Week 9: Halloween

This week started with Halloween. Which turned out to be a big dud, nobody celebrates here, it was sad. But I still dressed up, I dressed up like the old guy from Up, wore glasses, my brown pants, tucked my pants into my socks, wore an ugly brown tie, and had a cane. That was about it for Halloween.

The next day was a holiday here, day for the dead or something. Its a two day thing were everybody goes to the cemetery and celebrates for their dead relatives. And my house just happens to be a 30 second walk from the cemetery, they had big tents of food, and flowers, lots of people- so as a zone we went over with cards and handed them out trying to get contacts, but nobody would listen. So after 2 hours we stopped. 

The next day I left Tumbes for the first time, we went to La Cruz to meet up with some other Elders, its a 20 minute taxi ride. Outside of Tumbes is just all rice fields, as far as the eye can see, and a few banana farms. It was actually pretty crazy to see. 

Then that night all of our appointments fell through, we weren't sure where to go, after thinking about it we felt we should try and stop by one of our investigators homes. We had failed about the last 7 times we stopped by, but he happened to be home. We taught him and set a baptism date on him. We hope we will be able to teach him soon again.  

Friday night we had a karaoke night and invited all our converts and investigators. It was just ok, nothing special, I sang 2 songs, photograph by Ed Sheeran, and Viva mi Vida. Then Sunday we finally got a new bishop in our ward. Our old bishop had been there for over 8 years and a lot of people were not a big fan of him. Apparently we have about 250-300 members in our ward, but only 60 are active. So we are hoping the new bishop will actually help us out. 

Then that after noon we had another awesome experience. We were walking around failing to find anybody, we kinda felt like we should stop by a members home and just see how they were doing. When we got there we found out their daughter was pretty sick, so we were able to give her a blessing. I know that the spirit guided us there so that we could help her out. 

A funny story, we were walking around knocking on doors, this old lady opens the door, sees its the missionaries. She whispers ¨No esta¨ (which means not here) and said that repeatedly while shutting the door on us. It was pretty funny. But I actually liked it. I wish more people would say no or reject us. Because everybody always says yes they want to hear our message but their to busy so they tell us to come back, we set a date to come back but they just keep setting more and more dates for us to come back. We know they don't want to hear us but we waste a lot of time on these fake appointments. 

Today we went to Agua Verde, the town 30 minutes north that borders Ecuador. We went there to a big market, touched the sign to Ecuador (we weren't allowed to enter) then just walked around for about an hour then went back. Wasn't anything too cool, but it was something different and fun to do. That was about all for this week. Love and miss you all. 

Love, 

Elder Luke Gruber