Glad tidings of great sadness

Well, Glad tidings of great sadness.

Elder Johnson just called and informed me that he was not able to
conseguir (acquire) another ticket to go home in Sept so I will be seeing you
all very soon.  I have not been able to averiguar (find out) if I will be able to
write next Monday.

Loves,
Mr. Officially Trunky

Grant requests an extension

Dear Family,

How are you all this fine day?  Centenario has been great.  Contacts are a little hard, but we have great members to work with.  The houses are all practically fortresses.  In the richest neighborhood I was surprised to see that there were actually less security measures taken than in a regular Guayaquil house until I found the huge sniper tower in the park in the middle of the neighborhood.  Go figure.  But it is all really clean and safe, so don’t worry.  I am already missing the dark, scary streets of the Guayaquil I know and love.

Elder Ovalle's birthday with Elder Gomez and Chaque

This probably sounds funny, but I had the most exciting ward council I’ve ever had in my whole mission last week.  I have always wanted to learn to work with members better and could never figure out how to use well my time in ward council.  Usually all the different organizations say what they want, but then nobody really makes a plan to try and fix it.  I like how this ward had kept a record of all the assignments and problems from the last week and they all reported on if they had been completed or solved.  Everyone gave good reports on their assignments and everybody contributed great ideas on how to help people in their progress in the church.  It was exciting.  Everyone knew the investigators and was willing to help.  The only problem is that everyone has pretty tight schedules.  Our ward mission leader is also an ex-stake president and he’s great, too.  It made me not want to leave.

Which brings me to my next point.  I hope you all won’t want to kill me for what I am about to tell you.  Brother G decided he wasn’t quite ready to stop being a missionary and asked President Montalti if he could stay until the rest of his group left at the end of the month.  Elder Johnson is looking for a plane ticket right now.  We still aren’t sure if it is going to all work out, but I will try to get back to you later.  Please don’t be angry.

Recently, I have been trying to put into practice PMG's (Preach My Gospel Manual) advice to write all the commitments that you make in your agenda to verify if they are being completed the next day.  I have discovered a fascination for checking off tiny boxes.  It gives me such a sense of accomplishment when I get to take out my little red pen a make a definitive check or X.  Missionaries are weird.

Oh yeah, Elder Piño came to give us multi-zone conferences, so we got to have him up close.  I think pictures are soon to come.  ¿Was he president of Rosario, Argentina, before of after tu, mama (you, mom)?  He told me to say thanks to you for taking me to piano lessons.

An ATM machine robbed me $240 two weeks ago, so I’ve been trying to live on just $35.  It came down tight, but this month’s money came in and it feels so great.  Ice cream for everyone on me!

Well, I love you so!
Mr. Viktorly

Cordero Grosero is Transferred!

Changes!

It looks like I will be spending my last two weeks in Barrio Centenario.  My new companion's name is Elder Gómez de Guatemala, Guatemala.  I was glad to find they had a program here because this sector is known for being kind of hard.  They changed Elder "Arroyos" también (Brooks also).  He’s going to Loja.  He’s happy about that.

Elder Gomez.  Doesn't he look like German from the District 2?

Well, I wasn’t really expecting this, but I am glad to have one last area.  Elder Fares is taking over Solana.  We left him a few good people.  I don’t know why, but for a few days this past week, I was just really happy.  One night I just went to bed super content.  I just felt really good about what I had done and what I was doing.  The next day, I was all smiles.  It was weird.  I even got this really grumpy evangelica (evangelical) who is always brava con nosotros (contentious with us) to give me back a big toothy one.  You never would have known she had a pretty smile.  I’ve since calmed down to regularity, but it was a good lesson.  It seemed like everyone was so much more willing to pay attention to us when we were so downright cheerful.  Smiles open doors.

