Thanksgiving Pictures

These photos were sent to my mom on facebook messenger on Thanksgiving Day by our Stake President.

THANKSGIVING!

THANKSGIVING!

Well, this week was pretty dang slow with teaching haha!  Thanksgiving is definitely my favorite holiday and man, was it tough not to be home!  But our Stake President is awesome and invited us to have a little Thanksgiving feast with his family on Thursday so that was really fun (the Chargers looked great! hahaha)!

Like I said, this week was really slow.  I started off the week by doing an intercambio (I don't know the word in English) with Elder Stoker.  We worked in his sector all of the day on Tuesday and it was my old sector, so yeah I went by and saw all of my converts and investigadores.  IT WAS AWESOME!!! I loved it!  Well, I got back to my sector later on Wednesday and man, every lesson we had fell through so we went over to a member's house and we told them how sucky today was and that we were going to buy crab to eat for dinner and then they told us to just go buy some crab off the street and that they would make it for us!  So my companion and I dipped out and down the street super fast and found some guy selling crabs on the street!  We bought like 20 crabs from him and it was so yummy!!!  Great end to the day! 

Then Thursday came around and man, we wanted some turkey and gravy!  Well turkey here is very hard to get, but our Stake President called us and told us to come over to his home at 6:00pm, so we went and ate chicken and gravy, which was pretty close to turkey, and had the best banana splits!  It was awesome!!!  Then after that we had our investagador get interviewed for his bautismo!  HE PASSED!  So that meant that on Saturday we had another great bautismo!  PILAS!!  

But yeah, this week still felt super slow and long and hot, but we did get a lot of people to attend church on Sunday and we are going to have another bautismo this week!  Junior Chuquimarca was baptized last week and Tahis Cabrera is getting baptized this week! 

All is well here!  ya mismo navidad!  yay!!!  Hope you all do the 25 days of Christmas "Light the World" from the Church!  It's on lds.org!  We are getting ready for that down here!  I really have been so busy lately.  We are trying to do 2 big activities and it is stressful.  I'm on my own here to make sure it all goes as planned haha!  They're in 2 weeks so we have a little bit more time to plan.  Hope all is well back home! Have a great week!

Hope all is well with everyone!

Love, Elder Hoole

maxwell.hoole@myldsmail.net

This is a monkey that we went to see at a member's home.

The monkey climbing.

Taking a taxi to a different area.

This is how they drive around.

Our crabs we bought off the street!

One of the member kids here who loves soccer!  I gave him a REAL Salt Lake sticker and he loved it!

Crab dinner!  It was so yummy!!!!

Our Stake President wanted to watch football on Thanksgiving. 
We didn't want to tell him No.  haha

Thanksgiving Dinner!  It was awesome!

Wearing our new Santa hats and hanging out with the kids!

Great baptism on Saturday!

I gave a nativity set and a Temple Recommend holder to our new convert!

Reindeer ears!

I did some shopping for the family!!! Can't wait!!!

11/20/17 - My First Earthquake!

Hola!

Well, we had a couple of earthquakes this last week!  I'll start off by telling a super funny story!  So we were in the house at around 8:40ish and our house just started shaking and we all thought it was just a big truck passing by because we live right by a shipping yard or a port, so there's always huge trucks driving by.  But then the shaking didn't stop and then it started to get a lot louder and the whole house was shaking and my first thought was, "Yo We Gotta Get Out Of This House!!! We Are Having An Earthquake!"  So mid-earthquake we dipped from the house because the houses are all 3rd world houses made out of nothing and we live on the 2nd floor, so when we got down to the bottom level the earthquake stopped.  People ran out of their houses but no one said very much when we were out there, other than if it is bigger we are dead.  But then we had another one that same night and I was dead asleep, but I do remember waking up that night and my heart was beating really fast, so yeah I guess that was cool.  Where we live is below sea level and Guayaquil is pretty much surrounded by water since it's a port city, so it's like an island.  Could be crazy in another big earthquake!  

Well, we didn't have our bautismo last week!  NOO!!  HE DRANK COFFEE!!!!  But we have made new plans and helped him set a goal to get baptized this Saturday!  ALSO the Stake President invited us this Thursday to have a little Thanksgiving with him!  Yeah we are pumped!  And yeah he has ESPN!  hahah! No, but really go COWBOYS haha!

All is well with me.  I like 1 John chapter 4 a lot right now in my life!  It talks all about the pure love of Christ and God!  This is the perfect time for you all to read it. 

Well hope all is well with everyone!  We might be going to the temple this week!!

Have an awesome Thanksgiving everyone!  Next year, I will get to eat with you!  Yay!

Love ya!

Elder Hoole

Pics are of some cool Book of Mormon covers that a member made for me, and an Ecuador toy.

Bautismos!

Well another week down south or up north? I don't know... Stuck in the middle of the world right now haha!

Well, last Monday my companion and I left after writing to our families to go and teach a lesson with our ward mission leader.  So we were just walking (kinda in a sketchy part of town) and BAM!  Like legit 20 cop cars just pulled up on us along with a bunch of the News Cars and I kid you not, there were like 100 cops just all around us searching for drugs in the trees along the road that we were walking on.  Well, we didn't try to walk around it and they didn't tell us to stop where we were going, so yeah we walked right through a 3rd world Drug Bust and I am like 100% sure that if you were watching tv in Ecuador that day, you saw the Mormon missionaries on the Ecuador news haha!  Afterward, it was super funny but also by far the scariest thing that has happened to me in my little adult life! 

