1/5

I'm short on time today, but I think my pictures pretty well describe my week. One thing not there is that we found a new investigator. We just talked to him once and invited him to church, and he was like yeah I'll see you there, so we figured he probably wasn't coming cause everyone says that to us... but then he was waiting for us inside the doors of the chapel Sunday. That was super exciting! We're really going to try to focus on him this week. So yeah, that's it.

The Fab Five say Merry Christmas - all back together again!

Got to get those floors nice and clean! This is at the service project we did as part of our trip to Guayaquil.

This is Elder Maggys idea of cleaning.

Here is my church building. Its bigger than our cute little building, but smaller than the Stake Center.

We found Cristiano Ronaldo! This is the type of thing they set on fire here on New Years.

Here's Familia Menoscal. They have three daughters... and now 4 sons. They honestly treat us so well. They recently got called as Ward Missionaries so that's super awesome!

  This week was crazy with New Years and such, but we worked in a cram course on pretty much all of the lessons in one day for a boy in the ward. His parents wanted to be sure he was ready for baptism. They also asked us to sing a song, so we did that as well. We got rewarded cake, and also the opportunity to see a baptism! 

It was Bishops birthday this week.

12/29

Editorial note: Double post to start off the new year.

Tanner sent e-mails as scheduled in December, I just didn't get them posted. 

This week we had a really cool reunion with the entire mission. We left Monday in the afternoon for Guayaquil and got there after 4 hours in the bus. We ate Pizza Hut in the bus terminal then went straight to the mission home to sleep. Tuesday morning we all went to the Temple, then did service as a mission. We got split up and went to the different Church buildings in Guayaquil and Duran and cleaned the chapels. After that we all gathered in the Stake Center. There were 250 missionaries and we all ate a nice Christmas dinner together. We had turkey and stuffing and all that good stuff. Then there were some musical numbers for Christmas from the different zones.

We left Wednesday morning again for Quevedo. Wednesday night was my skype call home to my family, and also a small service activity as a zone. We went to the hospital and gave out Hot Chocolate and Pan de Pascou and sang for the people there. We had dinner with Familia Menoscal (recent rescatados). They are the best and always have us over for dinner.

On Christmas we had an activity as a zone. We cleaned the chapel of one of the companionships, and after had a Secret Santa gift exchange. I got a wallet from Elder Gomez. After we ate with Bishop and his family. They also gave us gifts, a tie for each one of us. Then we visited some of the members of the ward and shared a small message for the rest of the day.

Then Friday we did another service project, this time for Familia Valencia. We hauled a big mountain of dirt up the stairs to their house. 

This week was interesting because we really didn’t do to much work with our investigators or menos acitvos, but it was still a really nice week. 

Much love for everyone back home, hope ya’ll had an awesome Christmas and will have an excellent new year!

Elder T

This is the only stadium in Quevedo. I have been dying to go in since I got here and we finally got to explore a little. It was exciting, but also a little bit of a let down, as it's not super nice inside. But hey it is real grass! There's not really grass here...

  

This after a big Championship game between the two most popular teams in the country, Barcelona and Emelec. Barcelona was the best team for a long time, but recently it has been Emelec. Emelec won and after the game it was INSANE! People were in the streets pretty much all night!

 This is the Latinos getting introduced to Candy Crush. They were like this all of lunch!

This is the view from a members house that we visited this week. She is super cool! She has a son on a misison in Pennsylvania and another just about ready to put in his papers. She also gave us a hammock to put in our apartment so that's really awesome!

12/22

Editorial note: double post to start off the new year.

Tanner sent e-mails as scheduled in December, I just didn't get them posted. 

This will be a short message because we don’t have much time today. We will be visiting Guayaquil today and tomorrow and returning Wednesday in the afternoon. So yeah... here it is... 

This week we had our little Christmas Show and we did a lot of practicing for that. We had chorus practices in the morning, then we went home to study, then we went back later because Elder Ulloque played the piano and he had to practice for that, so we didn't get much work done. The program turned out pretty cool. We were told to be there at 5... so we got there at 5, and there was literally no one there. Slowly missionaries started trickling in, but the chorus director didn't get there until just before 7. He had the piano and the music so we couldn’t even practice till he got there. The event was supposed to start at 7, but we were working on South American Mormon time, so there were like 10 people there then. No one really showed up until 7:45-ish. We sang our songs then we got to stay for a little bit to watch. Really all people did was dance, but it was fun.

This week we found a promising new investigator. It’s interesting because we found out that one of  her kids was baptized 2 years ago. She wasn’t at his baptism, and he only attended church 3 or 4 times, and then was never visited again. So now we’re working with the family and we will see how it goes. This week 2 of the kids came to church without their mom... we were hoping to see her there as well, but hopefully next week. Okay I think that’s about it.

Elder Roberts

At the baptism of the other Elders.

 Got to carry on the tradition of hamburgers after baptisms!

 This is during the Christmas Show. President Riggins and his wife came, which was pretty awesome!

 Shout out to my Canadians! We did these flags for all the missionaries in the show. Pretty cool.