March 2015

3/2

Today was the last P-Day for Elder Cuberos. He is from Colombia and he heads for his house in one week. We had a zone activity to see him off.

This was a pretty cool thing. It's in remembrance of a treaty of some sort between Ecuador and somebody else... clearly I don't know much about it, but it was big and cool!

3/9

This is Elder Lund. He is my new companion. After just 3 weeks with Elder Figueroa he got moved. Elder Lund was born in San Fran, but his family lives in Utah right now. The Gringos are going tear up barrio PONTON!!! 

For the most part your first companion is one of the longest of your mission because you're getting trained. After that we normally have a sector for about 3 or 4 months with a month or two with the same companion in this mission. But right now we have a lot of missionaries going home, and we don't have many coming, so there are more changes than usual. We should get some pretty big groups of new missionaries when the summer starts though.

We made ourselves some empañadas the other day. They are Argentina style and pretty delicious! 

We live in a house with just us two. It's small, but pretty nice. One thing it's missing is windows. The lights went off for like half an hour when we got home one night, and we couldn't really see anything. The showers are still cold, but it's better than a lot of the houses. There's a water shortage here, so most of the houses missionaries live in have their water shut off at 10 pm, and when they do have water it comes in bursts. That is so annoying that some people just fill up big buckets of water, shovel smaller buckets of water, and splash it on themselves. Our house has good water, it's just cold. It's all OK though because we really are only there to sleep, study, and get ready for the day.

3/16

I didn't take any pictures this week... whoops. More than anything we are looking for new people to teach. We found lots of them, it's just a matter of doing check ups and seeing who is going to progress. We also worked a little more with the members. There is an RM we have gone out with a couple times this week. He served in Guatamala like 4 months ago. He's super cool, but he's leaving here on Friday and going to Mexico. Next week we're going to try to go out on visits with all of the Elders Quorum. So that's where we're at right now.  

3/23

So I don't really have much to report. We did meet one really cool family this week. The dad was doing some cleaning outside his house and he started speaking to us in English. A lot of people here do that, but his English was a lot better. We found out that's because he studied in New York. We asked if we could come back another day to visit his family, and he said no problem come on in right now. We met his wife and his four kids. This week only one of his kids came to church because the rest were sleeping, but we're going to visit them again and I hope they all come to church next week. They're really nice and cool and everything that is good!

This picture was taken at a historical park in Duran. It shows the progression here in Ecuador from old to new. The bummer is that they have a pretty good sized zoo, but its not open on Mondays. So nobody really goes to that place on Mondays except missionaries... But yeah it was still pretty cool.

3/30

 Last week we had a Zone Conference. We went through the temple in the morning then we had a meeting with President Riggins. I sat with him at lunch and he has a sense of humor like Dad. It's pretty funny. :)

 Our really awesome family of 6 is progressing well, but they are moving out of our sector in a couple of weeks, so they may end up being a reference for other Elders.

Baptism! 

This is Fransisco, Carolina, and Omar. Fransisco is a member, but he and Carolina aren't married, so she couldn't get baptized. Omar could though, so we started with him. Now we're going to work on getting his parents married. Omar's grandma tried to talk him out of getting baptized, but he shared his testimony of the church and told her my mom and your son are going to get married and sealed and we're going to live together forever and if you want to join us you need to get baptized too. I was like dang!  He's only 9, but he's super smart, has a super strong testimony, and he's my homie.