Elder Taylor Moulton: Week 14: Doobly Boobly, Chupe, Camarooninites, and Giant Fruit

Hola Family!!!!!

This week has been both weird, fun, and stressful, but overall it was a great week in the mission! We hit pautas (goals in the mission) so it was great to know that we are making improvement in the work! We also had some crazy food this week so that was memorable. We had harichwela, a Dominican Republic dish with a member family, fufu (delicious!), and Ecuadorean Chupe and Caswela soup. Chupe was a weird paste that you put on rice that is made of shaved platano(banana) and shrimp, which wasn't half bad. It definitely looked strange though... And the heart/organ looking chicken in the soup made me sweat a little before we tried it haha. But the good news is that except for the nasty chicken sandwiches a few weeks ago that knocked us out for 4 days, none of the food has made us sick, so props to that! It's definitely fun trying all the food out from the different cultures here, and food is the only way it seems to get to the heart of an investigator so that's the way we work! We also tried out a giant orange at a store while contacting, which had a full other orange on the inside! The bananas here are also huge, which I'll have a pic of too.

On one of our dinner visits, I also learned how the Spanish say American words, which turned to be super funny. One of the words was doobly Boobly, aka, Double Bubble, which took me like 5 minutes to figure out haha. Lesson to be learned here, it always good to listen closely when with Spanish speakers, because you might miss something important!

A miracle that was part of this week happened last night as we were making a call to an investigator to invite him to an activity. We looked across the empty street to find two African Camarooninite women walking along(Africans are the nicest people ever, so we couldn't pass that up!), so Elder Turner and I quickly made our way over and talked to them. Miraculously, I had met these ladies two weeks ago right before my companion arrived after transfers, and they totally recognized me and wanted to learn more about the church, and when it was! Right after giving them a lesson and setting up another, we turned the corner to find another African lady from the same country, and after giving a lesson on the Book of Mormon, we felt that we should invite her to get baptized, to which she responded "no problemo!" And she set up another lesson with us to learn more! Overall, we knew that we were blessed with meeting these three ladies last night, and we are excited to teach them more this week!

Elder Turner and I have been getting along great! It's been fun having the combined mission age of 6 months(he's literally a brand new trainer), so it's been fun learning from each other. One thing we like to do is to end the day telling each other about what happened that was funny with each other, which usually there are a lot of. One of them, was watching him, upon finding his belt missing, turning around just outside our pisos elevator, and not looking running face first into the metal door! I laughed at it the whole way back up to the room haha.

Overall it's been a great week, and while we had no baptisms, we have three investigators with fechas, and a bunch of news, so we're hoping to change that the next few weeks. Love and miss you all, and thanks for the Pics and Christmas box! I only opened the star wars pillowcase , which is awesome by the way so thank you so much(sorry for the custom fees, Spanish government sucks haha)!

Love you all!

Elder Taylor Moulton