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