Brandon's Ecuadorian Tales

Happy new year everyone from Ecuador! New years is definitely celebrated a lot different here. Everything was closed all day on new years and the only people out were drunk people that had been up all night and hadn’t gone to sleep. There was one time when we were walking to an appointment and we got stopped by some drunk people that wanted us to teach them. We told them that we had an appointment but that we would come back later (which we weren’t really going to do). We went to our appointment which was right down the street and about half way through the lesson we heard a lot of noise outside so we looked out the window and a huge fight had broken out between all the drunk people. Then one of the kids ran outside to watch and then came back in and shut the door and told us that one of the guys had a knife and was trying to kill the other one. It was an interesting experience. A few minutes later the cops showed up and I’m pretty sure no one really got hurt so its all good. I’m sure they don’t even remember know that they sobered up.


We had 2 baptisms this week. Eleanor and Alexander. They are brother and sister and their parents are inactive members. Eleanor is 13. She’s just a normal 13 year old girl and was excited to be baptized. Alexander is 14. We gave him the Aaronic priesthood on Sunday so now they ward has more that one youth to pass the sacrament. He told us that he wants to serve a mission one day so we took him out with us yesterday to give him some practice.

We have another baptism this week. We might have up to 3 but we’re still not sure about 2 of them. We have to go visit them tonight to try and encourage them and set up a time for their interview

This week we met a crazy guy that was locked in his house and asked us if we had a saw to saw down the bars and let him out. It was kinda a weird situation. We didn’t know what to do at first cuz we didn’t know why he was locked up or what the deal was. We asked someone else near by and they told us that his family was out of town and they locked him inside while they were gone because if he gets out he likes to run around naked and be mean to little kids. Haha we told him that we didn’t have a saw but that if we found one we would come back and help him. Poor guy though, his family just left him all alone locked up in the house.




On new years eve a bunch of the little kids started hustling people. They set up road blocks so that cars couldn’t pass and then when a car came they wouldn’t move their roadblock until the car gave them money. They tried to get money out of us a bunch of times but we would just tell them no and walk around.

Anyways, there’s not much else to tell you. This week is zone conference so we’re excited for that but we’re kinda bummed that president Sloan wont be there because he’s still recovering from his surgery. I have to give a spiritual thought about exercising faith to accomplish the mission norms (4 baptisms a month). Anyway, I hope everyone is doing good and had a happy new year!
-Elder Messer