08/31/2015
Today was a simpler PDay and we just went to the church offices to grab some things and ate some food. We haven't done too much else and probably will just relax until the P day ends and go and teach some lessons. Still we did some cool things. My companion hit the one year mark in the field like a couple days ago. He didn't burn anything though, so I guess he is unique. Granted at his 6 month mark he burned a shirt that was extremely damaged as he was attacked by a dog. That was cool to see him hit one year.
The weather is pretty constant here. I think it rains sometimes at night but we have yet to have it rain during the day. The weather does stay the same mostly throughout the day with a lot of cloud coverage sometime which is so strange. Still I think we might have some rain later on in the year but right now it is technically winter here. I think they get more rain during their summer. Quite honestly though their seasons are based on rain and not the names of the seasons. I still don't know the names of the seasons in Spanish as they really don't have seasons here.
I have learned quite a few jergas (slang words) from some people and also some local words. The family we eat with and some of the missionaries use a lot of the jergas. Also they are not so formal here. You shake hands with ward members usually but with missionary to missionary or to someone you are more familiar with they oftentimes do like fist bumps of high fives of combinations of the such which is really interesting.
My feet are doing relatively fine although I might need to get my toe cut because it is starting to develop an infection. It bugged my in the MTC but I did a treatment on the advice of the doctor and the treatment worked and it was fine. Then one day here it got irritated then Bam! Infection. I believe the mission would pay for the treatment in this case as it happened in the mission and it wasn't really preexisting as it was completely healed then got un-fun. Both sets of my shoes are broken in and I ensure to keep them nice and polished (one of the things I had to learn how to do. That little book from Pomeroy's was really helpful) and I learned how to sew rips in my pants because one of my pants got a hole in it. That was neat to do.
This last week we had immense success. We got several new investigators and had 5 assist to church although we should've had 10 as we have some very solid investigators. We did some great contacting and one thing that surprisingly worked very well was doing an invitation to baptism in each first lesson. We thought it was completely dumb but we started really doing it well this week and we saw immense success. Plus we have investigators with a baptismal date that kept the date. We had one new family called the Family Rivera and the mother is awesome. She basically said to us in one lesson that she wanted to be a member of our church. She was one person who went to church. her daughter has a few problems. She is 16 and fell in love with a cop. Well she then decided to go to this cop to a hotel room and majorly break the law of chastity. Now she is in a lawsuit with the cop but he has a very nice lawyer because all the other cops are helping him out. Thing is he broke the law but this is a cop we are talking about. Taking a cop to court and having a lawsuit about that sort of thing is just bad. She needs some work. She in one lesson asked what happens when we break the law of chastity too much. So we have a few things to teach her still. But the mom is great. So yeah that was one of our investigator families.
We have another set with a couple that live together but aren't married (very common here) but they were very accepting. They are Javier and Erika. They are a very good couple with 3 kids so it is strong. They asked in one lesson if they had to get married before the 19th (the baptismal date for them) so they are very good. They are very accepting and are thinking a lot about marriage. They assisted as well with their children. I believe we will have a marriage date for them soon.
That is some of the investigators. We did have to drop a few people unfortunately but we keep looking.
Now the highlight of this week was our conference with President Soares. He was awesome and talked about why we are here in Quito. It was awesome to hear him and there were a ton of missionaries in the chapel with him. He was great and I got to shake his hand and in Spanish he said "Bueno repuesto, Elder" as I had answered one of the questions. Trust me standing up in a hall of a couple hundred missionaries facing someone who could be one of the twelve one day was a tad nerve wracking. But it was awesome. He was asking about why we were here and I talked about intelligences and being chosen and saved. So awesome and scary at the same time. We got to hear him for 2 hours and the conference was a blast. That was so great.
Look forward to hearing from you again,
Love
Elder Throop
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