Ministry and Mining

Hey folks. I went four hours south for the weekend to the town of Linares with the WELS missionary here and his wife. The town has virtually no touristic interest but it was cool going on some of the home visits and meeting with Chilean families in more of the "working class" The conditions weren't shockingly horrific but we were still going to some houses with two rooms, 6 people in the family, dirt floors, and one light. The house we stayed in was without heat which wasn't terribly pleasent as there was the worst storm of the year this past weekend bringing temperatures into the low 40's. Santiago was pretty flooded when I left on Saturday and it only took 15 minutes of driving to get into the snow level. This is extremely late in the year to be receiving rain and snow here so even the Chileans seemed caught off guard. The next morning we had a minor earthquake, must have been earthquake weather!
On Sunday they took me to the local chapter of the American Association in Chile in which people from the United States get together twice a week to wear cowboy hats, speak english, and listen to country music. Within minutes of being there I realized it was going to be an unusual evening. There were about 40 people in the club, all identical with a classy looking wife and a mustached hat wearing husband in their 40's-50's. Every single person was from either, Texas, Nevada, Colorado, or Arizona. Turns out, every person that I met there is involved in the Chile's massive mining industry. American mining companies send their top people to Chile to work on major projects classified as anything over 1 billion US dollars. Throughout the night I was assured multiple times that mining is not half as bad as people make it out to be and that, "what people don't realize is, if you don't grow it, you mine it." Virtually every conversation between the men was about how many tons of earth some outfit was going to move this week to find copper (chile's number one export) gold, or ore. I was informed that you need to move 30 tons of earth to produce one ounce of gold but this comment was quickly followed with reassurance that it's not as bad for the environment as people make it out to be. Now I'm no expert on mining so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt but mining companies have left some pretty impressive holes throughout Chile, including the largest open mine in the world. Take a look! At the very least I was able to get some extremely spicy Chili at their event so I walked out a happy man. Hope all is well, Ciao for now!