Mission Accomplished! Well, This One Anyway...

Well, it was a great week!  David got baptized!

Also learned some interesting things about the baptismal font here.  Like how the water heater doesn´t work too well. And how the water comes out yellow (good thing Elder Housley was the one getting in there!).  The baptism went pretty well though.  David was kind of nervous, but he´s doing great now!  He knew it was the right thing to do and now he is very happy for having done it.  Now we´re focusing on the Morales family, one that we found a couple of weeks ago.  The dad is very interested in what we share, and he really liked the Book of Mormon when we gave it to him.  We´re going to visit them tonight with Bishop Catucuago and his wife.  Apart from them, we´re working with Sister Castro and her husband.  Sister Castro is from Manabi (the coast) and happens to be our star mamita of the week.  She cooks so well!  Her husband is not a member, despite having known the church for some time and for being such a good guy.  We found out last night that he has seen some bad examples on part of the members, and is afraid of not being able to set a good example once he is baptized.  So we´re working with him.  Hopefully I will stay here for the rest of my mission to be able to see how he progresses.  

Thanksgiving was good. (Also send Alexis my slightly-belated birthday wishes before she leaves!)  It rained a lot, we knocked on lots of doors, and we also took an hour to have dinner!  With our limited resources and lack of eloquent cooking skills, we decided to have pancakes with kool-aid.  Also sliced bananas, wafer cookies, and oreos.  Not exactly traditional, but it filled me up for the moment!  I think we might see if we can arrange Christmas dinner with a member.  Who knows... this week we have transfers, so we´ll see what happens.  I just hope I don´t get changed again!  Kind of tiring.  I spend the first 17 months of the mission in 3 different cities, then the next 4 1/2 months in 3 more.  Interesting how that happens.  We shall see though!  I guess I had better talk to Elder Whitlock about van drivers.  Or I could just not send David´s baptismal record so that he´ll call me asking for it!  Maybe that´s not such a good idea.  Either way, thank you for writing me, and talk to you next week!

Love,

Elder Wallace

Thanksgiving Week!

Happy Thanksgiving in advance!  I hope it all goes well!

This week has been much better for us here in Conocoto.  We are working this week on baptizing David Calderón.  He´s 30 years old and lives with his grandma and his sister.  He already knows a lot about the church because his sister Paola served a mission in Kentucky.  All he lacks is making the decision!  He knows it´s all true, he´s just kind of nervous about trials and difficulties.  He´s really great though, and he´s getting more bold in his decision.  This week, he´s our main focus.  

The rest of my time this week has been largely dedicated to doing baptismal interviews and helping the other missionaries out with their investigators.  We´re also working to gain more confidence from the members.  Our ward mission leader is good, he gave a talk yesterday which was kind of boring until he started to go on about how the members need to do more and invite their friends to hear the missionaries.  He scored points with us, giving that talk!  We´re also planning a big movie night at the church for the 9th, which we hope gives the members an easy opportunity to invite their nonmember friends.  I liked when the bishop´s counselor announced, ´´the purpose of this activity is not for us to just party, but to bring all of our nonmember friends so that they can get to know the missionaries´´.  Glad he understood it so clearly.  The rest of our time is spent searching, searching, searching for new people.  Last Tuesday we decided to go out to the ward limits to a community we´d never been to in order to search for people.  A very filthy rich community.  And a very bad idea.  I guess they deserve their chance as well.  Not terribly time-efficient though.  

We´ve been working a lot with the pre-missionaries as well as the returned missionaries.  We get the most support from them.  The most supportive is Nefi, who got back from his mission about 3 years ago.  He´s really great and we learn a lot from him.  He´s also helped us out a lot with David.  The ward is a lot better than I thought when I barely got here!  I guess it´s just what you make it.  We´re working to make it great!  The district is baptizing, and I got to baptize one of the sisters´ investigators this last Saturday!  (I´ll work on getting a picture of it to send!)  I just barely unpacked my camera so there should be more pictures coming your way!  I´ll send some next week!

Love,

Elder Wallace      

Conocoto

Well here we are again!

Conocoto is kind of off to the side of Quito.  It takes us about 30 minutes to get to the main city.  We went there this last Friday to listen to one of the seventy, Elder Uceda.  He was a great speaker, and we learned a lot from him.  I was even one of the missionaries that he interviewed!  A very short and simple interview, but powerfull.  He counseled us all to work more effectively with the members.  Brother Rivera, the high council member in charge of the mission work, talked with us yesterday and told us of his plan to whip all the members of the ward into shape and get them working.  Needless to say, I was happy to speak with him, and I´m glad we have leader support here.  

This week we´ve been getting to know this area!  My companion, Elder Housley, has only been in the area for two weeks, and has only been in the mission for two months.  He´s from Draper, and we´ve been getting along great!  He likes to sing, so we´ve been singing to people at their doors to get them to accept us!  It´s worked pretty well so far.  It´s still a little early in the work for any stories, so it´s going to be short this week.  Sorry!  

In the meantime, I´m just working, hoping for a package (and that it didn´t get lost), and finishing strong.  More stories and pictures to follow next week!

Love,

Elder Wallace

On The Road Again...

Well hi!

First thing´s first... I´ve become the victim of ´´emergency transfers´´.  I´m in Quito again, in a place called Los Chillos.  It should be interesting.  My companion is Elder Housely, a newer missionary, and he´s from the states!  That´s the first time in my entire mission!  I´ll miss Ibarra, but I won´t be too sad because all of our progressing investigators got baptized and we´re in the process of getting more to progress.  I´m actually in the terminal right now, waiting for the missionaries to come get me!  So We´ll see how this first week goes.  I´m in charge of a district of 8 missionaries, but it´s in a zone that usually enjoys a lot of success.  Hopefully I can keep that up!

So my last week in Ibarra... we got Andrés confirmed, which was good because he was feeling pretty nervous.  Then we had a miracle in the other branch, where they had an investigator who wanted to get baptized.  So I interviewed her that morning, we baptized her while the sacrament meeting was going on, then we took her across the hall to get confirmed in the meeting!  Typical apostasy of the Ibarra district.  It´s what we do!

What else... I was on splits with the elders in Tulcán this last Friday, and we were searching for people in a little border town called Tufiño.  We crossed a bridge to get to a nearby neighborhood, and started talking with the people.  We asked one family if the Columbian border was close.  They responded, ´´You´re already in Columbia!  The border is back there!´´.  So that was my interesting experience of the week.  Wandering into Columbia by mistake. 

So I think that´s pretty much all for now.  I wouldn´t mind coming back to Ecuador a couple weeks after my release date.  It would be fun. 

Love,

Elder Wallace