Hey Mom and Dad,
Ah that´s good to hear it´s been another good Halloween weekend and the ward had the traditional fall party. Here the government has been doing all it can to discourage the celebration of Halloween. They´ve established a national holiday as a patriotic day of the shield so you don´t see too many people in costumes and there isn´t much candy. But we did see a few people dressed up in Salinas near the beach on Sunday. It´s funny because here there is also the holiday “day of the dead” on the 2nd of November so Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are all days off school and work. So for the national vacations it sounds like a ton of tourists are coming here to Salinas to enjoy the holiday. So yeah we´re getting a lot more traffic and people which make it a little more exciting but crazy.
And thanks I did get your package this week with the Halloween candy and everything. I´m excited to make some rootbeer to show the natives how it tastes. It´s funny often the people don´t like the taste of rootbeer first. But they love rootbeer floats, lol. And yeah if you want to send the classic mashed potatoes and gravy and everything like last year that´d be sweet :).
Well this week has been awesome. We did have the baptism for Karen on Thursday and it went great. Several friends came from other wards to support her including one friend that came and sang a hymn in the service. It was neat to see that she already has a lot of support. Her mom also came which was a surprise. I wasn´t sure if she would come because Karen has told us that her parents aren´t too excited about the whole baptism idea, lol. But I guess in the end she decided to come so hopefully she had a good experience.
Then on Friday we had Consejo de Líderes in Guayaquil so Elder Baquerizo and I got to get up early and put on our suits to travel to Guayaquil. It was sweet because apparently President recently had a seminar for mission presidents in Peru where Elder Gonzalez presided. It was neat because he said that the church wants to duplicate and even triple the number of baptisms we´re currently having. But in order to change the results we have to change the way we work. So we talked different ways to change the way we are working. One of the biggest topics we talked about was the new instruction that we, as missionaries, can´t be giving solutions to the investigators anymore. Often as missionaries we want to help the investigators so much that when they need to get married or even divorced in order to qualify for baptism we are willing to help them take out the paperwork and do everything to help. President said that we can´t be doing that anymore. He said the first presidency is worried that the new converts in the church are depending too much on the church to solve their problems instead of solving their own. We need to teach them the principle of auto sufficiency. So yeah that should be good to help. Other than that it was sweet to see the other zone leaders and everyone. I talked with Elder Godinez and he told me everything is going good back in Quevedo. He told me that Alex and Elizabeth had a date to get married this week and had asked if I could come back to be one of the witnesses, lol. He said they have a baptismal date soon after.
Other than that everything is going great here. Oh I forgot to tell you about the “cold weather” we´re having here, lol. It´s been cloudy and windy and the temperature has dropped down into the low 70s, so of course everyone has been throwing on jackets and catching colds, lol. Elder Baquerizo had asked his parents to send him a sweater so he´s being working in a sweater. It just kind of makes me laugh to think of how this is so cold for them here. Of course it also kind of scares me because I too am feeling a little cold when I step outside so I hate to think of what it´s going to be like to be back in Oregon in the winter, lol. But ah well I´ll live :)
Well thanks for everything! Hope you have a great week! Love you!
Love,
Elder David Frome
PS- here are some photos from the baptism
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