Brandon's Ecuadorian Tales

Hey everyone. Let me tell you a Little bit about my week. On Monday and Tuesday I was in a little town called pelileo. I was on divisions with on of the district leaders- Elder Caskey. He’s a stud. He is from Arizona and was a forest fire fighter before his mission. It was an adventure to be in his sector because he`s only been there for like 3 weeks and his companion only 2 weeks and it’s a huge sector so its easy to get lost and really hard to find where your going. It includes a bunch of small villages with a bunch of farms. And its right next to baños so its really pretty as well. He had some references that he needed to contact in a little village called Patate. But no one out there has phones or addresses so all we had were names and that they lived in patate. We found the bus that went to patate but when we got there we didn`t have any luck. No body knew any of the names we had. So we just decided to contact. It turns out that Patate is like ridiculously catholic so we ran into some people that weren’t very happy to see us. One lady literally started screaming at us and after screaming just walked away and left the door open. I just said “It was nice to meet you” and we walked away. The best part about my division with elder caskey was that he has an oven in his house so we made peach cobbler before we went to bed. We didn`t have a recipe so we just kinda winged it but it actually turned out pretty good. On Thursday and Friday I was on divisions with Elder Garcia. He’s from Nicaragua. His sector is downtown Ambato so it was a lot different that pelileo. I did a couple of baptismal interviews while I was there as well.
This weekend and today and tomorrow are holidays in Ecuador. Its “Day of the dead”. To celebrate everyone makes this weird drink that they call “colada morada” . It’s this thick purple drink with pineapple and leafs inside. I don’t really like it but I’ve had to drink it a ton. Everyone is like “oh your not from here so you have to try colada morada” no one realizes that we visit like 8 families every day and that everyone else has said the same thing and given us the same drink. It’s been pretty rough to have to drink nasty purple goop so much but I guess that’s part of the sacrifice I have to make as a missionary to not offend people.
This week we broke a record since I’ve been here. We had 4 people at church, a family of 3 and another person. Its not really that big of an accomplishment but considering that the last 2 weeks we had nobody I feel like we accomplished something.
This week we wont be in our sector at all. We’re leaving for Quito right now because we have zone leader council and leaders meeting on Monday and Tuesday and then on Thursday I have to renew my censo to be in Ecuador and then when we get back we`re going straight to pelileo to get started with doing baptismal interviews for a family of 13. This month in Ambato we broke a record with 16 baptisms. The old record was 12. So if this family of 13 gets baptized and a few other people we could break our record again.
Anyway that’s all I have for this week. Thanks for everything! I love you!