Soles are a little thin!

Puttin' on the miles!

Hello family,

Thank you for the picture.  Did you go there as a family?  I really have no idea what you have been up to for the last month or so.

Well, this makes Week Two back with the Guayacos.  It sure is a lot easier to get lessons here.  Elder Sanchez is a big fan of the door approach.  The only investigators that we have right now that we are making progress with are the ones left over from the hermanas (sister missionaries).  One family, the familia Rodriguez, was close to being baptized with the sister missionaries, but now are not sure they want to get married any more.  She has a big testimony and loves the sisters but told us the other day that she realized her partner is not quite the man of dreams.  He has a drinking problem, too. 

Delicious Cerviche de Concha Negra.  My first cerviche ever!

We had a lot more success with the familia Brown.  They are a brother and sister who live together.  We have mostly worked with the sister, Shirley.  Her brother is a little harder to get a hold of since he owns his own business outside of Guayaquil.  We had a really good lesson with the bishop, though.  He did a really good job of explaining his calling in the church and also talked about the church in the community.  He wasn’t ever a full-time missionary, but he is able to teach and still make it feel like a conversation.  He was able to get Hermana Shirley to open up a lot more than we had been able to in the past.  She talked about experiences in her life which lead her to hold her current beliefs, many of which agreed with ours, making an excellent opportunity for us to testify that she could know the truth of the other things we were teaching her by the same spirit that lead her to believe the other things she already believes and holds dear.  We knew that Hermano Brown likes karaoke so when we passed by their house and heard him singing, before our appointment, we said, "We have come to sing with Hermano Brown."  They invited us in and we had a good time playing with their karaoke equipment.  Hopefully this will have strengthened our relationship with them and they will give more attention to the commitments we leave them.

Anyways, Elder Sánchez and I have been getting along pretty good.  We have little rough times now and then, pero el ha dejado de ser tan machetero.  His new thing is beginning each idea by saying, "I think I am receiving revelation."  I am afraid pretty soon he will begin a sentence "Thus sayest the Lord".  Oh well.  I think he got it from Elder Nash during our conference.  The conference was really good.  We are going to have another Seventy, Elder Cabrera, come for our stake conference this 15 de Mayo.  I am looking forward to it.

Well, we have the call home Number Two coming up.  I think we can do it the same.  We can just do the pre-call so I can give you the number and what time they want us to make the call.  I look forward to hearing from you all soon.  Much love,

Elder Ludlam

Back in the Horno! (oven)

Hello Family,

Guess what!  I just got transferred back to Guayaquil!  My new area is called Los Almendros in la zona La Pradera.  Elder Sánchez, my old district leader, is my new companion.  We got here on Friday and have been getting to know the members and the sector.  I am opening another area that the sisters had just left and, yes, there are girl shoes all over the place here, too.

Goodbye to Elder Nuñez

Up in the Sierra, I had almost forgotten how different everything is here in the Costa.  I had forgotten the Guayaquil accent, the food, and everyone's general attitude towards life.  Last night, we were walking around when we ran into a member and her daughter, who offered to accompany us for a few lessons.  They were so happy and eager to help and participate in the obra misional (missionary work) you never would have guessed that they were recent converts of only a few months.  Fellowshipping is something they do really well here.  It was certainly refreshing to meet the ward at sacrament meeting.  It made me more eager to go find more investigators, point to the members and say, “Don’t you see what you can become?”  They are just happy.

This week we are having the Area Seventy come to talk to the mission.  We have a big chapel clean-up planned for this Wednesday so everything will be ready for when he comes.  I am preparing myself mentally for the long dark mail-less night that I know I can expect.  It will probably be a few weeks until they stop sending my mail to Cuenca and another few weeks to send it back to the office and then send it to my new area.  Oh well.

We had a cockroach problem here because we forgot to take out the trash

Recently it started to rain buckets and we took shelter under the gate of the member we had just visited.  A large part of our area is a navy vets-only neighborhood, so there are some pretty moody guys here, one of which is the husband of the member, who is also very antagonistic to the church.  He kept on telling us to get a taxi and get off his property, but Elder Sanchez kept on trying to start a conversation with him through the gate.  I thought to myself, "This guy is going to punch your lights out and I am just going to laugh."  But what surprised me was eventually the vet started to open up and started telling us about the different years when the neighborhood had flooded and how high the water got and we waited for the rain to let up.  I had misjudged the man and through some way, completely inconceivable to me, Elder Sanchez had been able to touch his heart. 

