Elder Tanner Roberts: 11/10

Editorial Note: Tanner sent this letter last week like he was supposed to, I just forgot to post it.

Oops, sorry!

Starting off... my companion got called as District Leader. He’s super young to be District Leader so its pretty cool. He has his first baptism interview tomorrow. In our zone we got 5 new missionaries. 3 Elders: Elder Alguerra, Elder McMinn, and Elder Badham. Elder Alguerra is the new Zone Leader, McMinn and Badham are babies straight from the MTC, and then there are two new hermanas. Pretty fun stuff. The new guy in my apartment is Elder Badham. He’s from Utah, so yeah, another Gringo. He got here Wednesday really late at night and we have had a pretty busy week this week, so in honesty I haven’t had much time to get to know him yet, but he seems nice and all.

This Thursday there was a baptism for a kid in the ward who turned 8. Elder Magallones, Badham, Ulloque and I went to it and it was funny because they asked us to sing a special musical number. We sang himno 181 in the Spanish Himnario but to the music of Come Thou Font and if I may say so myself it was quite good. There was also cake there which was super nice :)

On Saturday we went to the temple with our ward and it was super fun. We had to get up at 3 in the morning to meet at the Bishops house at 4 and leave Quevedo by 4:30. So interesting story, Elder Badham and I realized we forgot our temple recommends, so we had a mad dash back to the apartment then back to bishops house to the bus, except the bus wasn’t there anymore! We called the other Elders and found out the bus was like half way across our sector and we had to run all the way over there to catch the bus. Yikes! Pretty much everybody slept on the bus, but for some reason I couldn’t so I just looked out the window, and I swear we drove for like 30 minutes with nothing but banana trees. Insane. The temple was pretty relaxed. We did a session then helped a member from our ward who doesn’t have legs get around. It was nice to have a relaxing day. We also saw Elder Gray there. He is like 6 minutes from the temple now so he came to see a family that he worked with who came with us. Yeah.

For P Day today we did something super cool. We went to Siete Cascadas (Seven Waterfalls) as a zone. It was crazy cool! The "bus" we took was super sketchy and the road was super bumpy but it was still super fun! We were way back in the jungle and we only saw like 3 or 4 other people all day. It was so green there it was crazy. We didn’t get to see all 7 waterfalls because that’s a really long hike and we didn’t have time, but we saw 3 of the big ones and a couple more small ones. We trekked up to one of the waterfalls and took some pictures, ate some food and had a little testimony meeting. When we went back down the mountain we went a super insane way and a ton of people fell a lot so that was a little scary. I fell in one of the little pools at the base of a waterfall. I was totally fine, just a little wet, but my camera was in my pocket. Luckily the memory card and battery are fine but the camera is dead. So yeah. Whoops. I want to send a lot more pictures but I’m out of time. We need to find a better way to send pictures because I was really afraid I had lost all of them today when my camera got wet.

This is transfer day and we went to the bus station with Elder Gray. There were about 30 Missionaries there. Craziness!