Liver

Hi everyone. 

We are pretty excited with all the people we are teaching. They are progressing and have an actual desire to learn and change which is the most important part. We had a service perfect as a zone and we were told we were going to be building a house but we ended up just moving dirt and digging a hole to find a pipe that we never actually found. It felt nice to lift some weights though because we moved a bunch of bricks. We made patacones like very night this week. Elkin who we baptized and his bother victor who is already a member are super cool and I love meeting with them we are always laughing. Hoping we can help victor go on a mission. We got permission the bring the phone to the Chinese restaurant so that we could show Yeri the BOM in Chinese and we didn't end up having g a lot of time but we'll see how it goes. We visited a member who doesn't come to church because he has some problems with some of the leaders at the church but we told him that we don't go to church for other people we go to church to serve God but he still is struggling with coming. A family gave us liver to eat with some rice and beans but luckily at was to-go so they didn't see me gag while I ate it. My Spanish felt really good this week. But yea not much new. I don't want to leave this area because I want to help a lot of people here. And I don't want want Elder gonzalez to leave either. Hope you all are doing great and I pray for you all at home everyday.

Extra photos

 

Transfers

 We had transfers but Elder Gonzalez and I will be staying here together for areas one transfer more. Which I'm excited because there's a lot of people that we could help and potentially baptize I hope.

 I finished all of the safety zone videos that I was supposed watch in the mtc (missionary. training center). We found a good restaurant called Patacolandia. One of the guys from my mtc is coming here to be my zone leader so that's going to be fun seeing him. I made some personal goals this transfer instead of just companionship goals which I'm excited to see how they go. So we eat at this Chinese place like once a week not even and there is a girl there named Yeri and she speaks mandarine Chinese and we've wanted to teach here for a while but she said she was buddhist. The other day we were reading the book of Mormon while we were waiting and she asked us what it was. We told her and she started asking us if it makes us happy and if it helps us reading and studying this book and we were like yea that's like why we are here is to share it with others and share our experience with it. And she told us that she has anxiety ever day and just stuff like that. So we tried teaching about it and tried to download the BOM on her phone but it doesn't work and obviously we don't just have Chinese BOMs on hand. But here's the thing is she's lived here for like 6 years but has never tried to learn Spanish. Just enough to sell food basically. So we are trying to speak bad Spanish to teach someone who doesn't really understand Spanish so she has us talk into her phone in Spanish even tho we both speak English my companion and I and then it translates it. But yea we'll let you know how that goes haha and we are in the process of finding a Chinese BOM. Oh I finally ate Guinea Pig for the first time. It's not bad. We still meet like a new person everyday that thinks we worship Joseph Smith. I'm still in the same are so that means I can continue eating crapes. But yea just a normal week with a few hard days.

We make really good juice with this fruit in the blender ( and a lot of sugar) 

8 MONTHS

 Hi everyone sorry I haven't written an email in a few weeks. I haven't been writing in my journal very well because it feels just absolutely pointless sometimes but it does make it harder to remember what I did this week because I can't look back at it haha. So I'll just talk about the week a little instead of every day. All around this week was just super slow and kind of a fog. But I did hit 8 months as a missionary including the missionary training center. 

 The people that we teach just aren't progressing very much which has apparently been a problem for this area. At the same time there's so many good people that we are teaching that I could so easily see as members of the Church.  My zone leader used to be in this area his first few transfers in the mission so when we had exchanges he showed me a lot if houses and people that we can visit. We have been struggling to get people to church. We invite them to church and we have like 9 people tells yes I will be there but then they don't show up. And we even go to there's houses in the morning to remind them/ walk with them/ wake them up and they just still don't come. It's like bro you can just tell us no if you arent going to come. We would prefer it haha. We also are going to visit some more inactive families and we already found one family that has a son who is only enough to be baptized and would like to be baptized. But first we are just going to help them come to church.

 

 We had a mini missionary training for the youth that are going to leave here for their missions soon. It was pretty cool especially because we didn't have to teach it. 

 

So we did have a baptism this week tho. Her name is Mayté and her grandma is a member. She is 11 and has had a few baptismal dates in the past with other missionaries but she may it may not have just not showed up up those haha but its okay because she's baptized now. 

My companions uncle is a doctor and his work picks another country to do free surgery in and before my companion even got his assignment to Ecuador his uncles work chose Ecuador. So my comp got permission to move our prep day  (pday) so se could take the bus to Guayaquil and spend the day with him there. We ended up walking around Guayaquil and all the malls and just looking at a lot of nice stuff that we miss from the states haha because his uncle took a little longer than we thought but it was super fun the walk around and see stuff. We took this huge ferris wheel. Then we went to the artisans market and saw some cool stuff. My comp bought a lama blanket. 

We had so many appointments fall through this week. But we have been contacting people in the street a little more  which is always good if you want to fix any social anxiety you have haha. 

My Spanish is OK. 

Spiritual thought: the day I was with my zone leader he talked about the Book of Mormon (BOM) a lot. And although I know it's very important and I have a pretty strong testimony of it he helped me remember just how important it is. It is literally written for our day. The ancient prophets that lived in the America's that wrote the BOM literally saw our day. It is literally the word of God just like the bible and was written by prophets as well. We can find an answer in the BOM to any problem we have.  And like we read in the beginning the BOM is the most correct of any other book on earth. That being because it was only translated once and there aren't any mistakes. I just want to testify of the healing power of the word of God in our life's but especially from the BOM. I think my first and maybe strongest testimony is that when we read the BOM we just have a better day and things seem to go better in our day. Not to mention out ability to resist temptations increases immensely. I knew that before my mission and I know it know. And for that I will always continue reading the BOM every day. If you don't read the BOM every day or maybe if you've never tried reading the BOM I invite you to do so with the promise that it will better your life and you will be more happy.  No tengo ninguna duda. 

I hope you all are doing well. Thanks you so much for reading if you made it this this far.  Let me know if you want to be added to my Google photos that I share.