1/4/16 voice message
Hi family, well I hope you all finished out the rest of your vacation, and winter break very well. Garrett I hope you got a lot of skiing done, and it has continued to snow. Um…as for here, we anticipated the big change, and that landed me back in Duran. Well, Duran South, it’s a different zone with my companion from El Paso Texas. You guys kind of got a brief rundown on that last week. After that there wasn’t a whole lot of time or things I could say.
The zone here in Duran has been struggling for a while now. They haven’t been baptizing or doing very well, but we’re going to do all that we can to pull it back up. Going out in the sector this week the new members we came across all received me very kindly, and the sector’s pretty cool. For the first time after working this week I feel like I’m working more to serve the ward and the members than I am to get numbers and baptisms for the mission. Although, I want to do both. It just has a different feel to it here. I also learned the importance of having those member families at home, especially when you’re trying to get to know a sector. My companion only has a month here also, so not a whole lot of time. The thing is that families just weren’t home, with the New Year most of them go on vacation, they go to the beach and everything. So, we did a lot of work on our own. A few nights we just ended up going around contacting all the neighbors here around our house. It’s a pretty nice area. We taught a few pretty strong Catholic families, just testified of the Book of Mormon. It was interesting, you can’t go wrong there. It’s actually really interesting too how many people accept the Book of Mormon. They accept it, they read it, but when it comes to that point when their ready to make the change and be converted, they’re like no I can’t change churches, I’ve been in the Catholic church forever. They don’t get the purpose.
Anyways, in the midst of all this we didn’t have time to go buy food on Monday, so that evening we bought some eggs, and some little things. When I got home I put the eggs to boil in some water, and then we started planning, and got cleaned up for bed. We organized the meeting with the zone that we would have the next day, and we went to sleep, until…like it was part of my dream, the smoke detector is like toot, toot, toot, toot. The neighbor from below is calling us, Hermanos, hermanos, I didn’t even realize until my companion got out of bed, and opened the door. The smoke detector was even louder. I was like OH SHOOT! We go out there, and there’s a ton of smoke coming from the pan. I go over there and all the water had evaporated out of it. The eggs were black. We unplugged the smoke detector from the wall. It’s like 4 in the morning. I put the pan of eggs in the sink under cold water, and one of the eggs exploded. I was cleaning egg off the wall. We had some very toasted eggs. I’ve never done anything like this my whole mission. I felt really dumb. It was a funny story though. I told the zone; they all got a good laugh out of it. Changes are rough sometimes.
The New Years was good though. We invited six other elders to stay in our house. There was eight of us here. We played Monopoly, watched a pretty impressive fireworks show. They make paper doll figures here, and they burn them on New Years. I have to give it to the Ecuadorians, they put on a show for New Years. It’s not such a big deal at our house, but I hope you all enjoyed it. After, we sang some songs in the English hymn book, God Bless America, My Country ’tis of Thee, The Star Spangled Banner, while the latinos just watched us.
The next day we took advantage of having the elders all over to play some basketball. I’m not super good at basketball, but compared to the others I’m average. We did alright. It was fun. I think the New Year threw the atmosphere out of whack. The weather here is testing us with all kinds of extremes. Friday afternoon we were burning from the sun. I forgot my sunscreen. We were walking around, and by nighttime the rain came out of nowhere. It came down super hard, and that raises the humidity. We hid in a members house for a bit. It wasn’t stopping, and we couldn’t teach anyone because they all have metal roofs, and the rain comes down so hard you can’t really hear each other. So, we booked it home, running down rivers in the street a few inches deep. It was pretty crazy. We got caught without an umbrella the first time, but now I’m smart carrying it around.
Anyway, I’ll leave you guys with a cool story real quick. There was a brother from the family Chavez, he’s the dad and got baptized two weeks ago. The thing is, his family have been members for eight or more years. His wife, and his sons, he’s had two sons serve missions, and now his third went out. The son who just went out on a mission had studied French for a long time, and the dad prayed that this son could serve a French speaking mission, so that he didn’t lose that. He got called to Argentina, so the dad was bummed about that, wondering if God really answers prayers. Then he found out that the ward where his son is serving is a French speaking ward. That, along with the work of the Elders, he decided to get baptized. It’s an interesting story. All I know is that God answers us, and that serving a mission blesses our families. I’ll leave you with that. I hope you can all adapt to going back to work this week. Enjoy it, and love it. Love you all. Take care. Bye
