Brandon's Ecuadorian Tales

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!

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, 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.

Feb 8, 2010

This week has been good. We had a baptism on Saturday where we baptized a 10 year old boy named Ryan and an 8 year old girl named Dana. Ryan’s parents are members but they are both inactive and they aren’t married. We’ve been working with the whole family to try and help them as much as possible. I think it was good for the parents to see their son get baptized. They’ve been at church the last 2 weeks which is good and they’ve been making a lot of progress. We’re gonna keep working with them to try and help them stay active. Dana is 8 and her mom is a members so it didn’t count as a baptism for us but we still baptized her because there is no priesthood in her family. Her mom is one of our mamitas… that means that she makes lunch for us every week. Dana bore her testimony about her baptism on Sunday and it was way cute haha.

We don’t have any baptisms planed for this week but next week we have 2. Violeta and Rodney. I``ll write more about them when they actually get baptized.
So there’s a senior missionary in our mission that served his mission in Mexico and has some CRAZY stories about it. I heard one and thought it was worth telling so her it is:
He showed up in a little town once and as soon as he got there all the people ran up to him and started asking him if he could baptize them. He didn’t understand how they knew who he was or why they wanted to be baptized so he started talking to them. They told him that a few years earlier 4 men came and taught them everything but that they said that they couldn’t baptize them but that others would come that could baptize them. They already new all the doctrine and everything and there were 80 that wanted to be baptized. Because there were so many in one place at one time the church sent Marion g Romney to make sure everything went smoothly and to make sure that all the people were really prepared. When he got there he said that they were all ready so they baptized 80 people all at once. Then later Marion g Romney pulled the elders aside and said “congratulations, you just baptized some of the people taught by the 3 nephites and john the revelator”. I thought it was a cool story. Oh and one more random story. my companion is from Mexico and he said that there’s a huge stone there in some ruins that has a picture of Lehi`s dream on it.

My companions “trunky papers” got here this week, aka his paper that he has to fill out before he goes home. Hes leaving at the end of this change… so in 4 weeks. I`m not gonna lie, its making me a little trunky to have a companion that’s going home so soon haha. But luckily he still wants to work hard and finish out his mission strong.
We ran into a guy that was SUPER drunk yesterday… I mean i`ve seen drunk people but nothing like this guy. He couldn`t walk straight and he was absolutely crazy! He started asking us how to walk with god so we tried to explain that the first thing he had to do was stop drinking. He didn`t quite understand and just started cussing us out. Luckily I don’t understand cuss words in Spanish haha.

One last thing, the rules changed on sending packages… they can know be up to 8 pounds. Before it was only 4 pounds but it just changed. Just in case someone wants to send me something.

I hope everyone is doing well! Until next week…


Feb 16, 2010
Well, another week and another email, although this week my email is being sent on Tuesday because pday was changed this week because of “carnival”—a ridiculous south American holiday when everyone goes crazy for a few days. Here in Esmeraldas it’s a giant water fight. Everyone just gets drunk and throws water on whoever they can find. Normally the missionaries don’t leave their apartments during carnival but president Sloan had us go out and work anyway. So basically if been getting water thrown on me for the last 3 days. I’ve had little kids, crazy teenage girls, and crazy drunk guys all throw or dump water on me. One girl just walked up to us as we were walking down the street, poured water all over us and then just stood there and watched as we walked away. She didn’t even say anything. Another guy approached us as we were walking and asked if he could pour water on us. We told him no so he waited till we passed and then threw water all over us anyway. Another time we were walking down a street and a truck drive by with people in the bed and they all just chucked water at us as they passed. People don’t seem to care that we are wearing shirts and ties or anything. And yesterday we saw one girl that was passed out from drinking to much being carried away to the hospital. And we found one of our best investigators wasted out of his mind. It was disappointing. We talked with him and asked him why he decided to drink and he said that he was weak and that Satan had already won the battle and that he didn`t think he could stop drinking. He started crying and everything. We told him that we were there to help him and encouraged him to not give up. We’re going back tonight to see how he is doing.

It’s been raining a lot lately and as a result all the houses on our street have flooded. Luckily we live on the 2nd floor though so our house didn’t get flooded. Also, there were only 27 people at church on Sunday because of the rain. Nobody wanted to get went so no one came to church. It was kinda disappointing.
Anyway, there’s not much else to say. We might have a baptism this week depending on weather or not one of our investigators got married. I was going to send letters today but the post office was closed for carnival so I’ll have to do it next week.

I hope everyone is doing well! Until next week!

Jan 25th
Hey everyone,
This week has been good. We had changes yesterday/today. I stayed in my same area but elder lopez(mycompanion) left. My new companion just got here and his name is Elder Lopez too. Our investigaters are gonna laugh when they see that elder lopez left but that another elder lopez came. My new companion is from mexico and he only has 3 months left on his mission. Hopefully he`ll be able to teach me a lot with all of his experience. Its nice to finally have a companion that is experienced at being a missionary.

