Great Tidings of Great Joy

Dear Family,

Great Tidings of Great Joy: The Peru package made it through after all.  Thank you for all your letters.  Even if they were all a little old, I was still glad to hear from you all.  I liked the Ecuadorean Hollow Kitty.

Well, Cuenca is quite different than the coast.  The people here all live faster lives and work all day, every day, which makes it hard to ever find people for a follow-up appointment or to work with the members.  This has been our biggest problem this week.  Elder Salvioli has been great to work with.  He keeps pushing us to try and fit as many appointments in as possible and is really good about setting goals and thinking of new ideas to improve how we work as a companionship and then following through with them.  We did a lot of contacting this week.  Up until now, I had not done too much contacting.  The only times would be when an appointment would fall through.  Right before I got here, Elder Salvioli and his companion cleaned out their list of investigators who were not progressing, so this week we rebuilt our program.  We have a lot of prospective future investigators that we have appointments with this week, so hopefully we will be able to focus on teaching people more than finding them.

To me, it seems like the people that we actually teach here are a lot more prepared to hear the gospel.  Either they don’t want anything to do with us or they are genuinely interested in what we have to say.  When we teach them the message of the Restoration and they hold in their hands the Book of Mormon, you can see in their eyes that this is what they have been looking for in their life.  In the coast, just about everyone would let you into their house to teach, but would never really listen to what you were saying.  The problem in Cuenca is that everyone here is die-hard Catholics.  They will accept Joseph Smith as a prophet of God, but insist they will still die Catholic.  So far we are teaching:

• Cristian, a young man who has been questioning if there is a God and if there really is a way to find happiness in this life.  Unfortunately, he will be out of town this week, so it will be a while before we can teach him again.
• Pedro, a chauffeur who has studied with many different religions, but has not found anyone who he felt really had the power to teach the true word of God.  He is willing to believe in the Restoration of the Gospel, but has told us that he is not going to just believe us simply on our word, but is going to pray for an answer from God (something that Elder Salvioli and I were more than agreeable to).  He asked us if there was a prayer service of ours he could attend to try and learn more about us.  “Well, as a matter of fact...”  Whoever said that extending commitments was tough? 
• Diana, one of Elder Salvioli`s old investigators who is dating an inactive member.



Cuy or Guinea Pig

• The family Hidalgo, who are ready to be baptized, but are still working on getting a visa so they can get their marriage license.  They are really excited about the church and keep asking for more doctrinal books to read.

These are the people we have had the best lessons with.  There was one other man, Sergio, who mistook us for his pastors.  We taught him the first lesson and he was receptive to the message, but I think his real pastors found out and now he doesn’t want to listen.  Hopefully he will still read the Book of Mormon to find out for himself.

The birthday girl, Hna Cedillo, cooking cuy

This week will be difficult because this is the week Ecuador is having their national census, which means that all the churches are going to be closed down.  We can’t leave our house all day Sunday.  We won’t be able to progress with any of our investigators until next week.  This week we are going to work on finding ways to confirm our appointments and to make sure our time working with members is well spent.  We had a few days where all our appointments we had planned with a member fell through and we had to just do contacting with the members. 

Right now, Monay is just a branch, so I don’t have the luxury of having a little fleet of ward missionaries at my disposal like in Machala.  Mostly we have worked with the Branch Presidency, who sacrifices a lot to be able to help us, but they still can only do so much.  They are building a chapel for Monay which should be ready in a few months.  They are hoping they can become a ward soon.

View from her parents' cabin

After I write to you, I will get to try my first Cuy.  A family in the branch wants to watch us cook our own cuy.  Cuy is only popular up here in the Sierra.  Now I can check this off of my Must-Do Ecuadorian checklist.  I still need to get mugged and to have banana related digestion problems.

Well, until next week, lots of love from your Andean brother.