Chile Santiago North Mission

Okay, when I served in Chile in 97-98, we had issues with that a lot of the sisters gained a lot of weight, so my mission president's wife had a special thing. She invited the mamitas to come for a special Mother's Day at the chapel that was by the offices and they served them food and they made it beautiful. I believe we sing them a song. We thank them for being mamitas. It was for all of the mamitas in the mission, not just the mamitas of the sisters, but the mission president's wife talked about nutrition. She had studied nutrition in college. She talked about how we needed to drink a lot of water and we needed to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables.

A land as diverse as Chile will have a lot of crazy natural disasters. Obviously, the biggest one is the earthquakes. It's famous for being earthquakes, having being on a fault line, and you're going to experience some earthquakes in your mission when you're on the 23rd story of an apartment building and the whole room swaying. It's kind of freaky, but God does protect his missionaries. There's also flooding. Both winters that I was in Santiago, there was a lot of flooding in the streets. We had rivers running in the streets just because it is more of a desert arid environment. They don't have a lot of infrastructure for a lot of water. So although it doesn't rain all that much, and sometimes it would rain a decent amount, you would get flooding in the streets. And for one of the summers, I was in the office and a couple miles from our apartment, it started to burn the hill, Cerro San Cristobal. So you'll get like fires, you'll get floods, that sort of stuff, but just be prepared and know the Lord protects his missionaries. As long as you're following the rules, you'll be safe.

There's not a whole bunch of great leadership in the church in Chile. You'll likely have at least one member of the bishopric that's pretty awesome, but often you'll be frustrated with the ward council because usually ward council doesn't happen, or barely does. You'll be frustrated with the ward mission leader, and you're just have to learn how to work with that because you can't command them to do their calling well, but you can learn how to kind of tell them to do their calling in a way that you're not ordering them, but you are giving them like very clear suggestions and reminding them that it is their calling, but at the same time you're not the stake president. You can't command these people to do anything.

There are a ton of immigrants, a lot from Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru. And so you'll meet a lot of people that are poorer, that are from those countries. But something that's somewhat new to Chile, starting in about 2016, is there's been a great influx of Haitians, people from Haiti, that go to Chile. And it's kind of random, but you see them everywhere. And they speak Haitian Creole. Most of the time they're very humble and very teachable, so a lot of missionaries actually end up teaching almost more Haitians than they do South Americans, which required many missionaries in the Chile Santiago North Mission to learn at least fundamental Haitian Creole to be able to teach that. So make sure you focus on having good Spanish, but there's a time that you can learn another language, have the chance to teach people from another language, and see from another culture. And the melting pot of cultures in Chile creates a lot of chances to teach many different people about the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So in Santiago, the church grew really fast in, I think, like the 90s or so. Just a lot of baptisms, a lot of people being baptized, a lot of people being drawn to the church. Unfortunately, it seems as though very few of them were really ready to come into the church. So as you're going along, as you're proselyting, you'll come across all sorts of less active members. You'll look at the ward directory and you won't believe that there are 800 people in the ward. There are 800 members in the ward and like 50 of them come to church. So there's all sorts of potential reactivation work there. But so many of them are so distant from the church that it's almost like starting from zero again, maybe even worse. So don't get bogged down by that. Just keep your head up. Keep working. Don't let the immense less actives bring you down.

I'm actually married to a Chilean. I love her to death. Her name is Catalina. I met her uncle on my mission and we became really good friends and after my mission I stayed in contact with him and he just said, hey Dallin you need to meet Catalina. She is my niece and she's just the coolest girl ever. She just got back from her mission in Argentina so I was excited and we just started talking through Facebook and we started Skyping and we fell in so I permanently will always love Chile. Chile will always be a part of my life because my parents-in-law, I have family there now. I'm not saying that you should marry someone from your mission but I highly recommend doing whatever it takes to make a permanent connection so that after your mission is done, you can enjoy that country forever. Whether it be work, family, friends, find a way to stay connected.

Clothing in Chile is a lot like clothing in the United States of America. So don't be surprised that their clothing looks a lot like ours. Before my mission, I went and looked up in a picture book what clothing looked like in Chile, and it only showed pictures of their traditional dress, which is the way that I think people dressed in the country part of Chile in the 1800s. People don't really dress like that now. They dress just like the way that people dress in the United States. So please don't be surprised that the people dress just like we do in the United States.

There are fleas in Chile. Fleas are teeny tiny. They're so tiny that you can't usually see them at the beginning and they come from the dogs and they come from people's houses and they like areas of your clothing where it's really tight. So if it's really tight in an area around your wrist, say at your watch, I had issues with the area under my watch. So I was wearing a wrist watch and the fleas would bite me and right under my wrist watch. So any tight area where your clothing is really tight against your skin, the fleas love those areas. So try not to make tight areas of clothing. Also at my waist it was pretty tight, especially in the winter when I had to layer. It was pretty tight there.