Week 49 Ecuador

8/31/15 (voice recording)

Hi family, one week down in Babahoyo, and I want you all to know that I’m super happy. The members here, everyone’s received me really well. This week (I love it when this happens, only the second time honestly), but I met a friend of Tiffie who served in Quito with her. Tiffie was actually ending her mission as the mission nurse when she came. Her name is Carina Cornejo, and she cooks delicious food. I’m really excited to go eat lunch with her again next Wednesday:) She’s really cool though, and seeing that, it makes me really excited to have some friendships when I get home too that will last a while; connect with people from the mission, and other things. 

The Ponce Familia are also one of my favorites. He spent 5 years in New York when he was younger, in his 20’s, and then came back for family/girls and everything. He now has an awesome family. His girls/daughters try speaking English; they do alright. He still speaks it really well, and the bonus is they gave me lasagna my first night. I love and miss lasagna very much. It’s one of my favorites here, but it’s rare. 

The members have a lot of trust is us here. Probably because there’s always been zone leaders here, and they’re a little more responsible. I don’t know, but the stake president called us and asked us to go out with him and do visits. That’s the first time that a member’s asked me to go out with them, so that was awesome. We had some really cool visits/experiences. There was one lady, Mariana, that has been inactive for a long time. She’s a good friend of his, and we went to see her. She explained that she got offended in the church because all the members think that Joseph Smith is a God, and she thinks he was a prophet. She was so, so confused...all bitter and everything. We said a prayer, and we taught the lesson. I know the spirit was there, and I hate saying doubts, but I guess we resolved her doubts, and taught her just like the simple doctrine. What we need to do, how we can act, and we got her to kneel down and say a prayer, and make some commitments. It was a super good lesson. I love it when the spirit is present in lessons and people feel it, and it touches their heart, and they change!

There were some fun lessons this week. We came to a man studying his scriptures in the street. I guess he was a less active member, I don’t know, everyone’s new here for me. He wanted to know everything about the millennium. Questions, questions, and they were legit. It was a fun conversation studying with him, and so it kind of left me thinking...so when does Jesus come anyway? Nobody knows...

We put some baptismal dates this week, and we got a lot of good goals lined up for September, so that’s really good. We have to marry one family. This week we’re selling food in the ward and getting money built up so we can go pay for their marriage. 

I love the trust that the people are giving us here. They trust you with everything, depend on you, and they ask for your help. They expect help from you, they want your help, it’s really great; I’ve never been so busy in my mission, and I love that aspect of it. There’s not a whole lot of time for yourself, but what do I need to do? We could clean the house, but that’s getting put off a little longer because today we have to go to a zone meeting, and then I have to go renew my Visa, and I have to give some Latinos an English exam/test (verbal) in Guayaquil, and then we have to sleep down there, and then we have a meeting with President tomorrow, and then tomorrow night we got invited by the stake president here to go to a leadership conference from the stake. That’s pretty dope. So, there’s a lot of way cool opportunities that I’m getting. I’m gonna get the inside scoop on all the church stuff so I can be a good leader someday:) 

Elder Alguera’s really good too. He’s a great companion, really humble. He gives me a lot of opportunities to teach, and I do really well with that. I love teaching. He was looking at a bunch of pictures of me that you guys have sent from a year ago, and he was telling me how much bigger I was. So I guess maybe I’m getting a little skinnier. I think I weigh 172#, about the same, but I don’t know I haven’t checked in a little while. 

One more funny story before I forget. I was teaching at a new investigators house. It’s like a concrete foundation, and then there’s a second floor, but it’s just wood so there’s cracks, and a little puppy peed through the cracks in the wooden floor in the loft onto my shoulder, and the couch. It was disgusting, but you know, Ecuador will never run out of surprises. That’s a certainty. 

The zone’s doing really good. I had the opportunity to go out with a lot of them this week...work a little bit. Elder Clark, he’s from Missouri, he’s a brother, he’s way sweet. A family out there when we were on an exchange took us out to eat Chinese food. It was delicious. The zone’s doing really well. We had 19 baptisms for the month. That was the highest zone for this month. I can’t take much credit because I got here a week ago, but we have great plans to do it again this coming month. I’m already learning patience, patience, because missionaries call you with everything. Hey Elder I’m sick, I can’t go out, then you have to verify and call everyone else. Or hey Elder, this happened, or that happened, or they don’t send you all your numbers and you have to send like 5 texts just to get the information that you want, and they won’t answer the phone...So frustrating. But, we’ve been listening to a lot of conference talks and things, and something I’ve picked up out of one of Elder Uchtdorf’s talks was...he said, “Humility doesn’t require that we think less of ourselves, simply less about ourselves”, and that’s true, that’s true. 

Well, I know that when we are obedient the Lord blesses us, and I’m really grateful for the experiences that I’m having. I thank you all again for allowing me to be here, for supporting me, for your love, and I love you all very much. Missing you...