We Moved!

It’s kind of sad, my time of living with my companion and the Zone Leaders has come to an end.  We moved most of our stuff on Friday and today we put our beds together so now we will be spending our first there tonight.  This past week we were pretty busy with the moving our stuff, the land lady at our old apartment was pretty upset when we showed up to mover our stuff.   There are several repairs that she is insisting we make before we take most of our furniture.  So today in our new apartment we only have a fridge, table and our beds.  But we have running water, a shower and its new and clean so it’s a good trade.  It is sad that we don’t live with the ZL’s but we are still pretty close so we will still see each other a lot.

This week I went on splits with Elder Equite from Guatemala and it was pretty cool.  I love teaching with Natives, they generally teach better than Gringos because of not having the language barrier. 

We taught a discussion on the Restoration to this family and the spirit was so strong during the discussion.  At the end of the discussion we asked them if they would be baptized and one of the guys accepted the challenge and his Aunt and cousin started asking why they needed to be baptized when they had already been baptized.  This guy spoke up and said “we weren’t baptized by someone who has authority”.  Then he turned to us and said he has been searching for a church that has authority for a while and he thinks he may have found it with ours.  He is the perfect investigator except for the fact that he is rarely home because he is a Fisherman so it is a miracle we even found him at home.  Fishermen here will leave for weeks at a time and then be home only for a couple of days before they take off again.

Half the zone here on the coast has Chiconguya which is a virus that is going around and causes your bones and joints to hurt and you get really bad headaches, it is a pretty crazy sickness.  Luckily I haven’t got it yet, it is transmitted by mosquitos so we have been sleeping with a bunch of incense burning which have protected us so far.

Anyways I am doing great and love you all

Elder Keyes

Nelson one of our Investigators

Elder Colfac and I

First week with my Second Companion

This week was pretty great we have a family with a baptismal date! The Espinosas they just had a baby this week a little girl, it was pretty exciteing. Especialy because that means they will want to get married, that was the thing we were waiting to happen because she didnt want to get married while she was pregnant?

anyways we had a super spiritual lesson with them we talked about capitan moroni and the example that he always gave in his life. we related it to them being parents and how they always need to put the things of god before everything else. And Andres (the Dad) testified to us that he knows this church is true and owes so much to this church because they answered his prayers and provided him with a job. He also said the things he has learned has change him and his family's life forever. it was pretty cool. I love that family their little boy who is like 3 is super crazy but is now super protective of his little sister he wouldnt even let us go into the room when she was. 

I retook some of the pictures with nelson, the crazy investigator that we have who live in a shack up on the top of a hill. 

This week was a pretty slow other than that but we did find a part of our sector that is on stilt or like big wooden planks over the water, ill try to take a picture of it next week.

Love Elder Keyes

 

Fruit Salad for Lunch

 

Holy Week

This week was Holy week here and they celebrate the week Christ entered back into Jerusalem and went through the Atonement.  They celebrate this special week by not eating meat or swimming and drinking and partying until the sun goes down.  It’s really a weird way to show appreciation for what Christ did for us but hey, I shouldn’t judge. 

There was too much going on for us this week because of a lot of things that happened, one my companion was going home the next week so this last week he was pretty much coasten. Two we just had a lot of other non-missionary things to do like the contract for our new house and packing up all of the things at our old house, only to find out that the secretary’s didn’t call and finalize the bank information with the landlord so we didn’t even move out.

But anyways on the bright side it was conference weekend and this was probably one of my favorite conferences there was a ton of good talks. It was kind of cool we watched all the talks in English except for the Spanish ones so we didn’t really have to listen to the translator. They talked a ton on the family which is really what Ecuador needs right now. I was just a little sad it was mostly on Saturday when not as many people were watching. 

Also my investigator had her baby so now they can get married and baptized now so that’s really cool!.

Me and elder Anderton (the zone leader) ran into some friends last night that took all of our money and our cellphones (first time being robbed) because I had the district leader phone and he had the zone leader phone because both of our companions had left to Quito already. But luckily we did not get hurt or anything but we had to go rob the other district leaders phone at like 9:30 at night so that elder Anderton could hear the transfers that were going to happen. 

Also I got my new comp he is another gringo Elder Morgan.

Well that’s all that happened pretty much this week love you all 

-Elder Keyes 

My Comp goes home next week!

This week was super busy with a bunch of different stuff like our meeting with President that took up a whole day.  Then the next day we looked for houses with the President and the Assistants.

But this week we did teach pastor Juan who is a minister for his little Chapel that he has been building for like two years now.  He is awesome and we have great discussions but we have to plan out what we say to him very carefully so that we do not offend the doctrine of his church.  This last time we visited with him he said "I'm starting to think that Joseph Smith was actually a prophet" , so we now have something to work with.  He is a super awesome guy and is really excited to listen to conference next week.



We also ate encocado and it was super good, its this yellow sauce they make from coconut and put it on fish and it was so good.  Also something else we did I bought a coconut and we all ate it together it was way good.  I'm kind of sad we are moving out of the Zone Leaders tomorrow into the house we found with President.

We found a less active member and started teaching her hoping that we can get her interested in coming back to church.  We have been teaching her about the apostasy because she has said that she thinks it doesn't matter what church you belong to.  We have been spending time with her trying to get to know her so that we know what to focus on and found out that her brother died a while ago so we have been teaching her about the Plan of Salvation.  As we discussed baptism for the dead with her she started to cry and said that she wants to get worthy to attend the temple and do the temple work for her family.  I hope that we can continue to build on that lesson and help get her active again.

The work seems to be picking up her so hopefully we will start seeing some baptisms in our zone.

I love you all,
Elder Keyes

My favorite Drink here in Ecuador

A local church