Sunday, August 31, 2014

8 bautismos, el templo, Bus drifting, y misioneros ver peliculas avasis

Hey!

So I guess I've failed to inform you all about my baptisms.  The first five was familia Holgin/Burgos.  Namely: Justin Holgin, Jubede Holgin, Alexander Burgos, Junior Burgos, and Rosa Burgos. They count as my baptism and I personally baptized Junior, but the truth is that they were mostly taught by Elder Christiansen (el poderoso), a missionary who finished his mission right as I started mine and was the companion of Elder Pagoada before me.  I feel like I can take more credit for the other three though: Pablo Fillian, Andy Cruz, and Noami Burgos.  Those are my eight baptisms, I thought I sent pictures for all of them... I'll send them again if I have time today.
This last week we got to go to the temple and afterward listen to President Riggins speak.  President Riggins is awesome and I like the way he runs things!  He tightened up a few things that I'm really glad for.  Before, the mission ran on the COMPLETE YOUR GOALS system were you made a goal for baptisms and if you didn't meet it you were put to shame.  Because of this missionaries seemed to baptise people by whatever means nesasary and I think sometimes some people got baptised before they were ready.  I hated this system.  President Riggins however is taking a new approch to the work that still involves making goal (because goals are SUPER importaint) but he's also raised the bar of the requirments to baptise.  He basically wants stong members which is OK by me.  This mostly comes from the statistics of last year, 80% of the baptisms last year were childeren and teenagers and he flat out told the missionaries that we're harming the church.  Another statistic is that the number of less active members here is over 50%.
The Temple was amazing!


This picture was taken at 6am, meh....


Our Zone consists of Buena Fe and Quvedo.  This being the case we do a lot of bus traveling between the two cities.  NOTE: I hate busses.

During one of our trips to a zone meeting, the bus hit some loose gravel and the back end started to drift a little.  WHICH IS REALLY SCARY IF YOU"RE A GREENGO IN THE BACK OF THE BUS.  Everyone was calm however.  Because as I said before; people here are gutsy/crazy-out-of-their-minds and they're good at it.  We continued to slip and slide down the road and we continued on our way.  No biggy.  Welcome to Ecuador.
The four hour bus to Guayaquil plays a movie for its passangers.  Missionaries really have nothing else to do in the bus exept for sleep or watch the movie.  With four hours there's usually time for both. SO, on that note.  If you're in the mood for one of those feel good/inspirational/make you love life and then litterally murder the charactars that made you love life and then make you feel good again kinds of movies, I'd recomend "My Name Is Khan", I liked it. Granted I watched it in spanish.
So there, I'm still recommending movies :P
I think that's everything for today... I have more but my time is sadly limited.  I usually make notes in my planner about what to talk about and if I end up not talking about a point I move it to the next week.  So don't worry.  you wont miss information!
I hope all is well back home!  Love you all!
~Cameron

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