March 8, 2010

Posted on 4:46 PM by Elder Messer | 1 comments

Hey everyone!
sorry I didn`t send this yesterday. the internet went out and we had to go before it came back. but here is my letter this week...

I hope all is still going well back home! This week has been good for me. We had changes yesterday but I didn`t get chaged so i`m still in esmeraldas with Elder Lopez. Our zone got split so know there is zone esmeraldas and zone san rafael. I`m still in zone esmeraldas but now there are only 11 missionaries in the zone instead of 26 like before. Also, i was kinda dissapointed to find out that 2 of the elders from my mtc district got transfered so now i`m the only gringo in my zone… oh well.

This week I had an interesting experience with a man named washington. I dont really know how to explain washington…. He`s very unique haha. Hes from esmeraldas but has lived in and has wives in the united states and mexico. Hes crazy… seriously… there is something wrong with him mentally. He speaks english. His face is deformed and he only has sight out of one eye. Hes rich. He says that hes a member of the church but I dont believe him. And for some reason all the girls want to marry him (i witnessed a woman propse to him that he had just met). I`m not sure why i`m telling you about this guy …… but there it is. There are some wierd people here… haha

I had a cool experience when we were tracking this week. we found a lady named ana maria that let us in and started talking to us. After we had talked to her for a little bit she told us that she had cancer and had to go in for surgery today and that she wasn`t expecting to live for that much longer. Then she told us that she had been praying a lot and that when we came to her door she knew we were an answer to her prayer. She went in for surgery today but hopefully we can find her again when she gets out of the hospital so that we can teach her more of the plan of salvation.

On Sunday at our lunch appointment there were tons of ants in the juice that our mamita gave us. It wasn`t hard to see that there were ant so i`m not sure why she still gave it to us to drink. It was kinda wierd. I was dying of thirst though so i just fished them all out with my spoon and drank it.

Other than that nothing really exciting happened this week. we`ve just been working hard trying to get our investigaters ready for baptism and trying to find the elect.

Thanks to everyone who has sent me letters and packages! I love to hear from you all!

Pictures!

Posted on 7:59 PM by Elder Messer | 0 comments

For Pictures go to http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=125090&id=713547841&l=c79747f802

I hope that works! But its such a hassle to post them on the Blog sometimes....I try tho!

Feb 29 and March 1, 2010

Posted on 7:49 PM by Elder Messer | 0 comments

Feb 29, 2010
Another week as come and gone in Ecuador. This week was normal for the most part. Elder lopez and I have been working hard to try and get things set up and finalized for a couple of baptism that we have coming up. Elder Lopez was under the impression that he was going home at the end of this change but his flight plans still haven’t come yet so now he’s thinking that he’s gonna stay for one more change. So that means there is a chance that I could get changed in 2 weeks. But I’ll just have to wait and see.

So on Tuesday night at about 2:30 in the morning we were awaken by someone knocking on our bedroom window and yelling at us. I had no idea who is was or what they wanted so it was kinda sketchy at first. But it turned out to be our neighbor from downstairs. Apparently his ceiling was dripping water so he come upstairs to see what it was and stop it. It turned out that a house in our bathroom had broken and water was being sprayed everywhere. The whole house was flooded. We had to find the key that shut the water off to the bathroom house and it turns out that that is the key that shuts off the water to the whole house. So we haven’t had water for a week… well we’ve had water but it only comes out of the hose that connects to the toilet in the bathroom. So we’ve been showing with buckets and washing dishes with water bottles. Its been kinda annoying but that’s how things roll down here in ecuador. We’re trying to get it fixed though so hopefully we won’t have this problem for that much longer.

I’m not sure if I already wrote about this but every Thursday night we get to watch a movie in the chapel. Its a missionary activity so that we can bring investigators to make friends with the members so the bishop asked that we be there. So basically I get to watch a movie every Thursday. And the best part is that its always in English with Spanish subtitles. So far we’ve seen, jhonny lingo, mobsters and Mormons, the home teacher, and beauty and the beasy (a later day tale). They’re all movies produced in Utah by members of the church. There’s a lot of jokes about Utah and Mormons so.. sometimes I’m the only one that gets them… its kinda funny.