My bed

I don’t know how things were in Argentina, Mom, but here the rain here is kind of magical.  It is the only time anyone turns off the heat.  I am now finally able to understand why Gene Kelly liked dancing in the rain, something I never was able to understand growing up in the Northwest.  I used to think this guy is pretty twitterpated if he doesn’t mind that he is going to freeze to death.

I wait to hear from you soon (or not).

Love, Elder Ludlam

Ding! Watching the light go on!

Farewell to Elder Carillo, front farthest right

Hello Fam Fam

Elder Sanchez and Elder Palacios fix their knot

We just taught a new family, la familia Quesada.  We kind of got shanghai-ed into helping them move.  They just moved into our area the week of general conference.  After morning session of conference last week, our district leader approached us and said, "Hey, we have a reference for you of a really great family in your area", which I guess is Huancayano for "Do you have three hours to help us move one of our investigators?"  They are two young parents who have been most interested in having the spirit in their home as the raise their children and are long time friends of some members from the area they just moved from.  They want to know what their friends did to raise such well-centered children.

Bienvenidos to Cajas National Park

We also had another really good lesson this week with a family named Flores.  They have a big family who all like to listen to us but it is really their 17-year old son, Cristian, that is the most interested and has been the most diligent completing the reading we leave him.  This particular week we had left Alma 32.  The focus of our lesson was to realize why the restoration was so important and encourage them to seek a testimony of the Book of Mormon.  As we were explaining the personal commitment necessary to receiving an answer to pray, Cristian said, "This is kind of like my reading you gave me, you elders have come here and planted a seed, but if I want to know if it good seed, I need to nourish it by praying, studying, and going to church."  Ding.  I love watching the little light go on in the investigators eyes when they make the little different connections.  Yes, Cristian, that is exactly what you have to do.

Anyway, today we just had a fun zone activity.  We went to a lake called Cajas about an hour out of Cuenca.  Most people go there to fish.  We have wanted to go up there for a few months, but the office just now gave us the permission to go as a whole zone.  There is an abuelito in one of the families we eat lunch with who has wanted to go for a while.  He thinks Elder Badger promised to go with him during our week-long interchange.  Every time we come over for lunch, he asks us when the elder from Azogues is going to come again.  "I got the car and the poles all ready to go whenever you are ready."

Our bus had to stop on the way back to town
 to wait for a llama crossing

We are hoping for some mail tomorrow.  We have a new zone leader coming in, but we don’t know who it is yet.  Our other zone leader just left today for Guayaquil to go pick him up.  The plan is for him to pick up our mail off the desk of the comisionario so we don’t have to wait for him to send it to us.  Hope to hear about how your conference went. 

Zona Cuenca

Until next week,

Mister Elder

Realms of Esoteric Thought

Hello everybody,

The paquete de marzo (March package) got here last week.  A little more timely than the last one.

Well, it was another great Conference.  I was a little worried it would not be the same listening to a translation because the translators just don’t flow like the original speakers do.  It was actually pretty cool, because most of the Spanish-speaking general authorities all pre-record their talks in Spanish, so it is like listening to them actually give the talk.  Elder Scott did his in Spanish.  I knew he spoke Spanish, but this was the first time I actually listened to his speaking in Spanish.  He sounds the same as when he speaks English.  It is weird, because whenever I read one of the old conference addresses in the Liahona, I still hear the voices of the original speakers in my head, except they are speaking in Spanish.  It is rather strange.

We taught a lawyer this week.  It was a different experience than the average lesson.  It is nice to have the confidence that the investigator is going to leer y meditar (read and meditate).  Every once in awhile here in Cuenca you run into some professor or other well-read person.  Usually they just want to compare Mormonism against the other religious philosophies of the world.  I can’t remember what we were talking about, but our investigator said something about how our beliefs differed from nihilism and I remember thinking, "Well that’s an insight I will never hear on my mission again." 

I have to admit, I was a little more than willing to discuss Nitzche, Des Cartes, Freud, and the like.  We jumped around a little bit.  He had actually talked with the missionaries before, so he was ready to jump into what I think we can consider "deep doctrine."  "So if God created more worlds than ours, doesn’t that make it necessary to have more than one Savior.  That is what the Kabbalists believe."  Elder Nuñez and I just kind of looked at each other and said, "We really don’t have any specific doctrine on that, the Lord has not deemed it necessary to reveal that to us at this time.  But you know what he has revealed..."  (I think that is Judaism, anyways)  If he is really interested in that question, he can bring it up in a High Priest group meeting.  I am sure he can find many people with definitive opinions on the matter.

Anyways, back out of the realms of esoteric thought ...

I hope to hear from you all tomorrow if we get mail at district meeting.  Looking forward to writing again next week!

Love, Elder Nannel