Brandon's Ecuadorian Tales

This week went well. On Monday Elder Lopez and I went on splits with the APs (they were here for zone conference) and they helped us out a lot. We were able to finally get one of our toughest families to commit to baptism and we made a lot of other progress with some other inactive families.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we had zone conference and that was good. It felt like it was missing something though because President Sloan wasn`t there. He`s still trying to recover from his surgery but one of the APs told me that he`s been doing really well and they`re expecting him to be there for the next set of zone conferences.
Our ward just started a home teaching program which we`re really excited about. The biggest problem here is that there are like 500 members but only like 40 to 60 show up to church everyweek so we`re hoping that the home teaching program can help to reactivate some of the inactive members. We`re been visiting a lot of inactive members lately as well. A lot of them have testimonies and good desires but they just don’t act. I think its because the culture is so lazy here. No one wants to wake up on early on Sunday morning to go to church.
This week we started on a service project for an inactive member named hermana mina. She doesn`t have any running water in her house and she doesn`t have a lot of money so we`ve been talking with a contractor to try and get the materials as cheap as possible and then we`re going to do all the labor. She is short by about 30 bucks right now so we`re just waiting for her to find enough money so we can start. I wish I could just give her 30 bucks but it’s against mission rules to just give money to people so I can`t. But I guess important for people to learn to provide for themselves.

On Saturday we had a baptism. Her name is Nicole. We`ve been teaching her for a while and shes wanted to get baptized for a long time but there were a few obstacles that we had to get over. At first her dad didn`t want her to get baptized. We had to talk to her mom and her mom said it was ok and since she doesn`t live with her dad that was all that we needed. Then it was hard for her to get to church a lot of the time because there would always be parties at her house on Saturday night so she wouldn`t be able to sleep and didn`t wake up in time for church. But eventually she got to church enough times so she could be baptized. It might be hard for her to stay active since she doesn`t really have much support from her family but one of her best friends is a member and has been helping her a lot. We`re teaching her mom but she has a lot of problems that she has to get over that are going to be challenges.

This week we have 2 more baptisms- Rosio and Fernanda. Rosio is the mom of Adriana (the girl we baptized a couple weeks ago) and Fernanda is her sister. We`ve been teaching them ever since I got here so its exciting that they finally decided to be baptized. Now we just have to baptize the dad (the dads are always the hardest part) and the whole family will be members. I`ll let you know how it all went next week!
Thanks to everyone that sent me something for Christmas or any other letters! It makes my day every time I hear from someone back home. You guys are awesome!