August 9, 2010

Dear Family,
This week was pretty weird again. We had more meetings and I got sick again. On tuesday we had our zone leader´s council and we ate pizza for lunch. At about 7 PM my stomach started hurting. It was right in the middle of President Sloan´s doctrine class. I ran to the bathroom but I didn´t throw up. According to everyone else I was very pale and had a tinge of green. It was a fun night. I just slept in the assistant´s house because it´s really close to the church that we had to go to the next day. I was pretty bad and I didn´t sleep very well. The next day we had our zone conference and we had to teach the missionaries. That was pretty fun. It actually wasn´t too bad. It made me trust more in the Savior. President Sloan was very happy with the training we taught. He said it was one of the best ones that he´s seen. We were really happy about that especially because we didn´t have a ton of time to prepare for it and because I was sick. By the end of the zone conference I was feeling a lot better. By the next day I was eating normally again. This weekend we had a baptism, finally!!! It was really good. We started off Saturday with a huge service project. We were moving someone from a 4th floor to a 3rd floor of a different building. It was way tough. We had 6 missionaries there and we didn´t finish until 2 PM (we started at 9 AM). They were nice and took us to lunch but they didn´t give us too much, which is fine, so we went to eat more. By the time we got to the bishop´s house to get the keys to fill up the font we were way tired and way dirty. We got there and he couldn´t find the keys. We just went to the chapel so we could at least fill it up with cold water (you can do that without the keys). There wasn´t any water that came out. All of the outside water spickets didn´t work either. In the janitor´s closet on the inside it worked so we attatched a hose and put it into the font, but it was coming out way too slow. Then we came up with an....interesting idea. In the ceiling in all the churches here in Ecuador there are 2 100-150 gallon water tanks. We decided to pop out the ceiling tiles and start passing buckets of water from the tank in the ceiling down into the font. It was way tough. My companion and the bishop were up in the ceiling and they passed the water down to me (because I´m the tallest). I took the bucket to the font and then threw the bucket back up tp the bishop. It was an interesting process. We were doing that for 2 hours. I was so tired and so dirty and so smelly. It was way bad. I have a sweet video of the process too. We were able to fill it up and clean up the mess right before Katherine Gaybor, the girl that got baptized, showed up. I was still in my dirty service clothes when they showed up. I sent my comp with another missionary to get me some clothes so I could keep getting the buckets out of the ceiling. I changed there in the chapel and then we had the baptism. It was way good. We haven´t had a baptism in so long so it was really nice to have one again. This weekend we´re going to have 2 more. 2 sisters are getting baptized. They want to go to the temple with all of the youth on the following thursday. It will be way cool. Well I had a really interesting week. I hope all is well. I love you all so much.




Love,
Élder Hakes