Elder Justyn Pollock

Happy New Year! I`ve had an awesome new year! I got a taste of the craziness that is Ecuador on New Years Eve. Our New Years Eve celebrations in the United States are like reading a phone book in comparison to what they do here. Here basically every single household has one of those paper mache mannequins. The fireworks started at around 9 or 10 I believe, and it was basically fireworks all across the sky until 1:00 in the morning (no way I could sleep with that haha). It was way awesome though. At like 11:50 they bring out the "Monigotes" which are those paper mannequins that are supposed to represent the old year, and if they didn`t like the old year they beat up their monigote before putting it in a pile of them. (I was pretty confused about why they were beating up their paper dolls at the moment though) Then they poured gasoline over them and at 12:00 burned them, then started throwing their fireworks into the monigotes!! From my window looking down the street, their were fires ALL down the streets, and the sky was full of fireworks! They would throw the fireworks in the fire and try run away which was super funny to watch. Outside of my window they had paper dolls of the flinstones in their car. This little kid tackled and beat up a 5 foot doll of the flinstones dog which was hilarious. The 28th Marco got baptized (one of those teenagers we`ve been teaching). Now we`re working on helping him get the priesthood. This week we had another baptism, of Jordy. He`s 16 and was super excited to get baptized. His baptism was actually scheduled for the 11th, but we shared a scripture in the bible about one guy who gets taught and baptized within less then a day in The Acts, and he asked if he could get baptized sooner! So the next day the zone leaders came to interview him and he was baptized! He`ll be the third priest in the ward right now! All the priests in the ward are recent converts within the last month. Pictures soon to follow! We`re now trying to help his older brother to accept to be baptized soon. This week if everything goes well, we will have the baptism of Dora and Favoricio. Two other teenagers we`ve been teaching. they`re 14 and 12 respectively. We were planning on the baptism of only Favoricio, but God answered our prayers yesterday! The other week Dora expressed to us she didn`t feel she should get baptized anymore. We did what we could to resolve her doubt but at the end we had to leave it to God and told her to ask him if she should get baptized. We prayed hard that she would do se and recieve an answer. She did so, and yesterday recieved the answer! She dreamed of being baptized and felt good about it and she felt very strongly it was her response from God. We`ve been teaching them for a little while and they`re awesome. Their parents support them alot. This week we also had transfers like I said last week. My new companion came from the MTC in Mexico. (Brand new to the mission!) He`s from Idaho and his name is Elder Chandler. He`s doing way awesome here and loves it. We get along way well. He performed the baptism of Jordy this saturday which I hope was an awesome impression of the mission. I`m doing my best here to be the best missionary I can be and help others as much as I can. I know this is the true church of Jesus Christ and I loving being a missionary for him. - Elder Pollock