Elder Ramos, Elder Logrono and Elder Black

Painted by a member of the Ward

Hello,

This letter is going to be short. Not a whole lot happened....To start off I'll tell you about my companions. First off is Elder Ramos. He's from El Salvador and has 2 months in the mission. He's a direct person who is pretty intellectual and relys on thinking. He knows how to teach the lessons and is overall a good missionary. He likes soccer, Spongebob and anime =). Next up is Elder Logroño. He's from Ecuador and is waiting for his Visa to Mexico. He's got a month and a half in the mission and is a really nice guy.  The only thing is that he has a hard time focusing. Sometimes he gets off track in the lessons. We were teaching about repentance one time and he started talking about the gathering of Israel. But when his thoughts are focused he's good. He's a nice guy who cares about the people. And I'm training both of them =).

So those are my companions for you. Now the investigators.....we hardly have any lol. Well it's understandable. Here in Quito, the city, the people are a bit more closed off and a lot of them live in houses with walls and intercoms or in apartments. In other words, it's a bit hard to find people. We did have some good success in a park this week though. The people are sitting down and can't run away and they're usually there with their family or kids. Perfect. We got a few good contacts out of that =). We went to the house of a contact that my companions contacted before I got here. Apparently she lived in Utah for awhile with some family who are members. We taught her the Restoration and she was really receptive. We invited her to baptism and she accepted, but she didn't accept a date. Oh well, that's fine with me. She has the desires and everything, she just needs a bit of time. We do have a few more people that we're teaching but only 2 have baptismal dates. Carmen and Ricardo, her son. Carmen is about 45 years old and is dating a member of the ward here. She's keeping commitments and is assisting. Her baptismal date for the 27th is holding strong. Along with Ricardo's. Other than them we don't have anyone else with a baptismal date. We do have a bunch of people that we want to put a baptismal date on, we just need to be able to find them in their house. We had a lot of fallen visits this week so that made things kind of hard.

Also this week I had my first baptismal interviews. At first I was a little nervous about it, but I studied it up in Preach My Gospel and I think I did a pretty decent job. I ended up doing 2 this week. I liked the second one the best. I interviewed a 9 year old named Joel. His mom isn't a member but he's an awesome little kid. I really felt of his spirit during the interview. An awesome experience for me and hopefully for him too. 

Well....that's pretty much it. Not a whole lot happened this week. We're going to really try to find more people to teach and all that good stuff.

To answer a few questions. My responsibilites as DL are these; all the missionaries in the district (2) call me every night and give me report of their day, then I call the Zone Leaders and give them the reports; I do the baptismal interviews of the investigators of the other missionaries in my district; I give a training of about 45 minutes every district meeting (thursdays); me and my sector have to be examples for the district and that's all I can think of for now. Nope I am not suffering in Yaruquì. In a different house and in a different sector.

That's all for now, 

Elder Black