Week 22

Hey! How is everyone doing? Did you guys have a good Christmas?

I am doing good! It was another good week here in Piñas. We taught and invited a lot of people! Every single day we focused on inviting 8 or more people to be baptized. Not very many said yes, but we found a couple of people that we can teach. One is a pretty good family that hopefully will decide to be baptized. We continue to work hard if we could only get a little help from the members we could have some baptisms! 

Christmas was good. We talked to our families without any problems and then had to be inside by 7 so the day went by fast. We will have to be in early on New Years eve as well so we will probably have another week go by pretty fast. There is not a lot of things to write about for this week.  

Yesterday we got a call in the night and Elder Margos got transferred, so this morning we went to Guayaquil to go drop him off and pick up my new companion. We had like a 10 hour bus ride so it has been quite a long day. My companion is now Elder Polloc he is from Washington. We now have a house of 4 gringos. I don't know if that has ever happened before so it should be pretty fun! Well I hope everyone has a great New Years! 

Love, Elder Sorensen

Week 21 Merry Christmas!

Hey! 

It has been a very very good week here in Ecuador! Not really very successful but definitely one of the best weeks here on the mission. 

The reason it was so good this week is because President Torres gave us a pretty great Christmas present. On Tuesday Morning we got a phone call that we needed to pack up an extra pair of clothes and get to Guayaquil because we were going through the Temple on Wednesday. So we got our stuff all packed hopped on a 6 hour bus and made our way to Guayaquil. Not only was the temple super super cool but I saw a lot of the people from my district and it was nice to catch up with them. We had like 4 zones that went through so there was quite a bit of us. The temple has like its own hotel right outside of it so we slept there on Tuesday night.  In the morning we went through the temple than hopped back on the bus to get back to Piñas. It was quite a journey, but a lot of fun. Wednesday night was also the Barcelona Emmelec game. It ended in a tie, but it was 1 to 0 for Emmelec in the last few minutes I guess that Barcelona scored, and the city erupted in cheers. It was at like 945 so we were getting ready for bed, and it was pretty crazy to hear the screams. On Sunday they played again for the Championship. Emmelec ended up winning. We were in our Consejo de Rama while the game was going on but you could tell when it ended because for the next 60 minutes we heard nothing but car horns. It was pretty crazy. 

The rest of the week was kind of a tough one though. We invited 8 people to be baptized everyday and a lot of them said yes. But on Sunday the day where you find out if they are serious or not, they did not show up. The family we are teaching went on a trip and so they could not show up either. It was kind of a bummer, but at the same time we ended the week feeling pretty good. This week we did everything possible to get people and investigators to church, but they always have their agency to choose whether or not they will go. 

Sunday was a good day in church though. The 4 missionaries  here had the talks, so we all gave talks on Christ. There is not very many members here so the missionaries I guess usually have a talk once a month. It went pretty well and I hope that most of them got my message. 

Well That is about all for this week. It has been a week of hard work. We are doing all we can and thats all we can do. Looking forward to a great Christmas week and I hope that everyone has the best Christmas yet!

Love, Elder Sorensen

  Temple Trip - Back with some Elders from the MTC.  They look so Happy!

Sunrise in Ecuador

Week 20

Hey! How is everybody doing? It has been another great week here in Piñas! We have been working hard and found a couple more people to teach! Hopefully we can bring them all to church this Sunday!

 

Last Tuesday we found a family to start teaching.  They  have 2 kids. Their daughter is 12 years old and she is very smart. She has read the entire Bible. I don't think there are many 12 year olds that have done that! They also have a 5 year old boy that loves to play soccer. We taught them a little on Tuesday, but then had a lesson with them on Friday. It was a really good lesson. It was really the first time that I have a had a lesson where a whole family has just sat down and listened. It was really cool to finally be teaching a complete family. They were not able to go to church this Sunday, but we are hoping that they will be able to make it this next Sunday. We have plans to go teach them tomorrow with the Branch President, so it should be a very good lesson. 

We also have been teaching like a 23 year old guy named Avanto . He is one of the members best friends. He was not able to make it to church this week because he went to the Barcelona game in Quito, but hopefully we can get him this next week. He is reading the Book of Mormon and has a lot of questions, so that is always good! 

 

The is also a pretty cool thing going on in Ecuador this Wednesday. If you guys all want to be doing the same thing as every Ecuadorian will be doing this Wednesday night you can watch the Barcelona and Emmelec  Soccer game. It is the championship of the Ecuadorian League and not very often the 2 teams meet up for the Championship. When they play in the regular season it is pretty crazy so it will be super crazy when they are playing in the finals! They play this Wednesday and Saturday. Whenever one of the teams scores the entire city erupts with roars. It is pretty cool to see how passionate they are for these 2 teams!