This past week, we’ve been trying to get this elderly gentleman to get married.  He is the grandpa and father of some members in the ward and has been attending forever but hasn’t ever accepted baptism.  We finally got him to accept, but then learned he needed to get married to a companion.  He doesn’t want to, but has been really interested another viejita (older sister) in the ward, so we thought we’d help them get together.  While all of this was going on, these past few weeks, Elder Brooks has been trying to get several pairs of pants redone.  The sewing guy we took them to took forever to get them done.  We later learned that he had also asked the very same viejita (older sister) to marry him, but she had said that he needed to join the church before she would consider it. We have suddenly found ourselves tangled in a very strange love triangle.  I’ve had lots of drama issues with converts and ward members, but I never thought it would be a problem for people in the 60-80 year old range.

Well, Elder Brooks still hasn’t gotten his pants back yet and has been trying to make plans for someone to get them to him all the way out in Loja.  I think he is going to have to do the exchange when Elder Piño of the Seventies comes to conference (he’s finally coming!)  Anyway, Elder Brooks and I had a good time singing, "Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match" as we walked through the streets these past few days.

As I’ve been trying to keep focused, I’ve realized I don’t think I really need to worry about what I will need to learn or gain here in the mission in order to be better prepared for the "after" life.  When I just focus on getting done what I need to do right now, then I will always have everything I need.  That scripture in Doctrine and Covenants 15 (vs 6) has popped into my head a lot this last week about what is of greatest importance to thee, is to bring souls unto Christ. “…the thing which will be of the most worth unto you will be to declare repentance unto this people, that you may bring souls unto me, that you may rest with them in the kingdom of my Father.” That is my anxiety-relieving thought for the week.

Well, love you so,
Love Elder Cordero Grosero (lewd-lamb)

South American Culture Story

A lot of parents here tape Virgin Mary stickers all over the packages to their missionaries here because then the postal people are too scared to open it up to steal stuff.  My companion's family sent him a huge box of candy, covered in virgin stickers a couple of weeks ago.

As we were walking around town, this lady sees the box from across the street and calls for my companion to stop.  She comes over and points to the box and says, "Can you please give me one of those?"  My companion asked what she wanted.  She said, "I want some of those stickers. Do you have any more in your box?"  My companion told her he didn't have stickers in the box.  "What do you have in box, then?" she asked.  "They are books about the Bible, aren't they? Can I have one, please?"  My companion said no, it's just a bunch of candy.  The woman looked at the ground confused for a second and then said, "Oh...can you please give me one?"  We gave her a Book of Mormon.

Plantains Ahead

Hello Family,

And still the move goes on.  I hope you are all hanging in there.  At least no one has had heat stroke this time.

Today a sister in the ward showed us how to make some Ecuadorian recipes.  We learned how to make colada, a drink with oatmeal, carrots, tomato, and Maracuyá. Delicious. We also learned how to make  menestra de lentejas. That’s something we eat almost every day and is a personal favorite of Elder Brooks.  She asked us what we wanted to learn, so I asked for these because I thought we could get the ingredients state side.  (I hope you are ready to eat a lot of plantains in the coming months)

Diego's Family.  We were surprised to see his inactive
father and mother, Angelica, at the baptism.

Here is a picture of Diego’s baptism.  He has been ready for a while, but we have waited because the zone leaders were worried about people supporting him because his entire family is inactive.  Here in the photo, they all came to support him at his baptism.  He has been going to seminary all by himself for almost two months now.

Diego was baptized by his cousin, Stalin Velastegui

We did pretty well this last week.  We got the family with the inactive dad to church and I think it was a really good experience.  His wife didn’t make it, but he brought one of his kids.  Gary and his son also made it (by himself) to church.  He is a cousin of some members and recently had an industrial accident.  Some ward members knew him from an out-of-church setting and were really happy to see him attending.  It was just proof that all the members are just loaded with references that they don’t want to give us.  Just kidding.  The missionaries need to find better ways of asking.

Love, Elder Ludlam

Divine Help

Happy Moving Day!

I hope these moving people don’t try and back the moving truck into the front of the house.  Or roll it into a ditch.  I hope you get some good sleep after all your journeys.

