April 12, 2010

Dear Family,
Wow, this week was really tough. I learned a ton though. It´s been really hard the last couple of weeks. My old companion, Elder Rivas went home. I know a lot of the details but I´m not going to share them. It´s been really hard on me too because I had to take him to Quito and I spent about all of my time sitting. I can only study for so long I found out. I always want to study more during the week but after 2 hours I´m pretty sleepy. Right now I´m with 2 Elders in my district that have problems, Elder Stieber and Elder Lopez. I´m trying to help them and it´s been hard so far. It´s hard also because I have to work in Conocoto but I can only go for a couple of hours during the week. I´m going to lose a lot of investigators and that´s really sad. I did have some good experiences too though. I had some crazy baptism interviews this week. I had 2 interviews with sisters. They were exact opposites. They both have to talk with the mission President and only one is ready to do it. The first interview was really weird. I din´t like it at all because from the moment we started I knew she wasn´t going to pass. She didn´t have a testimony hardly at all. The second sister however was an amazing experience. She is ready to baptized. I also knew it from the beginning. She also has to talk with President SLoan but she´s ready to do it. She is very humble and she has a strong testimony of the church and she has a ton of faith. It was an amazing experience.
This week we were visiting a family of the other Elders and I found someone that reminded me of Cooper. That is one personality that I thought I would never find here in Ecuador. He is about 6 years old and he´s hilarious. We were teaching him and his family and he wasn´t paying attention so we asked him if he understood. After that in the same sing-song voice that Cooper has he said I don´t understand anything. I got a really good laugh out of that one. This little kid is called Galo. It was a pretty funny experience too.
Another bad thing happened this week too. After my companion and I received the news that he´s going home we got on the bus and were an the way home. There was some guy there that had lived in New York before so he was acting like a gangster and he thought he was all cool. I eventually decided that I wasn´t going to talk to him because it was really annoying. He just kept cussing and saying very ina propriate things in English. I was so annoyed and distracted that I left my English scriptures in the bus. I was pretty sad because that´s one of the few things that I really want here in Ecuador. It was also all marked up and had a lot of notes in it. It hurt to lose it. Right now I´m studying from a Book of Mormon that a missionary has here. Luckily he had one in english or I´d be studying everything in Spanish.
Well I´ve had some pretty rough experiences this week. I feel right now like the Lord is preparing me for something. I just hope I´ll be prepared for it. There are transfers on Sunday so we´ll see what happens. I love you all and I´m so grateful for all the blessings that I have received from each and every one of you.



Love,
Élder Hakes


......I almost forgot. I had a baptism this weekend. His name is Luis Olmedo Lopez Mora. He´s a little bit slow and it took some time to get him ready but he did it. He has a really strong testimony and he lives next door to the Bishop and they´ve been helping him a ton. He is all for enduring to the end and not listening to what others tell him about the church. It´s really awesome. I have baptized my 5th person here in the mission. That´s pretty exciting!!!

I don´t know how to explain Quito. It is really high in the mountains and there are mountains on every side. These last feew weeks it has been raining pretty hard. Everyday it rains now. It´s a nice chnge. I think the easiest way to show you what Quito´s like is that you come here when I have to leave. I´ve been growing a lot during the mission. I can´t beleive how skinny I am now. I hadn´t really looked a myself in the mirrior and it kind of hit me this week. I felt like Brent. It was weird :)