 

Not really much going on other than these things. We had a lot of lessons with Antonio too. I had a good conversation with him for about 45 minutes just him and I. It was pretty cool to be able to talk with somebody in a different language, and actually understand it for the most part. I can't wait to see how my Spanish will be in another couple of months!

Well that is all for this week everyone have a good week! Christmas is close!

Love, Elder Sorensen

Khristian sent  these pictures but didn't say what kind of fruit it was.  So of course I googled it-  I think it is called a Granadilla.  It was from one of the member's tree. 

 

Week 19

Hey guys!

I hope that everyone has had a great week! I sure have! We capped it all off with a great baptism for Antonio and a branch activity!

Through the first part of the week we worked very hard to find new investigators.  It is  hard to find people here in Piñas. We walk from one members house to the next trying to find new investigators, but with no luck. This week the members kind of took the week off, so we did not have much success,  but we did find a couple of new people to teach. Hopefully they will agree to a baptismal date soon. They all said that they want to hear more before they will agree to a date. We worked our tails off from Monday to Friday. I have never walked up and down so many hills. My calves will be pretty strong after I am done here!

On Saturday we had the baptism for Antonio. It was a pretty crazy day because one hour before the baptism it started to pour rain. We were all the way down at one end of our zone and had to keep walking just to make it back to the church for Antonio's baptism at 7. We kept walking and walking in the rain and it kept raining and raining. By the time we got to the church we were soaking wet. You would have thought that we had already baptized somebody! The baptism went great! Everything went good. I got all of the words right and then he was confirmed yesterday. He shared his testimony after he was baptized and it was really cool to hear how much he has grown since the first lesson he had with us. Elder Margos and I learned how hard work and diligence pays off. Our first visit with him he tried to give us back his Book of Mormon because he said he did not want the book and he wanted to be Jehovah's Witness. But we told him just to read the Book Of Mormon and ask which he should join. Our next visit with him 3 days later he was super happy and he agreed to his baptismal date. It was really a good lesson to learn and to see how hard work can pay off.

There is not really much more to talk about. The Ward activity was really good we just played a whole bunch of games. The members were supposed to bring their friends but they kind of slacked off on that so it was only the members but they had a pretty good time. The missionaries were the judges for the different games. It was pretty fun! Well I hope everyone has a great week!

Love, Elder Sorensen

4 Months!

Hey Everyone! 

How is everyone doing? I am doing great here in Piñas. It has been another great week and a fast one as well. We taught a lot of people, walked up and down a lot of stairs, and ate some good food. 

 

First off, our investigators are all doing pretty good. Antonio  will be having his baptism this Saturday and we are all super excited for it, and he is as well! It is very nice to see how happy he is for it. At church yesterday he went to all three hours and after church some of the members were going to a fireside in Machala, he was asking everyone if he could go with them because he wanted to listen to more talks. Saturday will be a really cool baptism. Our other baptism for Saturday fell through a bit, but hopefully we can get him baptized another day. We are teaching some other investigators but they don't have any dates down for baptisms yet. 

 

Last night we had a family home evening with Antonio, since none of his family lives near him. We just talked to him shared some messages, and went through the baptismal interview questions, so he would know what to expect tomorrow. He made us these things that are smashed up verdes (like a green banana) with some Mani (kind of like peanut butter but not as good) You mix them up then put them into big huge balls that are the size of softballs. I could not eat all of mine because it was sooo big! We had some kind of chocolate drink that tasted pretty weird. I drank it really fast just to get it down, but than he saw that I had no more so he made me more. The people here are so kind to make sure that we have food always! 

 

The weather here was pretty rainy, but really the rain is like walking through misters so it feels really nice. They all think it is freezing cold when it rains, but I think it is perfect. I wish it would feel that way all the time .We also had some good food this week. For Thanksgiving we bought a Pizza, so that was our Thanksgiving meal!  I think we had Pizza like 3 times this week. It is 2.50 for all of us so it is the same price as the restaurants and a lot better. It is our one break from rice. For every other meal we have rice. Luckily it is not too bad. 

 

That is about it for this week. It has been very nice to see how the Lord has prepared Antonio for us and how accepting he is to our message. We have really been blessed to be able to teach such a great guy. I hope every one has a great week and I will have some pictures of his baptism next week! 

Love,

Elder Sorensen

 

Giant Snail