I found some time to write

It has been a while since I have been able to sit down and write out anything. Bear with me. I am sure that this will work out fine as I get it going.

Pedro Sanchez and I went up to Vicuña this last week end. We visited Rolando Suazo, who was baptized this last month. We had a good time, even though our stay was short. Rolando had his results back from the doctor, and they were good for his pancreas, meaning that he was not getting worse. Whether he can get better or not I do not know. But we continue to pray for him.

His wife, who is a devout Catholic and has expressed on more than one occasion that she wants nothing to do with any Bible study, visited with us for a while during our short stay. I actually enjoyed her company.

Rolando took us up into the Valle de Elqui where he has a parcela. This is a nice little country house, but not in the sense of what Americans would think of. It is nothing fancy, but comfortable, small with a garden that Rolando has filled with every kind of fruit tree known to man. It is a regular garden of Eden. His house is just outside the village of Monte Negro which is where the Nobel Prize winner for Literature Gabriela Mistral is from. Chile has two Nobel prize winners in Literature, the other is Pablo Neruda. For those of you who are interested, I have read a little bit of both, but not much. I prefer other reading. I have read quite a bit of another Chilean poet that I know, but only because he obligated me to do it. He actually stood over me and made me read it, so I took my medicine and hurried it as quickly as I could. This is the price you pay for being a missionary.

Back to Rolando. He was an officer in the Caribineros de Chile, eventually reaching major, which is pretty good in the Chilean services, largely because they are small, and there is not much room for advancement. A lot of these guys like me pretty much, since I was in the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M University. Probably the most impressive thing about this is that in his neck of the woods, he knows everybody.

The Valle de Elqui is a pretty famous valley in Chile. Apart from being the home of Gabriela Mistral, it is also a famous agricultural producing region, with lots of avocado trees and vineyards. There are more vineyards than anything else. An interesting note is that the producers are beginning to plant grapevines and avocado trees on the sides of the mountains that form the walls of the valley. They are doing this at some pretty incredible slopes. I personally do not know how they plan to harvest off the side of the mountains. The grapes from this particular valley are not used as much in wines as they are in pisco and pisco sour.