Brandon's Ecuadorian Tales

Hey everyone! So this week has gone really well… better than most weeks I would say. We have found a few new families that we are teaching that we`re excited about. It’s always a big deal when we find a family that will listen because there are hardly any families here and if we do manage to find a family they usually don`t want to listen. But we have found 3 in the last 2 weeks so we`re excited about that. Also, we had a baptism on Saturday. We baptized a young man named Jordy. We met jordy about 4 months again when I was with the other Elder Lopez (the one that I trained). We were just walking down a street and I had a book of mormon in my hand and jordy saw it and came up and started asking me about it. I showed him the pictures in the front of the book and explained about how Nephi and his family came to the Americas from Jerusalem and how the book of mormon tells the story of their family and of the ancient inhabitants of the American continent. He had tons of questions so we set up an appointment to come back. We started teaching his brother and sister and his mom as well but they weren`t as interested as he was. His mom is really hard to deal with. Her heart is super hard and she gets offended really easily. She has been the biggest opposition to the progression of Jordy. He was going to get baptized a few weeks ago but his mom wouldn`t give permission. Jordy begged and begged her and she finally said yes. On Saturday we passed by jordy`s house to remind make sure that he was going to show up to his baptism on time (here it is very normal to show up 30 minutes to 1 hour late) and we found him crying. Some of his aunts and uncles had come by his house and invited his family to go to the beach. When he told them that he couldn`t go because he was getting baptized they started giving him a hard time and telling him that he had been brainwashed and stuff like that. And he really wanted his mom and his brothers and sisters to come to his baptism but they had decided to go to the beach instead. We gave him some encouraging words and explained that whenever we get closer to God there is always a greater opposition. Its becoming predictable to me. For almost every baptism that we`ve had so far something has happened either right before or right after. Anyway, he got baptized despite the opposition from his family and was confirmed on Sunday. His mom ended up feeling bad for not coming to his baptism so she came on Sunday and watched him receive the Aaronic priesthood.

We have another baptism scheduled for this Saturday. Its for a man named Harlington. He has been to several different churches and has studied the Bible a lot. He has been coming to church for like 6 weeks now and went to all of the sessions of general conference. He is very motivated when it comes to religion. There are still a lot of things that he doesn`t understand perfectly because he has been to so many churches and has so many different ideas mixed up in his head but he has a testimony and believes the book of mormon is true and the joseph smith was a prophet so we`re gonna baptize him next week. His interview is scheduled for tonight.

Random thing that I ate this week: Cow utter……. Surprisingly it wasn`t that bad. They didn`t tell me what it was till after I ate it which is good because if I would have known it might have tasted a lot worse… haha

This is the last week of the change so that means my companion goes home in a week and i`ll get a new one. I`ll let you know what happens next week.

We just found out that the 1st councilor in our bishopric (one of the 4 priesthood holders that we have and one of the strongest members in the ward) is moving this week so that might take its toll on the ward. We`ll see what happens.

Anyway, that’s all for this week! Thanks to everyone who has sent me letters! I`m in the process of writing back right now. I love you all!