Other than changes not much happened this week. It was pretty normal. We did manage to offend a lady really bad though. We went to teach a lesson to this one family and in the middle of the lesson they brought out some type of tea for us to drink. We weren`t sure wheather it was the kind of tea that we cant drink or not so just to be safe we explained the word of wisdom and told them that we couldn`t drink tea. Then the mom got mad and just flat out called us out on it. She had invited us to eat before but we told her know because we had another appointment. Anyway, she just got really mad and started asking us all these questions about why we always reject their food. She thought it was because we thought her kitchen wasn`t clean and all this other stuff. The whole time I was just thinking “is she really that mad about something so stupid” but I guess that’s just there culture. Someone told me that in otavalo if you reject food you might as well not even go back to the house because the people will never forgive you.

I had to speak in church yesterday on “hermanamiento” which means being friendly I guess. I`m not really sure what the direct translation is. The bishop told me like the day before so I only had an hour in the morning before church to prepare. But it went alright I guess. Its always hard for the bishop to find people to speak because there aren`t very many active members.

Thanks to everyone who sent me letters! I`m trying to write back as fast as I can. Thanks for all the support and prayers!



Feb 1st
This week has been good in Esmeraldas Ecuador. My new companion and I have been working hard trying to find and teach the Lords chosen people here. Elder Lopez is a really solid elder. He’s been out for a long time and knows a lot of stuff and is a really good teacher. I’ve been learning a lot from him. We have a baptism scheduled for this Saturday. A 10 year old boy named Ryan. His parents are members but are inactive because they are living together but aren’t married so they’re embarrassed to come to church. Anyway, we’ve been teaching Ryan and we even got his parents to come to church with him this Sunday so that’s a good sign. The biggest problem that we have to face as missionaries here in Esmeraldas is people that have broken families. In the whole ward there are only 4 married couples. My new companion Elder Lopez as served all over the country (Quito, otavalo, baños, Ambato, Ibarra, la Concordia) and he said that its not like this in other places. He said that in his last ward the average attendance at church was 180- that’s like 3 times the size of our ward here haha. But seriously, its all because families almost don’t exist here. Kids just grow up in broken homes and its normal to them so then when they are older they have kids and raise them in broken homes as well. Life is seriously sooo much better when we live the gospel inside of families. Its hard here because even if we can get a convert they usually don’t have a family to support them so its hard for them to stay active. They really have to be self motivated to gain and maintain a testimony.

Ok culture shock time,
1) We knocked a door this week and a lady came and answered without a shirt or anything. It was kinda awkward. She just opened it, looked at us, then closed it and when and put a shirt on and came back and opened it again.
2) On Sunday we went to eat lunch with a member and they gave us rice with some sort of meat. I tried it and thought it was good. It tasted kinda like beef. Then after we left my companion told me that it was some sort of cow organ that we just ate. Its probably better that I found that out after.
3) There’s an elder that just got transferred to Esmeraldas that has a huge ponytail. He’s from otavalo and apparently if he cut his hair it would be like denying his heritage and really bad so they let the otavalo missionaries keep their long hair. They make all sorts of weird exceptions in the rules for them
Other than that not much else is new this week. I did manage to convince one of our investigators that I speak Chinese though. It’s this 12 year old boy named jordie that has an obsession with learning languages. He always asks me how to say something in Chinese and I just make some weird noise and he believes me. It’s kinda funny. Oh and it’s been raining a lot lately which is good because now the rivers are filling up and we don’t have power outages anymore but it’s bad because my shoes and clothes are getting destroyed by the mud. My companion slipped and fell in a bunch of mud, but luckily I haven’t done that yet.

Thanks to everyone that has sent me letters or packages. I loved getting them! I’m working on writing back. I’m gonna try and send some letters next week if I can get them all written.

This week has been really good. ON Saturday we had 2 baptisms. Rocio and Fernanda Martinez. Their baptisms went well (despite the fact that Rocio and to try 3 times before she was successful, I think she was scared to go under or something like that haha). Rocio is the mother of Fernanda and Adriana(one of the people we baptized on December 26th). I’ve been teaching them ever since I’ve been here. Adriana made a lot of friends in the church and gained a testimony really quick so she was a little easier. Rocio and fernanda on the other had were a bit harder. We challenged them for a baptism a few times and they didn’t really give us a straight answer. We finally ended up just going to an appointment with them and just bearing pure testimony that they needed to get baptized and that baptism is what God wanted for them. We found at that they were scared because all of there family is catholic and they didn’t know how their family would take it if they got baptized in our church. We just testified again and asked them to pray and ask if they should be baptized. We went back the next day and they said that they wanted to be baptized. So now the whole family has been baptized except for the Dad. Every time we try to talk to him he kinda puts up a wall. He’s a really nice guy, he just doesn’t like to talk about church stuff and it always seems like he just feels awkward when we try and talk about church stuff with him. But its nothing we cant take care of with a littler patience and longsuffering!