Well, we had another great bautismo!  It was awesome!  Ella se llama Baneza!  Her kids are members and she never really wanted to get baptized.  We had been teaching her but she just was not progressing.  We went over about 3 weeks ago to visit with her and felt inspired to throw out an invitation to get baptized in a few weeks and she said no.  But she told us she wanted to get baptized sooner, so last week was her bautismo and it was awesome!  She has a great testimony!  This week we are going to have another bautismo.  El se llama Junior and he's such a cool kid!  He's 10 years old and a really great kid.

 

We have been planning a lot with our zona and in 5 weeks we are going to have an activity like Alma!  We are having a White Night or a Noche Blanca.  We are inviting all of our investigators in the Zone to be part of a special baptism night and baptize them all on the same evening at the stake center!!!  Our goal is to have 40 bautismos that night or more! 

All is well right now for me!  Almost Christmas!  I gave a talk yesterday in church.  I read Mosiah 5:8 and talked about the covenants with God that members of the Church have entered into and that there is great responsibility with that.  It was a call to the members to start to perform their church callings and help out more!

Things are good!

Con amor

Elder Hoole

 Our zone tie!  The lighthouse of Guayaquil.

The Zone!

 The baptism last week

A Great Baptizme!

Well, this week was a pretty awesome week!

First off, we had another Zone Conferencia with Presidente and it was awesome. We talked about how we can make the baptizme service more of a spiritual thing and how we need to take the baptisms more serious in our wards with the members. It was a great meeting and it even made it better because a couple of days after our meeting, we had a baptizme. It was so awesome.  It was probably the best baptizme I have ever been to!  Well, first off Presidente Moreno came to our baptizme with all of his family and we were super stressed out, so we spent the whole day Saturday cleaning the church and making sure everything was going to work out as planned. The reason that Presidente Moreno came was because our investigator invited him to come and baptize her!  Narcisa de reyes Loma has been an investigator for the last 24 years!  She has a daughter currently serving in the mission in Brasil and her daughter has been a huge help for us!  If you remember, last Monday Narcisa got married and then on Saturday night she was baptized finally after 24 years!  It was awesome and it was so great that her daughter serving in Brasil got to watch it on Skype!  So great!

Last Monday in the nighttime, we decided to go and teach an investigator who hasn't been progressing really, but her 2 kids are members in our ward.  Well, last Monday night we went over and the first thing she told was that she's ready to get baptized so we invited her to get baptized on the 25th of November and she said to us, "No I want to get baptized this week!"  So it turns out that this Saturday we are going to have another baptizme! 

The work here in Guayaquil is picking up and it is so fun!  We are really working hard and I'm seeing so many great milagros!  Fun fact: we walk a lot and all my pants are getting sunbleached.

Yesterday after church, we went back to our house to change our clothes and break our fast.  Well, as we left the house my companion and I took a turn and BAM a drugged out guy who looked just like a pirate was right there just chilling. There was nothing we could do.  We couldn't turn around because he would've just chased us so we just walked right up to him.  When he saw us he started shouting, "BLESSINGS! BLESSINGS!"  And then he looked right at me and was like, "Give me your phone and money and everything you have!!!" (low key I had a lot of stuff on me) but I just turned to this guy and said, "Dude we have nothing."  And he just said, "Oh ok."  And then I said "Oh yeah, haha, don't worry about it."  And tried to be chill.  But yeah, this dude was really huge and scary but we LIVED!!!!  GOD IS REAL, MY FRIENDS!!  The story sounds a lot funnier in person, but man right then I was so scared haha! 

But yeah, really all is well here in Ecuador!

Thanks for the love and support!  I have been out 13 months!!!

Elder Hoole

Narcisa and her family 

 Presidente Moreno and Narcisa

 Presidente and Narcisa speaking with Narcisa's daughter 

who is serving a mission in Brazil.

Cute little ward member wearing my name tag

Halloween in Ecuador

Well...HAPPY HALLOWEEN!  They don't really celebrate Halloween here because they think it's from the devil, but they all buy Halloween stuff for their houses and decorate....Oh Ecuador...

So this past week was a good week!  A lot happened!  First off, Elder Falabella who is a member of the Seventy in our Church, came down to Ecuador and talked to our mission!  We were all super scared that he was going to come and just hit us hard with scriptures, but that didn't happen.  He just talked to us and told us how we can be better missionaries and how we can find more people to teach and baptize!  It was super cool and I got to see a bunch of my friends who are here serving in the mission in other parts!  Then the very next day, about 15 of us had to go and renew our visas and that took the whole day.  Honestly, it was super boring but we got to chill in the Guayaquil North mission the whole day and yes, there's a GOLD'S GYM in the Guayaquil North Mission!  Super cool!  But yeah, I am legal again to be living here in Ecuador! 

Last Saturday, we had another meeting with Elder Falabella, but this time just with the leaders in the mission and yeah, this was when he really hit us with some scriptures!  haha It was a really good meeting and part of what he told us is that if we want to have a mission with success, it starts with us!  So other than that not much has been going on in my life.  Funny thing, our mamita here who cooks for us is now telling us that she wants more money so that's cool.  Going to talk to her today and find out what is going on!  I guess the most interesting news is that this morning we went and were the witnesses for a marriage today!!!!  She is this great lady se llama Narciza that has been an investigator for 25 years!  It was super awesome and her bautismo is this Saturday and her daughter that is currently serving in the mission in Brazil is going to watch it!!!  ESO!

Anyway, hope all is well!

Elder Hoole

I miss this so much!

Getting some papers signed before the marriage!

Getting married

All married!  Baptism on Saturday!