Brandon's Ecuadorian Tales

This week has been pretty normal and uneventful. I don’t even know where to start because nothing exciting really happened this week. We’ve kind of hit a rough spot in our sector. All the investigators that we had have either been baptized or we’ve dropped them because they weren’t progressing. So basically our biggest problem right now is that we don’t have anyone to teach. We’ve been knocking doors and contacting people like crazy all week but we haven’t had much success yet. We met a lady that has 2 nephews on missions and her whole family lives in Utah and her brother is a bishop but she doesn’t want anything to do with the church. We also met a family of Jehovah witnesses that only wanted to debate with us. I didn’t understand them at all….. Their doctrine is really strange and doesn’t really make sense to me. We’ve met a lot of people that “Were born catholic and that are going to die catholic no matter what” and a lot of other types of people. Knocking doors in Quito is a lot different than knocking doors in Esmeraldas. In Esmeraldas it was easy to get in a house and teach. Like every 10th house would let us in. In Quito it’s a lot harder. I think I’ve only gotten in 1 house since I’ve been here and it was someone from Esmeraldas. The people are a lot more closed here. But the good thing is that when we do find someone to teach they are serious about it. In Esmeraldas nobody was serious about anything. Life is a lot different here in Quito.
I’m not gonna lie. Things have been kinda rough lately. My companion is having a really hard time. He’s been here for 4 weeks and he is super homesick. He talks about going home a lot and is really frustrated with everything. He says that he hasn’t been able to sleep since he got here and that he just wants to go home but that something inside of him tells him that he should stay. Its been kinda hard because I already have all the weight of my sector and district on my shoulders and now I have the weight of my companion as well. But I guess that’s what the mission is all about… going through rough experiences and learning how to depend on the Lord to overcome them all.

A new mall just opened up in my zone. It’s the biggest mall in Ecuador. It’s pretty cool. I felt like I was in the states when I was there. It has a bunch of good American food. I even got some baskin robins. It was pretty tasty.
Well sorry that my letter is so short this week but that’s all I’ve got. I can’t think of anything else that would be interesting. Until next week….