Week 7 in Quito Ecuador

The Ecovia, the mass transit bus system that
goes along our route to the office.

It's common to see dozen of taxis at any one time.  They
are all over the city. 

This week we had several days of very heavy rain.  We usually walk to the office but when it rains we take the taxis, which is sometimes a challenge to find one that isn’t already in use, so by the time we have been standing  in the rain we are soaked.   It only cost $1 to get to our apartment from the office.   Taxis are in abundance but they are also used a lot.  There is the bus system that only costs 25 cents but I don’t feel comfortable taking the bus when it is so crowded.  I’ve heard too many stories of being robbed by pick-pockets while riding the bus.  Elder Phelps was even pushed down one time and robbed.  Lynn has ridden the bus a few times and has tried to talk me into using it but I just don’t feel very secure riding it.  We are lucky that the office is close enough that we can walk most of the time.  When we first got here the walk just about did me in but as time goes by I’m getting more used to it.  I still have to stop a time or two to give my hurting hips a rest but it is getting easier every day.  Maybe I’ll even lose a little weight by the end of our mission.

This week, when I was checking some email at the office, one of the Elders put a note on the bottom of his report for their zone, “If there’s a problem with this, it’s my companions fault …. Ha”  We in the office thought it was so funny.   Sis. Platts said that she would like to know his position in his family, what number child he was.  It sounded like something a child would say about a sibling.

On Wednesday Lynn and Elder Kaneen went on a trip with Pres. Ghent up northeast to the Otavalo zone to look at possible apartments for the missionaries.  It was a long trip for them, what would be about an hour drive on good roads ended up being about 2 hours one way with all the winding roads and road construction.  It would appear that the states don’t have a monopoly on road detours and one lane roads due to road repairs.  Since both of our husbands were gone Sis. Kaneen and I ate lunch together.  Lynn and I usually take a lunch to the office but the Kaneens usually eat at one of the many local restaurants.  Since I knew she would have to eat alone I decide not to take a lunch and go with her to lunch.  We went to a little restaurant called “Teik-A-Breik”  and no, I didn’t mis-spell it. That’s the way it is on the sign.  It was really a nice place, very clean and not crowded.  Every day they have lunch specials for $3.90.  It was a nice change for me with good company.

A lot of my time this week was spent working on the mission history since the history for 2012 should be turned in by the end of March.  Evidently, that has been one area that has been neglected since they have been so short-handed and could only take care of so much.  I guess the area offices are encouraging us to try and get one in.  Now that we have a lot more help in the office I was assigned to try and do one.  Since I can only go so far back to gather information I decided to start this history with when the Ghents took over as mission president on the 1st of July 2011.  It is turning out quite nice and President and Sis. Ghent are very pleased with my efforts.

One part of the history is a service project that was done while the Bunkers were here back in 2012.  They were serving as Member Leadership Support in Puyo, a little branch about 200km south of Quito. There was a family living there whose mother died of cancer leaving the three children orphans, since the father had died previously.  The children were two sons, 18 & 16 and a sister who was 7.  The older brother was getting close to the age to serve a mission but felt like he couldn’t leave his siblings without someone to care for them.  Neighbors had helped where they could.  The house that the family was living in had to be torn down, which left the family homeless as well.  The children had a 16 year old cousin who had been living with them to help while the mother was sick and who continued to take care of them after the mother died.   A friend of the family had donated a piece of land to the family but there was a need for the materials and manpower to build a new house.  The small branch had discussed the situation and how they could help. Since Elder Bunker was serving in the branch presidency he was in on the planning.  He suggested that he would talk with President Ghent to see if there was anything he might be able to do.  The branch was willing to donate the manpower but they needed about $3000 for the building materials.  President Ghent offered to contact some of his friends in the states to donate some money.  When the needed funds were collected they were able to go ahead with the project.

It was a simple three room house on poles, as is the custom in the area, to keep local varmints from the inside of the home.  On the days set aside to work on the project,  the Ghents, the Bunkers and missionaries serving in the area along with branch members helped.  It was completed within a short time.  With this help and the willingness of his cousin to stay with his younger siblings the older son is now serving a mission.
I had heard about the project and emailed the Bunkers to have them write about the experience.  They sent me a one page story and with several of the pictures that had been taken I was able to include this in the mission history.

