Monday, March 30, 2015

Arica: Earthquake, Floods and Baptism

Hey Everybody! Greetings from the mission under the sea!

No but seriously, this week was suuuuuuper crazy! I'm gonna give you guys the story from my point of view, I'm sure that you've seen what's going on in the news.

THE STORY:

We were teaching a family home evening with some members in our ward (last monday). It was super awesome! It happened to be Hermano Diaz's birthday, so we were just eating cake and minding our own business. All of a sudden, the lights went out. We went outside of the house and all the lights in the entire city were out! We got a call from Elders Swett and Giadach (our zone leaders)  telling us to immediately return to our pension. Hermano Diaz gave us and the Hermanas that work in our ward a ride back to our pensions. We then sat around for a couple hours in our pension because it was only 8:30 and we don't go to bed until 11:30 in our mission. We peered out the window into the black abyss that was Arica for a couple hours. You could see sirens in different parts of the city. That's one of the cool parts about our apartment, we're on the fourth floor and can see forever. There was also a fire in part of the town.

The next day we found out that it had been flooding in the south and that's why we had lost power. We didn't really know the extent of what was going on. This day we didn't have any cell service but we had power.

The following day we found out the extent of the things that were going on. Apparently rivers had just taken out cities in our mission. One of the cities to get hit the worst was the city of Cheñaral, which pretty much doesn't exist any more. The significance of this is that my companion spent his first six months in the mission in Cheñaral and is super worried for all the people that he knew there.

We spent a greater part of the week worrying for the missionaries and wondering what was going to happen in the mission. We finally got a call from the president (through our zone leaders) telling us that all the missionaries were fine and that there wouldn't be any huge changes in the mission. Other that that, we haven't really had ANYTHING happen in Arica. Wait, I take that back. We had a 6.4 earthquake in the middle of the night. I slept through it...haha...not sure if that's a good thing.....

Now onto the more important part! The part where we had a baptism! 
His name is Pedro Choque! The hermanas found him in the street and started talking with him! About a month and a half later he got baptized! We were super stressed because we had to teach the lessons very basically and were worried that he wouldn't be able to remember them. He passed the interview and everything went through without a problem! He was super excited after the baptism and says that he wants to keep progressing forward!

Here's a scripture about baptism taht I like -- Mosiah 5:8-10

Love and miss you all so much!

Stay Frosty,
Elder Walker

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