Conference, General Authorities and Political Protests

Hey Mom and Dad,

That’s way neat that Zach Baldwin is home. Man I can´t believe he´s already back home. Seems like just yesterday he was leaving on his own mission. I have so much respect for converts who serve missions. Seems that would be so much harder. My whole life it´s always just been the expectation that when I turn 19 I´ll serve a mission. I´ve had Robbie and Ryan 's example and Dad always talked about his mission. But, when those who are recently baptized, without that support decide to serve, that´s an amazing thing. That´s fun he bore his testimony in Spanish and then another member did. It´s definitely a great language :P (Speakin´ of which I found a fun statistic that spanish\english speakers can speak with 75% of all the members of the church, while english can only speak with about 55%. Just thought that was nifty :)

Ok, so I just realized I only have 20 minutes left so I´d better start writing about all the awesome\crazy things that happened this week. Firstly, we had Zone conference on Wednesday in Guayaquil. It was awesome, as zone conferences always are, lol. One thing that made this zone conference even more inspiring was because Elder Rafael Pino, who´s the 2nd counselor in the Area Presidency of South America Northeast was there. It was amazing when he walked in during Hma. Gamboa´s presentation she asked us all to stand up. Then, before he spoke he asked to be able to shake hands with us all first. So we lined up and shook his hand. He said he always loves meeting missionaries. It was neat because I remember a few months ago there was an area broadcast via satelite in the Stake center when Pres. Packer spoke. He was also there and spoke. His message to us was really just keeping the vision of our calling. We read D & C sections 15 and 16, which were two revelations given for men going to serve missions, and even though they were exactly alike, they were intimately personal callings. The only difference between them were the names and that´s something we should remember. He said that when there’s an emergency and something bad happens to a missionary, the First Presidency wants to know as soon as possible. For that we´re a unique group. It really just reminded me of a football pep talk. Something that I think we can all use every once in a while. I´m not sure if he´s actually a general authority like I wrote in the subject of this email, but I thought it fit for a good title :)

Then after that, we had an exciting day on Friday, lol. We were going to have the District meeting that morning but then Pres. Gamboa called around 7:30 that morning and asked to speak to Elder Peters, the Zone leader. It wasn´t until I handed the phone to Elder Peters that I realized it was kind of odd that the president was calling us that early, lol. Well to say the least Elder Peters then told us that we weren´t having the meeting, but had to stay in the house until 2:00 and he then called the rest of the missionaries to tell them. Yeah, that fun exciting feeling that gets your heart pumping. Apparently President Gamboa got news of a strike and thus wanted all the missionaries to wait until after mid-day, or possibly the whole day. We found out later that also in the morning hundreds in big cities like Quito and other countries came out with signs in protest. So yeah, if that wasn´t fun enough, we realized that the missionaries from Playas already left so me and Elder Cordovas had to go out to the church to give them the news. I joked that maybe we should go out in street clothes because we don´t want to attract too much attention in national emergencies like this. So we left and just went to the church and back. It was kind of a fun experience, lol. Nothing too interesting happened other than that.

But alright well I´m out of time so I´d better go. Thanks for everything! I got your package today! Thanks the american candy is great! as well as the cards for The Living Christ. They´ll help a lot! love you!

Love,

David