Feliz Año Nuevo!

January 6, 2014

So this week was pretty interesting.  First of all, last Monday were transfers, and I´d been freaking out that I or my companion would get transferred.  But lo and behold, we´re both still here!  So I´m pretty grateful for that.  I really hate packing and moving.

Katie in front of the "ano viejos", before and after burning

On New Year´s Eve we had to be inside at 6pm again.  We went to bed at 10:30pm like we´re supposed to, but we got up at about a quarter to midnight to welcome the New Year.  It was super fun.  We just kind of hung out the window in the other sisters´ room and watched the fireworks and people burning their año viejos.  Oh yeah, so it´s kind of a huge tradition here for people to make life-sized dummies out of old clothes and paper mache and what not and burn them at midnight on New Year´s Eve.  They´re called "año viejos" or "old year", and I guess they´re supposed to be symbolic of the old year passing and making way for a new one.  But they had all sorts of them, like as different cartoons and whatnot.  Some were enormous!  There was a giant plane just at the end of our block.  We got to see them burn it at about a quarter to 1.  It was huge.  It won a prize and the guys who made it got $1000.  Crazy!  We went to bed at around 1.  Super fun.

The next day we got to visit our branch president´s farm for lunch with all eight missionaries in the branch (oh yeah we got another pair of missionaries in our branch! crazy times).  It was so cool.  Ecuador is beautiful. 

Later that day, we finally divided our sector into four parts, one for each companionship.  We´re in the farthest corner in Los Ceibos, which neither of us had ever really been to.  We´ve only been working there for four or five days and we´ve already seen amazing results.  We´ve found so many people, families even, and committed them to baptism!  We had 11 investigators come to church yesterday!  This is awesome!!  I´m excited to be there.

Yup, so things are going pretty well here.  It´s been raining off and on the last several days, but on Saturday in the afternoon it was 38 degrees Celsius.  That´s 100 degrees Fahrenheit!!!  It was hot, but it didn´t feel like 100.  I feel proud of my ability to withstand the heat.

That´s all for now.  Keep it real and choose the right.

Love,

Hermana Iverson