Week 9

Hey Everybody!

Ecua-facts:

1. Nobody has car seats for toddlers and infants.
2. Nor is it illegal to have an entire family on a motorcycle, including infants.
3. Sometimes on the hills that are particularly steep, natives walk them zig zag style. Like you would on a hike. I tried it once, didn’t seem to help the breathless panting much.
4. Making 10 dollars a day is a decent living.
5. This is really more of a mission fact but they have their own lingo: To machete is to lecture.
6. Garbage day is Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You just leave it on the street, in some places they pick it up every day.
7. They don’t think there is any poverty at all in the United States.
8. They also think that North Americans are really racist too my companion always has to tell them that her sister is married to a black man. They are actually a lot more prejudice.
9. They aren’t big fans of flavor in anything, not just spicy. They don’t like too much of anything sweet, sour, spicy, salty. You name it! I just miss me some flavor!
10. All the pre-made Superbowl memorabilia for the Cardinals will be sold down here! Anybody want a Cardinals Champs T-shirt? Hehehehehe.

My cast is off finally! I’m am however, still on the crutches, but only until Friday, I’m very excited to get back to work! A broken ankle isn’t very much fun when you have work to do!
I’m not having any companion problems don’t worry, except I do feel bad that Sorensen is basically my glorified babysitter. That has got to be wearing on her. We still aren’t doing as much as we would like and were able to get out yesterday. There is a woman at the Cabina’s, like pay phones, and she has had a really difficult life. An abusive husband, major health problems, and her mother is dying. We taught her about a month ago but she kept standing us up after that. We had kind of given up on her as an investigator. However, the other day we were making some calls and she had her bible out and asked us what the verses were that we had shared with her. We were so excited and explained that they were in the Book of Mormon. Yesterday we were able to drop one off to her and tell her a bit more. Angel and Norma are some recent converts that are having some hard times, and we got to drop off their triples too! They were so excited! Triples down here are a little uncommon. Interesting fact for you- They don’t have the King James Bible down here so every member has a different version of the bible. The church is retranslating the Book of Mormon into Spanish right now and working on making a quad, which doesn’t exist in Spanish either. I also carried on a 3 hour conversation in Spanish with a member. My companion and I did splits so she could get some more work done. Our numbers aren’t great, it is still really hard and expensive for me to get around, I feel like I’m just blowing through money. Not really a great feeling!

We had zone conference this past week, they are so long, but always good. This one was all about how we had to have more faith in this mission so the Lord can work miracles. They also teach us how to make some sort of food every conference. I think that portion is mostly for the Elders, but we always get to sample. Cooking is hard down here because nobody has ovens, they don’t even have microwaves so we can’t live off of hot pockets! Just kidding, eww. We really do eat a lot of Raman noodles, we have some pretty creative ways of cooking them though. Then we get some training from the Assistants from Preach My Gospel. The best part is when you go to President’s class full of doctrine. Then there is always some sort of activity. Last month is was tug-o-war, this month we played red light, green light. Then they sing Happy Birthday to all the people who have Birthdays this change, I tried so hard to get out of that but I didn’t succeed. At least I got some Peanut Butter M&M’s out of it! Then a Testimony meeting, then we get to close at around 5 o’clock, it takes so long!