4-25-16 letter
This last week was great! We had a multi zone training here
in Cuenca and Elder Jugo Montoya from the 70 came to talk to us and teach us
and take questions! It was an awesome experience. He is one of the counselors
here in the Area 70 and it was a powerful devotional. This was last Friday. He
had a bunch of really cool life experiences he shared with us. We also found
out that JUNE 11 and 12 Elder Rasband from the 12 is going to come talk to the
3 missions here in Guayaquil! We are going to have one of the Apostles come and
talk to us. So he also talked about how we need to prepare ourselves
spiritually for when he comes, and write down questions that we can ask him. We
also took a photo with him with our zone. The Cuenca zone is the biggest in the
mission with 24 missionaries. Half Elderes and the other half hermanas! Its
weird being in a zone with hermanas because my other 2 zones in Guayaquil
were only Elderes
To answer your questions, it is kind of a resort town. So
our sector has the downtown touristy part and a bunch of nice neighborhoods
where its not so toury. It definitely feels a lot more like the United States.
We work a lot more with references here because contacting and tracting doesnt
work so well. The weird thing about Cuenca is that there are a lot of atheists
and people that just dont believe in God or Jesus Christ. We try to help them
too but a lot of them have closed their hearts. As of right now we are
preparing one guy for baptism. His name Marcos. If you guys could pray
for him so he keeps his committments and keeps coming to church that would be
great. He is 38 years old and he had family problems so he came to live here in
Cuenca. He is a cool guy and we are preparing him for this next weekend.
So of course being in Cuenca we asked our mamita to make us
CUY one night for dinner. And I took a lot of good pictures for you guys.
Before, after and later. And yes I really did eat that. It was pretty good, the
only thing is that the skin is pretty tough. My companion ate all of it, eyes,
brain, everything. Thats why at the end his looks like a fossil hahaha. The
food here is honestly amazing. And there are always members that want to feed us.
There are a ton of super cheap pizza places too.
There are a ton of cool places to go in Cuenca, one of the
things that isnt very cool is that all of the Musuems are closed on Mondays!!
How lame is that... the only day we can go, they arent even open, but we did
find a cool abandoned rail yard in our sector so that was cool. And yes there
are a lot of white people here who dont speak Spanish. It was funny we were
walking in the street and this white guy said ´´sup´´ and me only knowing how
to talk in Spanish said ´´que tal.´ Its weird being here because sometimes we
talk english and I fumble over the words so bad.
As far as the quake I havent heard anything more about it.
The epicenter was in the Quito North mission I think. Everyone in our mission was
fine so I havent heard any cool stories. All we have heard is that 11 members
lost their lives. Im sure you can find their names inlds.org
so you can pray for them and their families.
One of the things that Elder Montoya shared is that we need
to be specific in our prayers. He shared a story when he went to visit a stake
conference and asked the Stake president to pray specifically for over
100 missionaries that were serving from the stake. He said they spent over 25
minutes praying but that it was how it should always be. I know that its true,
because if we ask specifically he will bless us specifically. It shows our
humility and pacience as well, several Christ like attributes we all need to
work on. DYC 112.10 One of my favorite sciptures, read it! I love you guys!
Love you mom!
Elder Solari
