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.

12/15

This week we watched the Christmas Devotional thing. I'm still not used to the whole lips don't match up with words and not hearing the voices of the apostles and such, but it was pretty fun. Each time the MoTab came on we played a little game. How many pairs of glasses can you spot? How many this or how much that. It was pretty fun. Then we had a meeting with President Riggins to do a little verification on what we learned in the meeting with Elder Uceda. 

There was supposed to be a baptism for the other Elders in our ward on Saturday... until the person getting baptized didn't show up. That was a bummer. There was a baptism for a different ward though, so we stayed for that. 

We had an Amigo Secreto (Secret Santa) with the YSA in our ward. All 4 of the missionaries got ties, but that was a fun thing. This past week has been pretty hot.. and that's NOT very fun. I've been sweating a lot more than normal. But yeah... it's whatevs. 

Almost forgot, yesterday we had some interesting things happen with the meals. We ate lunch with a family and last time we ate with them Elder Ulloque didn't finish his food, which is pretty much rude here. So this week after I finished my first plate they asked me if I wanted more, and I said yes and I got seconds. The only problem was the hermana put way more food on my plate than the first serving. I really struggled to finish it, but I did finish it! I was just super full. Then for dinner I wasn't hungry like at all, and I could barely finish the dinner. But then we got dessert too... doughnuts. I didn't have any trouble eating 3 of them. They were very good for home made doughnuts. 

A normal week really, and I don't think I have much else, so yeah!

Much Love, Elder Roberts

This past week a Subway opened like 2 blocks from our house! Its pretty expensive, we're talking 10 dollars for a footlong, so I just went with a 6 inch for 5 dollars. But yeah it feels bit like home and its really good. The owner of the Subway is from Guayaquil but he studied in Canada and Miami for 8 years so he speaks like perfect English and is super cool.

This my Secret Santa. She's the bishops daughter and is a missionary for the ward, teacher of Gospel Principals, and a seminary teacher! Crazy!

This week we had an activity in our ward. We played futbol with our Elders Quorum and some menos activos and investigators. I'm getting a little better at futbol, not a lot, but a little. It was pretty fun, but we played with the hardest ball of all time, so my foot hurt a bit. Then right after futbol we did a service project where we were in the sun for hours and I got nice and burned, so that was fun...

12/8

Some experienced missionaries say it doesn't quite feel like lunch if they don't eat rice. I kind of doubt I will ever feel like that because we eat so much rice that I look forward to every meal without rice. On P-day we go to the mall and eat Carls Jr or something like that and those are amazing lunches.

 Estafany and Jesus moved. They were living with the sister of Estafany, but now are living with the father of Jesus. Since they live in a different ward we can't visit them during the week, so that's a sad thing. They still come to church on Sundays though. We haven't visited Dora in a while because more than anything she just wants to sit and talk with us. She will talk about her family and just about anything for like 45 minutes, but the minute we start talking about what we're going to teach, she says oh I have to do this or that... so yeah it's been a while since we went there. That's the case with a lot of people here. Everyone loves to talk, but not a lot of people love to listen to our message.

This week we shared a video called "El es la Dadiva" a lot. In English it's something like He is the Gift (in spanish Dadiva is a pretty specific word) So we've been talking a lot about Christmas lately. We visited quite a few members and shared this video. It's pretty cool.

Toward Christmas we're going to have a special Christmas Show. All the missionaries from Quevedo are going to sing a couple of songs, and there are some other performers, and it's going to be a really big event that should be fun. So we've been working on that this week. One more fun thing, our President of the Area visited us this week. He had a capatacion (sorry I forgot the English word for capatacion) for us Saturday in the morning. It was really focused in the retention of new members. It was pretty fun. There were missionaries from about 1/3 of the mission there. Yeah... that's pretty much it this week.

We celebrated Elder Arnells birthday in District Meetings with a cake and cola. This is him trying to avoid the tradition of taking a bite of the cake and then getting your face slammed in the cake. Luckily we had Elder Mecham to pull him off the wall and slam his face in that cake!

12/1

Answers e-mail first... In all likelihood I won't be transferred for a few months because I'm probably going to train in a couple weeks, but we'll see. 

