Also there is some good news, one investigator did attend actually. Ulpiano Saltos!!! We went to eat lunch with Fam Saltos on friday, like normal. When we walked in he was standing there...I was really surprised to see him there. For those of you who are wondering who the heck is Ulpiano Saltos and why is it so amazing that he was there. Well here you go. Long story short. Ulpiano's brother horribly died about 4 months ago and he took it really hard. He started drinking alot and even thought of taking his own life. So in order to have support from his family in this hard time he was staying here in our sector, he's from Guyaquil (a city in another mission in Ecuador). So he was here with his good mormon family and we started teaching him. He was doing great, keeping commitments and everything. All he needed was a baptismal interview and that's it. So hermana Saltos thought it would be nice if she invited his wife to his baptism. So she did. His wife was less than supportive she said that Ulpiano would never change, that he would be a drunk forever. Ulpiano didn't want to be baptized only to go back to an unsupportive wife. So he left for Guyaquil to settle things with her. He said he would come back, but for 2 months we didn't here anything of him. Not even him family here knew anything. And then one day out of the blue we saw him standing there in Fam Saltos's house like nothing happened. Pretty cool. Unfortunately we haven't had a chance to teach him again. We'll get on that soon =)
So that was basically the other week. The important stuff. Now this week. This week was lame lol. We had a bunch of visits fall through so we hardly taught anybody, and nobody attended church this week so all of their baptismal dates fell through......I honestly don't know what else we can do to get people to go to church. We bring members with us to visits so they have a friend in church, we teach them that it's a commandment, we call them every night of the week to remind them, everything.....and they still don't go. I don't get it. It's kind of frustrating. Darn agency....if we could take that away from them we would have tons of baptisms =)
The people that we have that had baptismal dates are Fam Chandi and Marcos Zambrano and his kids. I don't know if I wrote about Marcos yet....but a short summary of him is this; we contacted him in the street, he accepted baptism on the first visit, he keeps commitments and says that the things he reads are beautiful and wants his kids to be baptized with him too, his 2 kids (ages 11 and 12) both accepted baptism too, and he's divorced. He's a really good investigator, but like everybody here he works on sunday, so his baptismal date fell through and is postponed for at least another week. It stinks but that's how it is....
In all the darkness there is a small light. Hermana Zambrano (an old investigator) wanted to meet with us again. It had been about 2 1/2 months since the last visit by the way. When we got to her house we asked her if she had any questions for us. She said yes. Her question was this, she wanted to know how to better understand the scriptures and how to connect/relate what she read in the Bible with what she was reading in the Book of Mormon....Wow. Earlier she didn't even want to read the Book of Mormon because she "didn't understand", and now she's reading on her own and wants to learn more. Finally she's showing some progress. So we're going to start teaching her again as well. Hopefully it will go somewhere.
I would like to take a little bit of time to explain some of the members here. 2 in particular that are awesome. The first, Vinny Esteves, aka. the weirdo. Although he may be kind of weird and funny he's actually a really good member. He always wants to join us on visits, he invites neighbors to church and he wants to help all-around. And yesterday (sunday) he went and visited 3 families all on his own. One lives in Quinche (30 min away), Checa (15 min), and a member here in YaruquÃ. He's not even assigned to visit them or anything, he just did it out of the goodness of his heart. An awesome member. He's also a convert of 8 months. Go Vinny! The other is our Ward Mission Leader. He's a convert too, but has been in the church a long time. His conversion came from an accident. He was severely electicuted and was in the the hospital for months. He was burned so badly that his ribs were exposed and he ended up losing both of his arms. In his diffitulties is when he started investigating the church and eventually converted. Now, even though he doesn't have arms welds for a living (he has simple mechanical arms that he puts on, but doesn't use them if he isn't working), and he's always happy and joins us on visits. Also, we were helping a member move this last week. Although he doesn't have arms he didn't use that as an excuse, he did what he could to help move. He put bags on top of his head and balanced it with his stub of an arm. A good example of a diligent member =)
To end I'll answer mom's questions and give the funny thing of the week. This week I'm a little discouraged because we didn't have so much success this week. But I'm going to get back up on my feet and work harder. Things with my companion are going normal, not great, not bad. I actually think he has fear or reluctancy to being obedient. One day for example. The goal that President Ghent is 20 contact per day. Normally that's really hard, but this one day we (mostly me) worked hard to get the 20 contacts. It was late and we had 19 contacts, only one more, and my companion,"I don't want to reach the goal. Sometimes you just can't reach it. Lets go home". More or less that's what he said. He didn't even want to take 2 minutes to contact 1 more person and meet the goal. He's also like that with a few other things. Kind of frustrating at times. But overall we're doing good. Yes we still have all of our meals cooked for us. Got my package. The chips are still good. Still delicious =). With my Christmas money I did get some things, I got a little speaker and a couple of card games. Yup I have everything I need and all of what I want too. Thanks =).
Now, the funny thing of the week. Remember that I said that we had a bunch of visits fall through? Well one of them fell through because the investigator was late to the visit. Why? She was looking for a cow that had escaped....Lol. Pretty funny. We waited for her at her house for awhile and finally we saw her walking up the road. She told us that she was late because she was looking for her cow....
Well I think that's about it for this week. Oh, one last thing. I found a cook book of Ecuatoriano recipies. I'll try taking pictures of it and sending them to you.
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