11/17

First answers to some questions…

There’s 6 missionaries in my district right now, 4 Elders and 2 Hermanas. Well, really there’s 8, but 2 are zone leaders so they aren’t involved in district meetings. They’re usually preparing for zone meetings. There’s 16 missionaries in my zone, 10 Elders and 6 Hermanas, 8 are gringos. In the mission there’s something like 250-ish missionaries. It's fairly difficult to keep track of people. There’s a lot more rumors about transfers than anything. Like oh yeah, I heard this Elder is here or there, but nothing is really for sure. My companions from the MTC are just outside of Guayaquil los dos. I only know that because they emailed me. The other two Elders from my MTC district are fairly close. One is just a zone over from me so we see each other at the mall sometimes, and the other is about an hour away from me. He’s in the middle of nowhere, but I've still seen him 3 times.

It is super hot right now, but from what I've heard I’m in one of the most mild areas in the entire mission and I arrived during the coolest part of the year, so pretty much I think I have 2 straight years of sweating ahead of me. We live in a flat in an apartment building. We have 4 rooms and 4 missionaries, but we use one room for sleeping, another for studying, one for storage, and the last one is a little relaxing room. We walk pretty much everywhere, or when its a long walk take a taxi. Taxis are super cheap here. I’ve only paid more than $1 like twice. The church buildings are pretty much the same except they don’t have carpet. Nothing has carpet here. That’s one strange thing I miss. The only place I’ve been with carpet is the temple.

Pretty much I hear nothing of the news down here. The only thing I know is that the new Hunger Games movie is about to or already has come out, and that’s because I saw an ad on a bus. So yeah... that’s the answers to your questions. 

On to my letter from this week, but I have no pictures to send you… broken camera. :(

This week we made some French Toast! I was super excited, but then I was super disappointed because the syrup here is really not good. Pretty much it’s flavored water. So that was kind of disappointing.

We also started teaching about Christmas this week. That was super strange. No Thanksgiving here, so we pretty much got right into Christmas after Halloween. We have a cool lesson with a story about a little ceramic nativity scene and a two year old who rearranges it to put Jesus in the middle. Its pretty cute. In truth this week was pretty slow though.

 The ward had an activity this Saturday. There was a little thing where each class made a plate of food typical from Ecuador. There was a lot of rice! But the missionaries also made food. Elder Ulloque made empanadas, Elder Magallones made some sort of salad stuff with a super delicious dressing, and I made Rice Krispie Treats. Elder Badham didn’t have anything to make so we split the R.K.T. I was glad I remembered something I didn’t need a recipe for. So yeah. That was a really fun thing.

There was also a Talent Show after the food. It was interesting. Pretty much all the talents were dancing to a song. There were some interesting choices that I’m not quite sure were Church appropriate... There was one kid who showed some real talent. He sang a song and he was super good. The Young Single Adults did something pretty funny. They did a skit that was like a Dr. Phil type thing. Not exactly Dr. Phil. Its was like one of the shows that have the couples who come out and then just fight about something. I currently cant remember the name of one. I’m having a really hard time remembering names of any shows and I’m pretty much sheltered from all that kind of stuff. Anyway, it was funny. We performed a song about missionary work. It was really fun and pretty much one of the best acts of the night if I may say so myself.

So last night we were absolutely stuffed with food. We had three different dinners. We had a Noche de Hogar with one family and they gave us food, then we went to our usual dinner appointment, then we were given dinner by a menos activo family we’ve been working with. So yeah 3 dinners. That would always be awful, but what made it worse was we were running late so we had to eat super fast! Yeah.... That’s my week.