Ok I have a few scary stories this week:
1) On Monday night we were at an appointment when the energy went out. We were just finishing so the people asked them where we were going next so we told them that we were going to barrio unidos somos mas. Then they told us that we shouldn’t go there when the lights were at because it’s a dangerous area. We told them that we had god on our side and weren’t worried. So we went anyway. While we were walking to our next appointment we came around a corner and saw some people sitting outside on a curb. When we walked past them they started to sing/chant “Los mormonas, vamos a matarles” (the Mormons, we’re going to kill you). We just looked at them, smiled and waved, and kept walking. Then the next day we found out that 2 people had been killed in that neighborhood the night before. Haha it was kinda sketchy… (but don’t worry mom, there was never any real danger. I promise! We have the spirit with us which is the best protector you can find.)

2) On Thursday night I woke up to find a man standing right outside our window. He was tapping on the window so we went and opened the door. It was some random person that we didn’t know but he knew us. He said he was a member and that he needed money to get home. Anyways, long story short, he was begging for money and we had no idea how he knew where we lived or how he got in the gate in front of our house.
This week we were at a lesson with a 15 year old boy named jimmy. He told us he didn’t have that much time because he had a ton of homework to do and he had to wash the dishes and clean the house so we offered to help him out. We ended up doing the dishes and I thought it was funny because they only materials they had to clean were a sock and laundry detergent. Haha they definitely do things differently here.

Usually we never take dinner but on Tuesday we decided that we were hungry and wanted to. So we went back to our apartment. When we got there, there were 2 white guys knocking on our door. When they saw us they turned around and started speaking in English to us. It turned out that they were missionaries from some non denominational Christian church and were in our area knocking doors. We talked to them and got to know them a bit. One of them had been a missionary for 25 years and had been in Ecuador for 9 straight years. They started telling us about themselves and how they decided to be missionaries and stuff. I’m not gonna lie, I got a really creepy feeling when they were talking. It was weird. They said that god started talking to them when they were little and told them that they needed to be missionaries. I don’t mean to disrespect them or anything but I just knew that they weren’t serving God. It reminded me of the story in the book of Mormon where Korihor says that and angel came and told him to preach against Christ but really it was an angel of the devil. I think its like alms 30 or something like that.

On Wednesday we went on divisions with the Zone leaders and the one I was with told me what was going to happen next week when we have changes. I don’t know if he has inside info or if he was just guessing so I’ll have to wait till next week to find out. I’m still hoping the president gets inspired to send me to Quito where I can feast on McDonalds, pizza hut, taco bell, ect… everyday. Haha I get to go to Quito tonight though so i´m excited about that. I have to take all the new missionaries back to get there documents to stay in the country.

Thanks to everyone that wrote me a letter or sent me something. I’m trying to write back as fast as a can! I love you all!

This week went well. On Monday Elder Lopez and I went on splits with the APs (they were here for zone conference) and they helped us out a lot. We were able to finally get one of our toughest families to commit to baptism and we made a lot of other progress with some other inactive families.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we had zone conference and that was good. It felt like it was missing something though because President Sloan wasn`t there. He`s still trying to recover from his surgery but one of the APs told me that he`s been doing really well and they`re expecting him to be there for the next set of zone conferences.
Our ward just started a home teaching program which we`re really excited about. The biggest problem here is that there are like 500 members but only like 40 to 60 show up to church everyweek so we`re hoping that the home teaching program can help to reactivate some of the inactive members. We`re been visiting a lot of inactive members lately as well. A lot of them have testimonies and good desires but they just don’t act. I think its because the culture is so lazy here. No one wants to wake up on early on Sunday morning to go to church.
This week we started on a service project for an inactive member named hermana mina. She doesn`t have any running water in her house and she doesn`t have a lot of money so we`ve been talking with a contractor to try and get the materials as cheap as possible and then we`re going to do all the labor. She is short by about 30 bucks right now so we`re just waiting for her to find enough money so we can start. I wish I could just give her 30 bucks but it’s against mission rules to just give money to people so I can`t. But I guess important for people to learn to provide for themselves.

On Saturday we had a baptism. Her name is Nicole. We`ve been teaching her for a while and shes wanted to get baptized for a long time but there were a few obstacles that we had to get over. At first her dad didn`t want her to get baptized. We had to talk to her mom and her mom said it was ok and since she doesn`t live with her dad that was all that we needed. Then it was hard for her to get to church a lot of the time because there would always be parties at her house on Saturday night so she wouldn`t be able to sleep and didn`t wake up in time for church. But eventually she got to church enough times so she could be baptized. It might be hard for her to stay active since she doesn`t really have much support from her family but one of her best friends is a member and has been helping her a lot. We`re teaching her mom but she has a lot of problems that she has to get over that are going to be challenges.

This week we have 2 more baptisms- Rosio and Fernanda. Rosio is the mom of Adriana (the girl we baptized a couple weeks ago) and Fernanda is her sister. We`ve been teaching them ever since I got here so its exciting that they finally decided to be baptized. Now we just have to baptize the dad (the dads are always the hardest part) and the whole family will be members. I`ll let you know how it all went next week!
Thanks to everyone that sent me something for Christmas or any other letters! It makes my day every time I hear from someone back home. You guys are awesome!