Dear Mom and Dad,
I´m glad it sounds like you´re having a good time in Arizona with Robbie and Kristen enjoying the heat. And wow over 100 degrees all week, that is pretty intense. Here we usually get around 30-32 degrees Celsius, which I think is the mid 80s, lol. But yeah we´re used to it by now. It was funny in the Conference someone mentioned the fall and changing colors of the leaves and we thought “whoa, leaves change colors in the fall?” lol then we fondly remembered the cool season of fall :P. an wow that’s neat you´re going to give a presentation on the Abigail Adams project. Who are you going to be presenting to? Members of the group or other people? Good luck! I´m sure it´ll go great. That´s sweet you bought a projector to do it. I´d imagine a projector will come in handy all the time with those presentations and just other activities. Nearly every zone conference we have the assistants use a projector as part of the presentations.
And yeah Conference was definitely amazing! It was nice our bishop set up a TV in the High Council room for us gringos to watch Conference in English, lol. So we got to enjoy conference in air conditioned comfort to ourselves :). The funny thing was there were almost the same amount of latin elders as Americans watching. We have three Americans in the zone so we were all in there, but also Elder Godinez wanted to try watching in English because he´s been studying English and has gotten fairly good. Also there are two other latin missionaries, one who is all but fluent in English and the other also knows a good amount who joined us watching in English. We had a good time watching in English. And yeah I loved how they spoke a lot of following the prophet, twice mentioning those 14 points of a living prophet. I liked how a lot was focused on the one, on the individual, one each and every member of the church and their responsibility in living this gospel. It also caught my attention who three times they mentioned that story of Christ in the Americas when the nephites prayed for what they desired most, the Holy Ghost and then it was given them. I think I´ll try to make a lesson plan out of that to teach the investigators the importance of the Holy Ghost. If the prophets and apostles like the story, so do I :)
But anyways, yeah funny thing we did have a sort of crazy political situation here this week. It´s kind of hilarious because starting Thursday morning Elder Usseglio and Elder Baum (the assistants) came by the house because they were apparently doing an interchange with the north zone the day before and then Thursday wanted to do a quick interchange with us before heading back to Guayaquil. But also they wanted to take out Censos (which is kind of like a Visa) for the new elders in the zone. They headed out to the police station of migration around 9:00 but got back pretty early. We asked them what happened and Elder Baum told me they went to the police station but for some reason all the police officers were gathered around outside with holding their guns over their heads shouting. Elder Baum walked up and asked someone if they could take out censos and they kind of yelled at him saying no it was closed and to go home. At this point Elder Baum told me he thought “oh looks like the police are all protesting, hmm, guess we can´t take out censos, ok lets go home.” Lol it was hilarious the way he told me how silly and naïve he felt just kind of walking into a hot political situation looking to take out censos, lol. But yeah when they got back the office called telling us the national police force went on strike against the president so all the missionaries have to stay inside without exceptions until further instructed. When they called Elder Usseglio, who is usually very serious and professional received the call and walked in and simply told us “well, it looks like Christ is arriving tomorrow,” lol after we laughed he told us what was going on. We found out later that in Quito the police actually kidnapped the President and kept him hostage in a hospital. The nation sent military forces to rescue him and in the struggle a gun fight broke out. A member told us it looked just like they were watching a movie, lol. Apparently the President has cut funds and a bond for the police force affecting a lot of the pay for the police officers so they decided to protest. The only real effects we saw here in Quevedo were all the stores that were closed Thursday. By Friday it looked pretty normal but we still had to stay inside both Thursday and Friday. I guess in Guayaquil and Quito and other big cities it was way worse. While the police were on strike entire city blocks of stores were robbed bare. It sounds like there have been a good number of assaults too. Yeah, good thing we stayed inside. By now everything is pretty well back to normal, but crazy, isn´t it? It was fun the first day we were stuck inside with the assistants because they couldn´t leave either so we just kind of studied but man after the first 4 hours or so we got bored. Friday morning the assistants left so it was even more boring. But ah well it was fun with Elder Godinez we studied some fun doctrinal stuff :)
So yeah the two days inside then the two days of General Conference pretty well took up the whole week. It was fun to break out of the routine. But now we´re definitely ready to get back to work :)
Ok and before I forget I got your package with the contacts! Thanks a lot! That should be good to hold me until the end of the mission because I still have 2 pairs left from the other box. And thanks too for the Plan of Salvation wood puzzle!!! Looks awesome! I´ll definitely have to put it to good use now!
I hope you have a great week! Love you!
Love,
Elder David Frome
PS- oh and here are some pictures we´ve taken at some family home evening nights we´ve done in the ward and the zone at general conference. Hope you like them!
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