Elder Marcus Tilghman: June 21, 2017

Hey everyone this week was a great week down in Chile, and like always there was a weird story. Honestly the things that happen are ridiculous, sometimes the way the people think just makes me shake my head, but on with the email!

For the last few weeks we have been having some solid investigators come to church, and they are all Haitian. They have been coming to church and reading the book of mormon, but we are working with them about teaching that the Priesthood authority from God has been restored after the death of Jesus Christ, they have a hard time with that one. We have gotten the ward to help us with some of the Haitians needs, so we are helping them to find jobs, food and get some well needed supplies that people need, especially during the winter. We hope that through fasting and prayer, both our own and that of our investigators, that they can progress towards a baptismal date and be baptized! We have also had a ton of fun this past week trying to find and teach new people. It gets dark here at like 6 o'clock at night because we are in winter, so we spend a lot of time trying to teach and contact people in the dark, cold night. I mean, who wouldn't want to talk to two foreigners about Jesus outside in the dark street with no street lights in the middle of the ghetto? Makes logical sense to me. I honestly would not change it for anything, the work is exciting and fun at the same time, with of course the challenges that come every day, but everyone has those.

On Saturday we went over to a neighboring ward to help them out with an activity where they had their chapel open and invited people on the street in to come take a look. Our job was to invite the people. But, the trick was we did it in the most dangerous part of our mission! So it was fun because we got to talk to a ton of fun characters in a few hours and I learned a lot that drugs are very bad for you because they make you lay on the street at 4 in the afternoon as cars swerve around you. Once again, do not do drugs children.

Ok so fun story of the week. Last Thursday we got a call from another missionary that he needed help right away with a service in his sector. So we headed over there and what we did was find a mountain of water bottles. The man in charge wanted us to dump the water out and put the caps into a bucket, because he will sell them back to people for more money, and he got the bottles for free. It was the weirdest service ever, but we just dumped water out of bottles for 4 hours. But wait there is more. We went back the next day to go finish up (there were like 10,000 bottles) and the owner of the bottles came out of his house angry and flustered. We asked what happened and he told us the story. Apparently the night before, a bunch of high people had jumped his fence and tried to steal his bottles so that they could sell them to get drug money (once again, drugs are bad), and their noise woke the man up while he was sleeping. He yelled at them to leave, but they did not, so he pulled out a gun and started to shoot at them from his back patio so that they would leave. So basically someone almost died over empty, useless waterbottles.

And that was our week! Pretty normal overall, I hope you all enjoy your week and take care in the heat down in Arizona!

Love,

Elder Tilghman

Alma 37:37