Short Letter

Well, this will be a short letter as today I will be calling my family today =). Just going to give a summary of the things we did. 

We had our Christmas dinner with President Richardson in his house, had a baptism (Herman Weiss),  and I opened my presents. Yup...that's it =). Our investigators are all meh....They're good but they're not really progressing too much. We'll be really trying this week to find new investigators =P

Pics:

So the one with the kids has Piero in it. He's the chubby one. We gave him a Preach my Gospel and he read a part in it about how to find new people to teach and he presented us to all of his friends who are all the other ones =).

We also have Maria Fernanda, her husband, daughter and her 3 hermanadores. Maria is the non-black lady =).

Herman Weiss' baptism! We also did it with a couple other missionaries who baptized 2 girls. 

Another Week, Another Letter

Well....another week, another letter. 

Anyways. I feel like the weeks go by and we do stuff but I don't know what to write lol. I'll just write a couple of things. 

So, Maria Fernanda, our awesome investigator, is doing great. We visited her earlier last week and she said that she wasn'tsure if this was true and wasn't sure if she should get baptized right now. She's always kind of mysterious and she told us something really funny. She said, "I want to meet with you guys (me and my companion) alone. Just you 2 and me. I want to ask you some questions" Well hermana there's a problem with that, we can't be alone with you...but maybe we could ask for special permission from our mission president. Then she said, "I will decide where and when and I will let you know 2 days in advance". See what I mean? She's kind of weird and mysterious.....But she 's good and wouldn't do any harm =). Then we said, "Well if it's in a closed room I don't think we could do it. Maybe if it was in your store or something like that". "No, no, nothing like that. We wouldn't be alone alone. I'll go ahead and tell you the place then.....the beach....." Whoa hermana! That's the second problem. We can't be alone with you and we can definately NOT go to the beach with you". Okay then. If it can't be the beach it could be my store". Lol. It was just really funny. I guess she really likes peaceful places like the beach, and she wanted to ask us some questions there. It would have been super weird if I wouldn't have known that she wouldn't do anything. But we had a FHE with her with her hermanadores last night and it was awesome. We only watched 15 minutes of the 1 hour restoration movie and then she said that she knows that this is true and that she feels like she should get baptized right now. Yes! She might be able to get baptized this week but more likely it'll happen next week. 

Then we found a new family this week. It was a reference from some other missionaries and they're great. It's a huge columbian family and we were able to teach 3 of them. They decided to move to Ecuador because where they're living there was lots of violence and war. There were bombs going off by their house and everything. So they came over here to avoid that kind of stuff. So we'll be working with them from now on =).

Funny thing of the week: the thing with Maria Fernanda. 

Pics

1. Familia Bonne. There's some less actives and an investigator in there. The one with the hands in the air is handicap and crawls around like Golem

2. The bishop, his inactive son and his wife Maria, an investigator

3. Herman Weiss and his kids. He'll be getting baptized this week =)

4. Demetrio. He's an old depressed blind guy that we're teaching. He was really excited to go to church this week =)

Well....this week we really hardy did anything. We had a bunch of meetings all week. Mon-Wed: leaders council in Quito, Thur: Mini zone conference, mission correlation and ward council, Fri: leaders meeting, Sat: Stake conference from 5:00-9:00, Sun: Stake conference 10:00-12:00. So there's our week =). 

Despite us not being able to work much we were at least able to end with 5 people with baptismal date. 2 of the 5 people that have baptismal dates are new this week. Good stuff. Things are going good here. The people are really prepared to hear the gospel and I'm enjoying it and also the food =). I have now had octopus and clam ceviche. Just some new stuff that I've tried being here on the coast.....not really much else to say lol so I'll continue to other things.

Funny thing(s) of the week: The first one needs no explanation....Just look at the first picture...Now, the other one is different. So here the water from the tap is deadly and you don't ever drink from it, so you have to buy bottled water. Every week we go through one of those giant bottles that you see (they're $1.00 each just fyi). So we had just bought one and I had carried it up the stairs and walked into our apartment. I took it off my shoulder and set it down kind of hard on the counter when it broke open and exploded water all over me and started dumping a bunch of water on the floor.....I hate you bottle......

Pics:

1. Jasmine on shrooms....?

2. exploding bottle

3. cemetary in front of our house

4. The mamita cancelled on us and we cooked our lunch =). My companion made the rice and chicken strips and I made the patacones and the deviled eggs =). Yum....

This will be a short letter. There's not much time and I'm super tired....

Well, this week was good. I felt that we worked hard. The number of lessons that we had dropped, but we have 2 progressing families, both of which are from crecimiento real. We also got a few good references from some less actives. Feels good. There were a few people that we met this week and I was sure that they weren't going to come to church and they did. Then other people that I was sure would come and they didn't. Guess it happens sometimes. We had 7 investigators in church, one of which was Demetrio, our old blind investigator. He liked it =). Piero is still doing awesome. He shared his testimony in sacrament meeting this last sunday and he wants to know when he can go out and make visits with us. He's the most awesome 10 year old that I've met. 

Overall things here are good. Just tired from all the traveling and sitting that we've done...I'm at the point in the mission where it's more tiring to sit down all day than walk all day lol. Not used to it. 

Random side thing. So normally for the zone leaders council we have it in a church. Today they took us somewhere cool. It was a small resort on the edge of the 2nd biggest crater in the world and it's the only crater where people live inside. It was pretty fancy and they gave us a good lunch. So that was cool =)

Funny thing of the week: While we were at the leaders council there were some llamas that were just there basically as decorations. One of the missionaries wanted to feed salt to one of the llamas. He tried with one and it just ignored him. Then he went over to another one and tenaciously tried to feed it. The llama sniffed his hand and then spewed spit all over his hand. It almost looked like the llama sneezed on him! It was so hilarious. We were all busting up laughing at him. There were about 20 people there that saw him do that. Bwahahahaha!!!!

I'll write maybe later tonight. We'll be travelling to Quito. Yes I got the package with the camera =)