposed to be reaching out to men, too because the church needs more priesthood leaders, we have lots of faithful woman :P

our zone leaders are super intense and promised us that if we fasted yesterday that we would reach our goals for the month, so we are hoping things will get better and we will find more new investigators to teach because this week was hard becasue everyone was busy with the holiday and woudnt answer their doors or were all busy and lots of our appointments fell though...but one of the days we had walked around for hours knocking doors and no one would answer and we were frustrated but then at the end of the night we found a man who answered and invited us in and turns out his teenage son was a member and we invited him to church the next day and he came! we have decided that when we find people like this who havent been active in years and arent even on the records and reactivate them, its basically a baptism :P there are so many people that were baptized in the past or tricked into baptism even by missionaries in the past without even knowing the covenant they were making or without even a testimony of the restoration (one of our menos activos..)! so our work is centered in finding these people, helping them gain a testimony and come back. its a new program from the church that is only being implemented in a couple missions..then we find new people to teach through the menos activos and such, their friends and family, etc

we have one investigator who is ready to be baptized but refuses to get married until jan or feb of this next year..it kills us. she is golden and has a great testimony and goes to church every week, she just has had bad experiences with a past marriage and is scared of marriage. she, like many other people here, has lived with her partner for like 30 years and has grandkids with him but isnt married..i dont understand it..why woulnt you get married if you have lived with someone that long and have kids with them and such? lots of people here are like that..i think it has something to do with the legality of marriage here..

as for my companion, shes awesome! she was even born in walnut creek and has family in San fran! haha

also i gave up on all my shoes haha the cheapest ones i got are the ones i wear everyday cuz i have so many blisters...haha ironic

as for my spanish, i can understand so much now! especially when people are talking about the gospel because that is the vocab i know...i understand everything in church and most things people say,..i still have a ways to go before i can speak or understand people when they talk fast about other stuff, but ive learned a ton!

also i got all your mail when i got here!! thanks for all the letters and birthday pictures :P and the package and such!  and tell Aunt Ann thanks for the book she sent! i read all the stories and loved it!

if you send another package anytime soon, i need a spanish hymnbook and more hymns sung by Vocal Point or BYU choirs and printed pictures of you guys! i wish i had brought more pictures to show people...  but dont worry about it now, i know its expensive to send stuff, just next time you are sending something.

love you guys! sorry my camera broke for good so i have to buy a new one today, so ill send pictures next week. 

miss you all!

Week 6/7--Leaving the CCM/In the Field!

Week 6-Sept. 9, 2014-Going to the Field

Ashley with new trainer, Sister Osterloh from Sandy, Ut, and Pres and Sis Barrierros.  Going to area 5 de Abril??
No email today...

Week 7--In the Field!

ok so im almost out of time because of all the emails about grandma so now i will tell you guys everything and hopefully get everything in... 

so hopefully they sent you the letter i wrote last week? scanned it or whatever..

so my trainer is from sandy utah, super nice, and a hardworking missionary but chill enough that i dont feel stressed out or hurried all the time like i did on splits. she is almost done and goes home after she trains me :Pshe speaks english of course and even goes running with me!

we live in the best apartment ever! i love love love it haha its on the seventh floor of a complex with an awesome view and TONS of space (we each have our own bathroom with a shower :P)

We visit tons of less actives here because like 70 percent of the wards are inactive so we have to visit all of them and bug them to go to church haha but they are fun to visit. they always give us food though :/ and the first thing the women in relief society said when i introduced myself on sunday was that they were going to make me fat..lol oh great...the food is good and basically we never have to cook or even buy groceries becuase everyone gives us fruit and snacks when we visit :P

unfortunately we are not even allowed to listen to EFY music ..so that made me sad :( but oh well i guess i will learn to love Motab.

i also had to introduce myself and give my testimony in church which was kind of terrifying in spanish..haha but it went ok, i feel like i can understand alot i just still have to figure out how to say everything. and i cant always understand old people..they mumble and talk fast...we finally got a baptism date yesterday with an investigator but i didnt really understand anything she said because she is a little old lady haha who loves to talk and have someone just listen , we barely got our lesson in :P

also the ward has SO many little kids! ..haha there were so many toddlers running around during the entire meeting, it was fun to watch :P so different than arcadia...

our sector is pretty wealthy, it is made up of lots of little houses right next to each other with TONS of dogs and a fence in front of every house. google map it if you can :P its by the Maipu catholic temple or something..haha

i want to send more pictures but it takes FOREVER to upload them on this computer, so i will send more next week maybe

love and miss you all !