Ecuador Week 11

Dear Fam and Friends,

It's great to hear from you and how well things are still going. And yes I did get both the packages. Thanks soo much! They were awesome! I've already eaten a package of beef jerkey, the mixed nuts (which were sweet!) and the skittles. Not all by myself though, I've shared with a lot of the other missionaries here, but thanks soo much! It was great! Oh and real quick about the things if you can send another package, musicwise, other cool piano songs would be sweet too. (like Jon Schmidt and whatever else) I like Amanda's taste in piano music so if she has any ideas that'd be cool. Oh and there was one thing another Elder had here which was pretty cool. He had these fake thumbs that had lights in them and lit up when you pushed on them or something. That was really cool. I don't know where anything like that would be, but it would be a cool "magic trick" to do with the kids haha.

So things are still going well here. To answer some of your questions, first, that church building in the pictures isn't mine. That's the stake center where we do baptisms because our church building doesn't have a baptismal font. The stake center is pretty nice, and our church building isn't too bad either. It's similar to the stake center, just quite a bit smaller.

As for the ward, about 60-70 people attend regularly. It's a really small ward. And according to my companion, it's smaller than the branches he's been in as well. Theres about 200 people on the register, but less than half actually go to church. That's a big problem in all of Ecuador I guess. But we are working with some less active members to try and help them come back to church as well. And to get to the church building we walk like 5-10 minutes down the road so it's not too far.

As for the heat, it is starting to get really hot here. I'm not a huge fan of all this heat, but I guess I have to live with it. The missionaries in our zone went out today and we played some football and ultimate frisbee outside and I forgot to put sunscreen on so I got pretty burned. But not as bad as some of the burns I've gotten in Arizona so I'll be okay. I'm just a little scared because it's supposed to be a lot hotter come January and February, but I'll probably be changed to a different sector by then.

So I said before that I hadn't eaten anything strange here in the mission, that changed this week. This week I had a few pretty strange foods. The first was chicken foot soup. Yes. Chicken foot soup. That was really interesting. It was just a bowl of soup with a couple chicken feet sticking out. And to eat the feet, you just like sucked the skin off of the bones. Really weird and a bit disturbing, but it didn't taste too bad.

The second strange thing I had to eat was..... cow stomach. I don't think I enjoyed it as much because I knew it was something strange before I had started eating it, just not exactly what. But I found out afterwards that it was cow stomach, and it actually wasn't too bad. It was just really chewy and strange the think I was eating it, but it actually tasted pretty good.
And the last thing I had was clam. Which isn't too strange, but that was the first time I had eaten clam. And I think I liked the clam less than the chicken foot or the cow stomach. haha.

Well that's all I've got time for this week! Sorry I couldn't write more. I'll make sure and update you a little better next week. And sorry, I'm kind of slacking on writing letters back to people. I don't have very much time to do so, but I'll get on it as soon as I can! And for Garrett, I already wrote your letter like 2 weeks ago, I just haven't sent it yet. I need to find the place to send letter first. But thanks so much for the letters and the prayers! Until next week!

Love,
Elder Joshua Lee