This Saturday we had a zone activity where we all went to the park, set up big signs about the church, and contacted people. The signs all had a picture with a thought provoking question. For example, mine had a picture of Christ in the Americas and the questions was “sabia usted que cristo visito las americas”(did you know that Christ visited the americas). Another one had a picture of christ and his apostles and the question was “jesucristo organizo su iglesia con 12 apostales, donde esta su iglesia ahora” (Jesus Christ organized his church with 12 apostles, where is his church now). It was surprisingly successful. They signs caught the attention of a lot of people and we were able to get some good contacts. We’re gonna start doing that activity every 2 weeks to try and find the “escogidos” (the chosen ones)

I was able to end a few letters this week so if you’re expecting a letter from me it might get to you soon. Thanks a ton to anyone that has sent me anything since I’ve been here! It always makes my day to here from people! Que vayan bien hasta la proxima semana. Les amo.

March 1, 2010
Hey everyone, let me tell you about my week. It was pretty good… a little more eventful than usual but still nothing huge.

On Monday night we went to an appointment with an investigator that got baptized on Saturday and his mom. After we finished teaching the lesson his mom invited us to eat dinner. We were hungry and you cant say now when people offer you stuff so we accepted. When sat down at the table and she brought out the food. I had no idea what it was. We asked her and she said that it was “huevos de pescado”(fish eggs)…. And it must have been from a HUGE fish because it was bigger than any egg i`ve ever seen before and I only got half of one. Long story short it was disgusting but I managed to get it all down… but… it made me ridiculously sick. I was up all night throwing it up and I was sick the whole next day. But all is well now so no worries. Hopefully no one else tries to feed me fish eggs!

On Tuesday we had interviews with President Sloan. It was good to see him again. I hadn’t seen him since the day I got here. He’s doing a lot better. He still has trouble breathing a little bit since he’s missing half a lung but other than that he seems to be doing pretty good.

On Wednesday we had zone conference which was really good. President Sloan taught a class about what it means to have real confidence and the zone leaders taught a class about verifying commitments. Something odd happened when we were eating lunch though… there were a few members there with us because they wanted to come to the zone conference. We were all sitting down eating when president Sloan walked in and just started looking around. All of a sudden he got a worried face and walked up and started talking in a whisper to the elders sitting behind me. He had seen one of the members (a 20 year old girl) and he didn’t like the way she looked so he was telling the elders that they weren’t allowed to have any contact with her whatsoever. It turned out that this girl was a ward missionary and would help the missionaries all the time and that her mom was one of their mamitas so normally that ate lunch at her house once a week. Later president Sloan told us that he did it because he would rather offend the girl and protect the missionaries than have something happen with the girl. I thought it was kinda odd how he just looked at her and didn’t want the missionaries to talk to her or anything, just from looking at her… I guess that’s just one example of mission presidents being inspired.

On Saturday night we got home and our neighbors that live above us were having a party and being really loud. They were really drunk and it sounded like they were having a huge fight. They were yelling a lot and one girl was screaming her lungs out. It was weird because normal there’s only one guy that lives there and he’s always super quiet. I asked one of the neighbors about it and he said that the people that are living there right now are thieves and that they live somewhere else but that they only come and stay with their dad every once and a while when they’ve done something big and they need to hide and lay low for a while. It could just be rumors but that’s what they told me.
We had a baptism on Saturday and it went well. We baptized a 19 year old guy named Ronny. He has a lot of enthusiasm for the gospel and always wants to learn more. He’s excited to come out with us to help us teach. He also was able to receive the priesthood on Sunday and we’re planning on having him up his with the sacrament next week. His mom has a baptismal date for this month so we’re going to try and arrange things so he can baptize his mom.

Today for pday we went on an adventure. We went in search of a waterfall that we had heard about. Long story short we ended up having to walk for 3 hours before we finally got there but it was pretty cool so it was worth it. We didn’t want to walk 3 hours back so we ended up hitching a ride with some guy that was driving a truck with some bulls in the back. We had to hang on to the side of the truck and dodge all the branches sticking out into the road. We were driving through the jungle so there were a lot of branches. It was sketchy but that’s how everything is here. It was my first hitchhiking experience though so that was cool haha.