Hey Mom and Dad,

Thanks for your email. Sounds like a semi crazy week with the weather and grandpa´s cows breaking loose, but I´d imagine that it helps keep life interesting, lol. That´s too bad Oregon lost the national championship. I´d imagine Sean must be pretty sad. But that´s sweet BYU beat Utah, that always makes life better :). I´m glad it sounds like Ryan had a good interview. Hopefully he hears soon. How long do the candidates usually have to wait to hear back?

Well life here is going good. I think the Lord is really blessing us because this Saturday we have a goal of seven baptisms. I think we´re going to call it our “mini noche blanca,” just for our ward, lol. This week we were pretty much just preparing the seven investigators for the baptismal interview that we had yesterday after church. Four of them are all brothers and sisters of a family we found about 2 months ago. The mom can´t be baptized yet even though she wants to because she hasn´t been able to come to church because of her work. But the kids are all excited. Then there is another girl from a family who lives near the second counselor of the bishopric who gave us the reference. Then two are 10 year old daughters of a woman who has recently come back to church. The father also lives there and wants to be baptized but they aren´t married so they are first planning the marriage then he´ll be baptized. So yeah this Saturday ought to be a spiritual night.

Other than that we´re also excited for a family that we´ve found about 2 weeks ago named the Baque family. They live in the farthest away part of our sector. We have to catch two buses to get to their house, lol but it´s definitely worth it. The mom is a member who was baptized when she was 10 but went less active shortly after being baptized. The dad says he´s attended a Christian church but hasn´t gone for a while. The mom apparently was invited to an activity in libertad by members who just knocked on her door and she went. So the elders there gave us the direction. They just received us and accepted everything we´ve taught. They came to church for the first time yesterday and accepted a baptismal date for the 5th of February. The only tough part about teaching them is that they only have time Saturdays and Sundays so we´re only going there twice a week. But so far they´ve been progressing great.

Well other than we´ve been good. This time of year is apparently the “hot-rainy season.” In most of Ecuador this time of year is when the rains come and when the sun is strongest. Which is funny that may sound contradictory but really what happens is at night it will start raining and rain until the morning but then around 10 the sun comes out and shines and makes everything way hot until about 5. Though here in Libertad because we´re right on the beach it hasn´t really rained very hard yet, but the sun has definitely gotten stronger so the temperature is getting up to the 90s every day. So yeah I think my body is going to go into shock when I get back to Oregon, going from a hot humid climate to a cold and dry one. But who knows we´ll see, lol. Oh and it´s kool because here all the schools are getting out and all the students are starting their summer vacation. Here the students have summer vacation in the hot weather until about april. That ought to make it a little easier to find some families together and it sounds like we´ll be having a lot more of the youth coming out with us so that ought to be good.
Other than that it was crazy because the older daughter of Josue (who was baptized on 17 of December) was accepted into the english language center in BYU and has had to fill out a ton of paperwork and things to get her visa. The crazy thing is that all the paperwork is in English so she´s asked us to help her fill it out. It was just crazy to see the byu webpage again. She received map of the campus which brought back a ton of memories when I was there, lol. I remember using that map every day for my first month there trying to find all the buildings.
Well I´d better get going. Wow that´s crazy that my flight is for Monday night and I won´t get there until Tuesday afternoon. Yeah I imagine I´ll just be trying to sleep on the plane the whole time.
Well thanks for everything. I hope you have a great week!
Love,
Elder David Frome