Hola familia!

Hey you finally got that package I sent you! That’s great because I sent it before Christmas. Apparently the office took a long time to get it sent off though. The important thing is that you got it. Sounds like everyone had a busy week this week—me too. Crazy busy. Everything went off really well but it was a near thing [translation: close call]. We had lots of big events go down and it was sort of a trial by fire experience for learning how to be a zone leader. Thursday morning the office called us and said that Elder Vargas (Elder Frye’s old companion) would be coming into Portoviejo that night so that he could go to the zone leader council the next day with us. That was a mess and would involve a lengthy but not too interesting story, but in short let’s just say that there were some miscommunications and it took us a long time to find Elder Vargas once he got to the city. Anyway, we got Elder Vargas to the house and went to bed early (10 pm) because we had to get up at 2:30 am to take a 4-hour bus ride to Guayaquil in order to make it to the darn council at 8 am. So we went to bed and all was well with the world until the phone rang at 11 pm. My companion answered and after he hung up I asked what was said. He mumbled something about giving a class but I was too tired to understand what he was talking about so I just rolled over and went back to sleep. As it turns out it was the assistants [to the president] calling to say that Elder Fonseca and I would be giving a class about “staying the course” the next day in the zone leader council. I hate giving talks at the last minute. Especially talks in front of all the other zone leaders and the assistants and the president. But hey, that’s life as a missionary.

So on the bus ride my companion and I were fighting the desire to sleep and trying to come up with a decent lesson, but it wasn’t really coming along. We had something more or less worked out and decided to call it good. Well, what really happened is that we fell asleep in the middle of planning. Then around 5:30 am I woke up and couldn’t help but notice that the bus was sitting at a 45 degree angle and that my side of the bus was now much higher than I remembered it being before. As I sat there contemplating my new, elevated status, I slowly became aware that we were no longer “on the road” in the conventional sense but that the right side of the bus was now half sunk in the mud—thus causing the significant tilt that I had recently become aware of. I woke my companion up to share with him my new discovery but at first he was too out of it to understand me. I told him and at first he said, “What’s the big deal, let me sleep” but I finally got my point across. So Elder Vargas, Elder Fonseca, and I got off the bus and sat around in the dark waiting for another bus so that we could continue our journey. I happened to have my camera on me at the time to take pictures with friends at the meeting so we took advantage of the moment to take pictures of the bus. I guess the driver fell asleep or something so he drifted off the road a bit and that’s when he got stuck. When we got on the next bus I sat there contemplating how lucky we were that he hadn’t fallen asleep when we were on a hill or something and I couldn’t help but notice the interesting correlation between that experience and the subject of the class we were supposed to give. So of course, that’s what we based our talk on. I think it went over well. It was a good meeting all things considered.

As it turns out, Elder Adamson became a zone leader this change too. I also heard that Elder Frye is a district leader now. I wish I could sit in on Elder Frye’s district meeting classes I bet they would be pretty entertaining. So then Saturday night the assistants called and said that President Gamboa would be in the area so he wanted to do the interviews for our zone the next day. Normally that wouldn’t be a big deal but Sunday was also the day we had planned to have the big meeting about missionary work for all the bishops and stake leaders. So the interviews were going to happen at 3 pm and the meeting was at 4 pm. luckily both were scheduled for the same building so after church Sunday, we went to lunch then rushed over to the stake center to get the building ready for both events. We were going to show a 15-minute video from Preach My Gospel as well so we had to get the projector set up as well.  But in the end we pulled it off. I guess that the stake president has wanted President Gamboa to come talk in Portoviejo for a long time and when we let it slip that he would be around, some people got it in their heads that he was coming to talk in the meeting at 4pm; but in reality President Gamboa didn’t even know we were having any such meeting. So when he got there we took him aside and informed him of our predicament and begged him to talk for 5 minutes to keep the masses happy. President was a good sport and helped us out so the whole thing ended up being a success. There have been all sorts of smaller events but I’m out of time now.

All in all life has been busy and there is a lot more to being a zone leader than I originally thought, but I’m enjoying it. Oh and I forgot to mention but there is this guy here who lives up in Utah and as it turns out he knows some people I know. One of them is J.R. Johnson. It’s a small world huh? Talk to you next week.

Te quiero,
Elder Walke

Note: Elder Walke recently send us some photos and videos in the mail. If you would like to see the videos click here.