Hello Again!

This week sure has flown by!  First of all, Happy Birthday to Nate!  Hope it all went well!  Glad to hear everyone is managing just fine.  School is almost out isn´t it?  That´s pretty weird to think about, so I´m not going to.  Ha!

We baptized Nicól and Andrés this week.  Nicól on Saturday morning, which went well!  I remembered her entire name too!  It´s a bit tough here, because all the names are so long!  Saturday turned out to be an interesting day.  Some old guy was being weird on the bus, and we couldn´t figure out what his deal was.  We discovered later that he had stolen Elder Fuentes´ phone, so that kind of made things hard for the day.  When we finally got the baptism service started, Andrés was a no-show.  We couldn´t figure out what was up with that, so we just baptized Nicól and went on with the day.  Afterwards, for about 3 hours, every single one of our appointments fell through.  That was a long afternoon.  Finally, we decided to call Andrés from a phone booth, and visited him that evening.  Turns out his hard-core Catholic aunt had locked him in the house to keep him from going to his baptism!  I´ve heard of opposition when a baptismal date is set, but that´s just ridiculous!  Luckily the bishop approved us to do it Sunday afternoon, so it all worked out.  Anyway, that was my weekend.  Absolutely crazy!  I´ll send some pictures of us.  (The bishop also threw a party in his office while we were filling up the font.  I think we have the coolest bishop in Ecuador!)

We´ve been finding some more families since we just had two baptisms.  Not too difficult, plenty of great people around here.  The teaching has been getting easier, and I have been understanding more.  The only difficulty right now is that my companion wants to do the following division with the ward missionaries:  He goes and visits some active members, while I go and teach some co-habitating investigators about the law of chastity.  I´m not too keen on that, since it´s a really big deal and I still have trouble getting the full gist of the conversation.  Hopefully that all works out!  We went and played some volleyball with the members this morning.  They only have 3 players on each side, and they use a soccer ball.  A little more intense!  It was basically a big party with a lot of the ward.  They´re great. 

No strange food this week.  Just this weird drink one of the members gave us.  It just about did me in!  The headaches the next morning were pretty bad too.  Just kidding.  But really, it was not a fun walk back to the apartment!  I found pancake mix at the store today.  I´m a very happy missionary right now.  I have also discovered ´oritos´, little bananas that are really sweet tasting.  Dirt cheap too.  I´ll send a picture of them as well because they´re just that awesome. 

That´s all for now, I think!  Congrats on the scholarship Aaron!  Hope that went well.  The food was fabulous if I remember correctly.  Hopefully the speeches weren´t as long and as boring as they were three years ago!  Everybody take care!

Love,
Spencer