Ecuador Week 4

Hey fam and friends!

So now a little about here. So this week I had my first cool/loco experience. I was attacked by a dog! Don´t freak out or anything because I am alright. It didn´t break skin or anything so I´m not going to get rabies, but it was a pretty big dog and it came and bit my ankles a couple times. I´ll probably have a nice bruise down there, but that´s all good. It was actually pretty scary, and now I´m a little more jumpy around all the dogs here (cause there are still a million of them) but I´ll get over it sooner or later! haha

Okay so now a little bit about where I´m living. Our apartment is not the greatest. My companion says it´s probably the second worst apartment he´s been in during the mission. It´s pretty small and usually pretty dirty. No matter how many times we clean it, it just seems to get dirty right away again. It´s probably because we have to leave the windows open or the house just gets insanely hot, and then all the dust blows in from the windows. Alright now here´s a couple of the bad parts about it. First, is that sometimes we don´t have water in our apartment. Most days we usually do, but some days we wake up and there isn´t any water so we have to bathe ourselves using buckets that we have already filled up with water beforehand (thankfully we´ve filled up those buckets everytime we´ve needed them). The second thing is that every few days all the power in the city shuts off. So a couple times my companion and I have been sitting in our house planning for the night and then all the lights shut off and we just have to head off to bed. We have a little candle that we light so we can kind of see our way around, but for the most part it´s just dark. Thankfully we haven´t had anything stolen from our apartment then or any other time so far!}

K now a little about the sector. Our ward is called Forestal. Esmeraldas is like a pretty big city, but our sector is like in the outskirts of the city. About half of it is like dirt roads and houses made out of bamboo. It´s really interesting and a really different experience. It´s also really humbling to see how all the people live here. I´m going to try and send some pictures with this email so hopefully you can see a bit what it is like. Oh and we can´t see the ocean from our sector because there´s like this giant hill in the way, but my companion and I went there today and I took a couple pictures to send back.

The people here are pretty great too. Most of the people here are black. There are some latinos, but here on the coast like everyone is black just because there is so much sun here. It makes me feel like I´m in Louisiana or something haha. I´ve been told by some of the other Elders here that Esmeraldas is just a whole other world from Quito. The people have there different sayings here and talk a lot differently too. It´s made it a little harder to understand because they do things like drop of all the S´s at the end of their words and stuff like that, but I just hope that means I´ll learn faster and be able to understand better when I do eventually go to Quito. We haven´t had any more baptisms yet in our sector, but hopefully we will get some soon and I´ll be sure to tell you about them! Because we definitely are still teaching people and there are a few I think that have really started to see the truth of this Gospel and are ready to be baptized.

Well that´s about all I got! Oh and I did get dad´s dearelder so they get here. We get the pouch every thursday so I think dear elders get here every one or two weeks. I´d love to get all and any letters from anyone! Thanks so much for all your prayers and I love you all!

Love,

Elder Joshua Lee

P.S. It takes forever for the pictures to download so i don´t know how many I´ll be able to send home all the time. I´ll still try to send as many as I can and tell dad I´m sorry I didn´t email him back this week. I thought we had an hour to email in the field and we still only have 30 minutes, but I´ll email him next week for sure! Okay I even had to take more off than I was going to send cause this is taking forever. I´ll find a way to get you some more soon! Enjoy these few now!