I finally got the package with my bedding today, and I also got Christmas packages from Mom & Grandma. So that was cool. No cards from Mom yet, but I have received a few cards, letters, and Dear Elders from other people. They come about a month to a month and a half after they were sent on average. I need to write like a ton of letters! I should have sent them out before now so they could get there by Christmas, but I think that time has passed now. :( 

The new Star Wars is already coming out? Ahh! Yeah, that's on the list to buy so I can watch it when I get home! 


MMMMKAY. So this week we had two interesting high tech service projects. The first one we were whacking termite homes with a broom, and the next one we were pulling weeds and getting bit by a million ants. Really, it hurt how much the ants bit us! 

Other than that, we got sung to by a contact. We were just talking outside his house and all of a sudden he was like, hold on I'm going to go grab my guitar. He ended up singing like 3 songs for us. He's pretty decent, but that was super interesting for sure.

I'm trying to think of other stuff that happened this week, but honestly there isn't much. I went on inter-cambios with Elder Gomez and they have these annoying roosters that are super loud from like 5 in the morning all the way through study time. It's pretty awful. I also had inter-cambios with Elder Meacham this week. They were pretty normal days though... just working in a different sector or with a different companion, but same sort of stuff. 

Oh! Today we saw President Riggins at the mall and he wasn't wearing church clothes. It was really weird to see him out of a suit and tie. I suppose that's how the members feel when they see missionaries in normal clothes. 

 HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

So this is what we did for Thanksgiving. The missionaries from my ward and the ward next to us went to a burger place for dinner. It was way different from a regular Thanksgiving, but it was super fun anyways. The interesting thing is that on Thursdays we have a member that makes food for us to take home to eat, so after burgers we went and picked up a second dinner but we just saved it until the next day.

We found Elsa this week! In Ecuador they have this crazy tradition of lighting this "doll" type things on fire. I dont know, my English is already struggling, so I cant think of the word for it. But yeah, so for New Years Elsa will be lit on fire. There are other cool little "dolls" on the streets and it's kind of weird to think they will be burnt in about a month.

  

I think we need a bigger tree since I got the packages from Mom and Grandma. So yeah, pretty much we're ready for Christmas in the apartment except that the tree is too small. There was a lot of stuff there... pretty crazy.

  

 Yeah... this is just a picture. There's no fun story or anything. I just felt like taking the picture.

 

11/24

I don't have much to report this week since we pretty much lost two days worth of time because we were in Guayaquil on Tuesday & Wednesday for a capatacion from the president. 

 We thought we were going to stay at a hotel right across from the temple and have nice hot showers for the first time in 3 months, but instead we were at the house of the assistants and they don't have hot water either, so that was sad. We did have a lunch without rice for the first time in a long time. That was interesting.


We went to the temple Wednesday morning and I understood a lot more of what was going on than I did the first time I went. That's good since the first time I went was on my second day in Ecuador. Then we had our meeting from president. Then we got right back onto the bus to Quevedo. We were in a bus for 8+ hours in the span of 24 hours.That was fun.

We did a service project here this week. We helped one of the families that give us lunch a lot move stuff from their old restaurant to their new one. 

Oh yeah, and we're getting ready to do a little Christmas concert with all the missionaries from Quevedo. We had our first practice Sunday and the song we're singing is an arrangement that David Archuleta did, so I started the rumor that David Archuleta was going to come sing with us, and so many people actually believed me... it was super funny.

So my camera is actually living, sort of, it's really messed up though. It doesn't have flash, and the screen to see what you're taking a picture of doesn't work, so I still need a new one, but I did get a few pictures. 

This is Mateo. We call all the hermanas that make us food and do our laundry our mamitas, but Mateo is our papito! This guy is super cool. He used to be the Ward Mission Leader, but now hes a big shot, he's the Stake Mission Leader. He always makes sure we're taken care of. We have lunch with him every other Sunday, and this Sunday he gave us big ol' hamburgers and it was awesome. It was his birthday this week so we planned a little surprise party and it was super fun.

Elder Arnell and I were playing tic-tac-toe on the window with socks. This is his face when he realized that he lost. Elder Arnell was on cambios with Elder Maggy.

  

So we found this tree in the apartment. I'm pretty excited. I was going to have to buy one, but luckily we already have one. 

Merry Christmas!