Brandon's Ecuadorian Tales

This week was pretty crazy and full of surprises. Tuesday was normal. I did divisions so I got to go to another sector and work with another elder named elder Hilden. Wednesday was normal as well. But starting Thursday things started to get crazy. On Thursday morning we did our weekly planning and then when to the mall to eat since we don’t have a mamita on Thursday and the mall is right next to where we have district meeting. When we walked in the mall we noticed that there was only one entrance open in the whole place and that probably around half of the stores were closed. We went into Rusty’s(our favorite restaurant) and noticed that it was empty and that instead of showing espn on the tv it was showing the news. We didn’t think much of it and started eating our food like we always do. Then the APs called us and told us that we had to go to district meeting and tell everyone that they had to go home and spend the day in there house and that they had to call us Friday in the morning for further instructions. Later we found out what was going on. It turns out that there’s an ex president named lucio that got forcibly taken out of his presidency by the people a few years back who is really bitter and hates the new president that Ecuador has. He used to be in a very high position in the army so he has a lot of connection with them and knows how the whole public defense system works. Recently the government passed a few laws, one of which will affect the way in that the police are paid. Lucio used it to his advantage and got the army and the police all riled up against the government. The president just had surgery on his leg so he was in the hospital. The police rebelled against the government and broke in through the roof of the hospital and took the president hostage and were threatening to kill him if he didn’t resign or change the law that he had passed or something like that. The army was on the rebel side as well but apparently someone from the government went and promised them certain things if they would help save the president and fight off the police. So after a while the army showed up at the hospital were the president was being held captive and they got in a huge gun fight with the police. The news was there so all of Ecuador was basically watching a live civil war on tv. Like they would see people die and everything. Everyone that we’ve talked to was watching it. At first the police were winning because they had better weapons and the high ground because they were in the huge hospital shooting out the windows and everything and the army was just trying to enter in and didn’t really have any cover.

Meanwhile, there were no police in the whole country because they were all on rebellion so the country went into a state of chaos and the thieves went crazy. 4 banks got robbed Thursday morning and a bunch of other stores. Needless to say it wasn’t safe to be outside so that’s why they told us all to go home until further notice.

Eventually the army broke in a saved the president and then the president declared himself dictator for 5 days to get everything cleared up. He started making a bunch of weird rules like people aren’t allowed to be in big groups. The police are back to work now but have lost a lot of the publics trust and everyone thinks that they are planning something bigger and will try again
As a result of all this… our baptism that we had planned for this week fell through because we weren’t allowed out of the house on Friday when he was gonna get baptized, we didn’t get to see priesthood session of conference because we weren’t allowed to stay out after 6, and we haven’t been able to visit most of our investigators because they are all home at night time. I think we’ll be playing catch up this week so hopefully all goes well and we can get back to a normal schedule. Oh and our pday activity to go to Cotopaxi (one of the biggest volcanoes in the world) got canceled.

If you want to know more about what happened you can look it up. I’m not sure if everything I said is 100% correct. Its just what I’ve heard from all the people. Luckily I’m in a richer suburb area of Quito so it was pretty calm here. Some of the elders that were closer to the action in Quito called us and told us it was crazy. They said that people were starting fires all over the place and that ambulances were driving by at full speed every second. Anyway, that’s all I have for this week. I hope everyone enjoyed conference! I love you! I’ll talk to you next week!