I like having p-day at four-day intervals.  I think I’ll have to write and tell the president we should change.  The other day he was asking if we’d like working a whole transfer without p days and then having a week of p days.  We used to have lunch every Monday, but it took up too much time, so we canceled and just ate in the house.  We weren’t sure how to make rice, so we asked a neighbor for help.  She got a kick out of it.

This past week we found an inactive guy.  He’s been a member most of his life until he started living with a nonmember.  She got him going to her church, so he hasn’t come for a while.  He was pretty happy to see us.  We taught her the restoration and it went pretty well.  Hopefully, our lesson today goes well.  We are still trying to find some good people.  We’ve been trying to improve the quality of our contacts by talking to the people awhile first before starting to teach doctrine because then we can know them better and say stuff that will be more meaningful for them.  So far it has felt like it has been working.  We had a couple good conversations at least. 

President has talked a lot recently about just enjoying yourself.  It is a privilege to be able to go out everyday and just look for good persons.  I have been trying to do that.  There have been times in the mission when I just enjoyed contacting and then other times it just feels like a chore.  I like listening to people.  It is true that really everyone has problems that they don’t know how to deal with and they need the perspective and hope that only the eternal gospel can give.  If I’ve learned anything on the mission, it is how to be a little more spiritually self-sufficient.  I hardly have all the answers, but at least I know where to look for them.

I have been trying to figure out why Elder Velasquez and I were able to have so much success together.  I have realized that there is no way I could ever have converted any of these people if I didn’t have divine help.  I guess this is really His Work and His Glory.  Sometimes we need to just take ourselves out of the picture.  So I guess now if I want to finish having helped some more people, the only way to do it is doing it His way.

Well, I was hoping to get some good pictures of the reunion and the move, but I can wait until next week.  Does this mean you’re not going to send any more DearElders?  I’d be careful sending any more letters because I’m not sure how long it’ll take to get here.  I don’t think the mission will forward mail.  Do we have a new phone number?  I need to tell Elder Johnson about my new address.

Love, the boy with lots of boxes of junk you just shipped across the continental U.S.

President gave us a new rule we can't post any pictures without permission on a blog.

Temple Trip!

Dear Family,

At the temple with Elder Brooks

When you’re on the road, will you get to check your mail?  How are all them Burnetts?  I am writing Thursday because we just had a special session in the temple today-- they changed preparation day.  It’s been since October or November since I last went.  We had a capacitacion with Presidente (training with the President) and we talked about teaching people, not lessons.  We practiced asking inspired questions to find people’s problems and then tailoring the lessons to fit their needs.

How is everybody all feeling?  I am guessing you are all pretty tired out.  I suppose you’ll get this when you get to NJ.  It will be two p days stacked up.

Disappearing Ink

Well, this past week, the Zone Leaders came and did a special study session with us about asking good questions and finding desafios (challenges) and not just jumping into a lesson, being more patient and relying more on the spirit to tell you what to do.  It got me really excited.  I guess that has just always been something I’ve wanted to learn to do real well so I want to make these last few weeks really count.  I feel like there is so much I want to learn.  It is 100% true what they say about the last part of your mission going by at light speed.  I remember going to bed one night thinking I had a little over a year and the waking up to find I only had six months left.  If you asked me, I couldn’t even tell you what I did in June.

I have been practicing being more assertive with my companion.  The only problem is that our entire program has tanked.  I don’t want to fizzle out at the end.  If I am going to end with any last baptisms, we need to find someone this week.  We have been trying hard to find someone.  Sometimes I feel like I’m that person who doesn’t know how to swim so when they fall in the water they start kicking and flailing and waste all their energy and then start thinking, "swimming is really hard."  Then they get a cramp. 

Hidden Message

I think another Elder may be sending you some photos.  I gave him Mom's email.  I´m not sure what he's going to send.  If you could forward them when you get them.

Now to answer my fan mail:

Hope you like these pictures of Fletcher's secret message.  I mailed him a letter once with "I heart Ecuador" written in invisible yogurt ink.  This is his response.

Love, Elder Grant