I'm Here!

November 25, 2013

I´m here!  I´ve made it to Ecuador!  Still alive, if anyone was wondering.  I had a long flight on Monday morning: I left the MTC at 2:30 in the morning for Salt Lake City for my 6:25 flight.  From Salt Lake, Elder Kabel (the only other person in my travel group) and I flew to Dallas, and from Dallas to Miami, and then finally from Miami to Guayaquil.  We got in at around 8:30 that night and our mission president was waiting for us.  Since most of the new missionaries were coming in the next morning, we stayed at the temple with a few other missionaries that came in that night.  The next morning while we waited me and some of the other sister missionaries there got to do a session in the temple!  It was really nice.  When the other missionaries came from the Mexico MTC, I got to see my old companion Hermana Davenport again!  It was nice to be reunited with her again.  Later that day, I got to meet my new companion!  May I present to you the lovely Hermana Herrera!  She´s 20 years old and is from Honduras.  She understands a lot of English which is a HUGE blessing.  So far we´ve been getting along really well together.

Katie and her new companion, Hermana Herrera

My Spanish isn´t totally hopeless.  I´ve found I can understand almost everything being said until it´s directed at me, then I can almost never quite make out what they´re trying to say.  Go figure.  I feel like my speech is pretty awkward, but my companion was really impressed my Spanish skills.  She says I have a Spanish accent, like from Spain.  At least I don´t sound like a gringa!

On Wednesday after we had our interviews, we went to our area in Santa Rosa, just south of Machala.  It´s pretty nice here!  The weather has actually been overcast recently, but it´s really mild.  I won´t be cold here!  

(Hallelujah)  The food is really good too.  We eat lunch at members´ homes and it´s basically a soup and then a main meal.  Loooooots of rice, pero es muy rico.

No one here can pronounce my name, but I decided a long time ago to not correct people.  So when people read my nametag and say "Hermana...EeBERsohn?" I just smile and nod and say "sí".

We had three baptisms on Saturday!  Nice way to start off the mission.  Wish I could take any credit for them, but they were scheduled to be baptized long before I got there.  Still, pretty neat!  Two of them were children from the same family, Delicia and Lucio Sánchez, and the other was a young man named Christian Gauliche.

One of the trainers that I met when I first got to Guayaquil is from Alpine, UT.  I asked her if she knew the Bowmans and it turns out that not only is she their neighbor, but she´s like best friends with their daughter Mollie!  So Mom or Nathan, you can let them know I met Hna. Jolley.

Hmm, what else...well I´ve got a bunch of bug bites (picaduras), all of my books and notebooks are warping and the pages are all wavy, it´s super weird, my shoulder bag was killing me so I bought a backpack today, and we´re going to start teaching English classes on Fridays!  Fun stuff!  Oh yeah and there´s another companionship of hermanas in our apartment and one of them, Hna. Almeida, is from Uruguay!!  Woooo!

Well I think that´s it for now.  I´ll tell you more next week!