When President Monson had his 85th birthday in August of 2012 the Ecuador Quito mission compiled many rescue stories from the missionaries and sent them to President Monson for his birthday.  This ended up being about 28 pages of stories.  We decided to include these in the mission history.  As I’ve skimmed through the stories, reading some here and there, they are very faith promoting.   Sometime I’ll take the time to read them all and maybe share some with you.

Saturday, Sis. Platts came over so I could show her how to do some things on her computer.   She had mentioned that she had loaded a whole bunch of pictures on her computer before she left home and in December they had disappeared.  She hasn’t been able to find them.  She has a Mac laptop.  I had suggested loading Picasa on to see if we could find them when it did a complete search as part of it’s initial setup.  Unfortunately,  we still couldn’t find the missing pictures but she was pleased to be shown some of the things that can be done with her photos using Picasa, so it wasn’t a complete disappointment for  her trip to our apartment.  When we were done Sis. Platts and I walked to a local ice cream shop called “Crepes and Waffles” that serves really good ice cream. She wanted to treat me to a waffle cone.  It was only a few blocks away.

The mission had a blog that they used for the missionaries to go to in order to download needed documents.  They were using a service called Posterous.  As it turns out this blog provider is closing down it’s blog service at the end of April.  As I was looking at different possibilities to replace this blog and was reading in the Church Handbook for guidelines I found out that temples, missions and visitors centers are not authorized to have blogs.  I guess the mission wasn’t aware that they weren’t supposed to have the blog.  Now we had to find a way to have the missionaries be able to have access to the needed documents for their missionary work.  I suggested to President Ghent on Friday that we try using Dropbox with limited access shared folders.  He said that he would like us to test it out with just the AP’s to see if it works, so Friday I set up an account and then Friday night I spent some time transferring the files from the blog to folders in the Dropbox account.  The idea is to send the link to the Dropbox folder to the missionaries in an email and then they would be able to access the folder as needed.   Time will tell if this is a solution to our problem.  It was a little disappointing to find we shouldn’t use a blog but President Ghent wants to be in keeping with policy.  At church today the AP’s said that they went to the links I sent and it looked to them like it would work very well for sharing files with the missionaries.

Saturday night the Kaneens invited us to their apartment to share desert and visit.  We spent a nice evening with them.  They are from California, recently moving from Redondo Beach to Bakersfield before leaving on their mission here.  He knew President Ghent when he was a young man, serving as his deacons quorum advisor at the age of 19.  President Ghent was his stake president when they lived in the same stake several years ago.  When the Kaneens were making preparations to submit their papers it was at the same time as when President Ghent was trying to get some senior couples to serve in the mission office.   When he found out the Kaneens were planning to serve a mission he requested them and was able to have them serve here.  It’s been fun to get to know them and to do some fun things together.

Sis. Ghent was at our ward today.  She also had with her Sis. Groberg, the matron of the Guayaquil Temple.  Their husbands needed to be here for a regional meeting and the wives attended our ward while they had their meeting.  If you remember in my first letter I wrote after arriving in Quito,  I mentioned our first Sunday here that we had dinner at the Ghents and President Groberg, president of the Guayaquil Temple and his brother, Elder Groberg, of the seventy and his wife were there.  President Groberg’s wife was not in attendance so it was nice to meet her today.  We both concurred that temple presidencies do a lot of work in these smaller temples that they never anticipated they would need to do.  We learned that as we served in the Monterrey Mexico Temple,  under the temple presidencies there.

This evening was FHE at the Segos . Sister Sego started out the evening by giving us a piece of paper. We were to write down two truths and one false statement and then share them with everyone. We were to try and guess which statement was false.  We found some interesting things about each other.  We found out that Sis. Sego was baptized in a horse trough and they had to break the layer of ice on top before it could happen.  Her mother was in the car waiting with lots of towels to get her dry quickly.  We found out about Sis. Kaneens ride on a camel.  She had been convinced to get on the camel to have her picture taken but then the camel took off run with her on it.  We found out that Elder Sego had been in a tornado. We learned that Sis. Phelps great-great grandfather had helped with the translation of the Book of Mormon into Spanish.  I don’t remember all that was shared but these are the interesting ones.

After we finished sharing unusual stories Elder Sego gave a very spiritual message on the resurrection and we watch the video “The Lamb of God”.  As always it was an enjoyable evening with our new friends.  We made plans for next Sunday to have an Easter dinner which will be at our apartment and talked about possible places to visit on our excursion day next month.  Since April is the height of the rainy season we are trying to decide on a place where we won’t have to be outside.