Volcano Calbuco

4/23/15  (excerpt from Sister Lovell’s blog)   This has been a VERY unusual day in the mission. Volcano Calbuco has erupted in Southern Chile, and we are in the wind pattern to receive ash from this volcano!    

4/25/15  One of the big health concerns for the missionaries is breathing the volcano dust in the air. Because of not wanting to take any chances of causing respiratory problems for any of the missionaries they were asked to stay in their pensions all day yesterday. 

April 27, 2015   

Good Morning! It’s cold and raining here. Makes me think of home. :)

The city of Lamarque is super simple and easy to navigate. I’ve pretty much got it down. Plus we walk down almost every street every day haha. 

Funny story of the week: I had to go to paperwork in Neuquen last Thursday to renew my Argentina ID (this is the day of the volcano eruption.)  We leave at 2:30am from here in bus to head to Neuquen. We arrive there at like 7 or 8 am. We go straight to immigrations to get started and they are closed due to ash hahaha. So we went and bought some doughnuts, hung out at the mission home for like an hour and then got on a bus again to come back. ROADTRIP!    

It’s about 4.5 hours to Neuquen from here. Didn’t get much sleep. I didn’t sleep Wednesday night hoping I’d sleep on the bus but didn’t haha. But with the ash we couldn’t leave our pension on Friday so I got caught up haha.

Neuquen had a good dusting of ash everywhere. Everything grey and the air super foggy. We wore scarfs to filter it don’t worry.  

Here in Lamarque we barely got any ash from Volcano Calbuco, but did get some.  The ash is bad in other parts of the mission.   In one part, which isn’t even that close to the volcano, it was at 5cm and that was before some of the most recent explosions. 

The work is moving slowly. We aren’t seeing much progress with anyone haha. The only good things going on are: 1) the stake president should be coming in the next week or two to help out and find a place to rent to have church. 2) The eternal investigator (like 10+ years) is looking close to baptism. She has all her family in town. They are all active members. Plus she is having major health issues, which the smoking is not helping so hopefully we will see great progress there. As soon as she stops, it’s in the water. 

These pictures were not taken from Tyler’s area, but are some amazing photographs I found on the internet. This is the ash cloud that was blown across Argentina. 

This third picture is taken at the mission home in Neuquen and you can see the dusting of ash.