Family,
This week felt so long! Monday night I found out I was getting changed. Tuesday morning I was on a bus to Guayaquil. I got changed to the sector, Independencia. It is here in the city of Guayaquil. I live in the same house as ELDER CURTIS from the MTC. It is fun to catch up on how our missions have gone thus far. Independencia, a.k.a Ghana by day, Compton by night, is crazy. It is the most ghetto city I have ever seen. Pretty much all of the people are black.
My companion is Elder Sulla. He is from Peru. He is super shy. He has six months in the mission and this is his first change as a senior companion. So he does not have a lot of leadership experience. Because he is so shy, he is hard to understand and sometimes a little awkward when talking to people. This has put a lot of pressure on me this week. The pressure is good though. I have learned I am pretty good under pressure. I feel like I am becoming a much better missionary because of the pressure I am under. I am expected to start the conversations and keep them going. It has been fun because I can finally really communicate with the people. My companion has been in this same sector for 6 months. He has not had a baptism for 3 months. He said he rarely talked to anyone the last six weeks. Everyone just shut the door in his face. But we managed to put 2 solid dates for baptisms this week. This refueled his desire and we are hoping to bring back some success into this area.
All the missionaries from my group had a meeting this Tuesday which was awesome!! The meeting was good and I got to see all my friends from the MTC again. It was great to share all our experiences and stories from our first 6 weeks in the mission.
I have learned a lot about this mission this week. The sad truth is that there have been a lot of really bad missionaries in this mission... For example, in my area, almost every single kid between the ages of 8 to 14 is baptized. 30 members attend the sacrament meetings. Missionaries would baptize 10 or 15 kids a month to boost their baptism stats. All those baptisms are completely inactive. Most never went to church after their baptism. This, to me, was so sad to find out. And what is sadder is all the kids here know it. When we talk to them they say, “oh yeah… Elder So and So just baptized me for their numbers.” It makes it so hard to do missionary work. The adults are not very receptive either.
But, Elder Sulla and I are going to work hard to be diligent, true missionaries. The numbers are not important. We want true converts. So far we have 2 who are truly interested and want to be baptized. With faith, we hope to gain more this week… and slowly, but surely, we can turn this sector around.
It’s fun to hear about life back at home. Thanksgiving is this week. It’s funny that holidays do not mean anything to us as missionaries. We just try and forget about them. Anyway let me know how that goes.
So what I learned about sending packages… I guess you need to send packages with a green sticker. I do not know what that means, but I guess there has to be a special green sticker on the box otherwise we will not get the package. So that is all I know. Maybe there are more instructions in my mission packet.
Anyways, all is good here. We are working hard and having fun. Love you guys.
Love,
Elder McRae
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