Corinne Arrives!

So Corinne arrived here safe and sound and we have been having lots of fun and keeping busy.
This last week was a special week of activity...the Donihue cong was the host to the District and Circuit overseers (an interesting side point: the DO's wife is the sister of Chichi, a special pioneer who serves w/her husband down in Cochrane w/Juanito Ponce). We were happy to have Vanessa get back from visiting Cochrane. And then this weekend was Donihue's 2-day circuit assembly. Vanessa got interviewed for the part about singleness and did a really good job.
Yesterday Corinne and I left for Vina del Mar. We are staying here for the week w/a really nice couple named Daniela and Miguel...they serve in the english cong. Yesterday evening we did some informal witnessing along Vina's main beach and were able to find a handful of foreign english-speakers. Talked to one woman from Poland who was especially nice and was in Vina just for the day.
Ok, that's a little update for now :)

Spring Service...

Hi!
Things continue going really good here. The weather has been so ideal...lots of sunshine with a cool breeze. We keep having good experiences in service too.
Here are some pics that Andrea took from the last couple of weeks. They include Veronica's 1st day in service...I believe she's the 1st official unbaptized publisher to come out of the territory of Puertezuelo.
Have I said how nice it has been to stay here w/Andrea? She's so precious! We end up laughing a lot. The other day she got this text msg from a company that likes to send her "Did you know?" factoids. When she gets these msgs a lot of times she'll translate them to me in english. So she's reading it to me in all seriousness "Did you know that the 1st person executed by electric wheel chair was..." and I had to say "I think you mean electric chair", we both started laughing so hard :)
Hope you're all taking care of yourselves!

Recent Activity

Some exciting news...one of Andrea's studies, named Veronica, just got approved this last week to go out in service. So on Sat she did a long day in the rural territory with the group...we met at 9:30 and didn't get back until around 7pm! What a start to her service activity! The group had a picnic last week after the Sun mtg and even invited studies to come. There were 21 of us, 14 of which were studies! Lots of fun.

Many of the friends from the group have been inviting us over to have "once" (their evening meal, kind of like the equivilant of our lunch). And one couple in the group, Claudia and David, had us sing kareokee afterwards...I didn't do too good (the program rates how on tune you are) but it still was fun! 
I'll try to get more pics uploaded soon, but here are a few of them.
Take care!

Miners...

So after the meeting last night, at around 10 pm, all the local dogs started howling really loud. Andrea said they howled like this when the earthquake was about to happen. So we turned off the music we were listening to and heard that the towns siren had gone off. Andrea remembered that the chilean miners were rescued that day so we turned on cnn online and saw that sure enough the last miner had just been pulled out safely. Soon we could hear the sound of cars driving through the neighborhoods honking their horns in celebration.
Some of you have asked if it's true that one of these miners is a brother...well it turns out no. But the mother of one of them (Fernando Pena Villaroel) is a Witness and he is favorable to the truth. In fact, if I understand correctly, he wrote a nice letter to the witnesses from inside the mine and it got delivered to bethel and as a result bethel was able to send some literature down to him.
Things are continuing good here. I'm hoping to take some pics of the busy weekend coming up to be able to share. Hope all's well for everyone!