Brandon's Ecuadorian Tales

Hey everyone,
How are you all doing. This week has been good for me. We´ve been teaching a lot and we now have 11 investigators with baptismal dates. Statistics say that they won’t all get baptized but we´ll see what we can do about that. Its been amazing to see how much help we´ve gotten so far and I’m sure we´ll continue to receive the help we need as long as we put in the work. I´m excited to see what happens within the next few weeks.



Well I guess the biggest news this week is that we had changes yesterday and my companion left for another zone. I´m staying here in Esmeraldas and I was called to be a trainer. So I have to go to Quito tomorrow to pick up my new companion and bring him back here. It was a pretty big shock to here that I was going to be training after just 6 weeks. Especially since I still don’t speak Spanish very well. Hopefully my companion will be native again or else it will be pretty rough. Theres one other elder from my mtc district that got called as a trainer as well so at least i´m not alone. We´re definitely gonna be pushed to our limits in the next 6 weeks and we´re definitely gonna learn a lot! I´m still not sure which was more overwhelming, when I first got here, or when they told me I was gonna be a trainer. I´m just gonna work as hard as I can and put my trust in the Lord and i´m sure he´ll continue to help me. If theres one thing that i´ve learn so far since i´ve been here its how to really trust in the Lord.



So remember the picture that I sent of the me holding the chicken last week? well… I don’t really know how to say this softly… Elder larrea killed it this week. Apparently it stopped laying eggs so the family decided to just kill it and eat it…. And unfortunately we were there when it happened. They brought it out right as we were leaving and my companion decided that it was an opportunity for service so he volunteered to kill it for them. I´m not gonna tell you how he did it. It was pretty sad. It was one of the culture shocks of this week



So latelty there have been a lot of fires here. Like right next to where i´m at. I´m not sure how they start or if they are intentinal or what. Everyone else doesn´t even think twice about it so I guess its normal. But it makes the air quality horrible! Theres huge ashes everywhere. When we got back to our apartment one day our floor was covered in ashes because they had all come through the whole that we have in our wall above our door. I remember once in California there were fires and they wouldn´t let us go outside for lunch because the air was so bad. But here its practically like breathing smoke and everyone is just outside. Its pretty gross.



On Wednesday night we got done with our last appointment earlier so we decided to knock some doors until it was time to go home. On our last door of the night we ran into a guy that is tau (that’s super rare here) and he let us in and when we tried to teach him he just started preaching to us about how the universe is run off energy and how there are 7 demensions and we´re in the3rd dimension and how we have 7 bodies and how Christ ascended out of hell to come to this world. It was rather bizarre. Then he started telling us about how the sun receives its energy from a more glorious star and how that star gets its energy from a more glourious star and he started naming the stars. I was hopeing that he would say that one of them was named kolab but he never did. Anyways, it was just a bizarre experience.

Thanks for you support and your emails and letters! I love you guys!