March 8, 2010-Good Morning

hey guys,
i wanted to let you all know, because you all asked about this...but we´ve already told everyone (district leader, zone leaders, and the president) about us getting robbed. apparently, no one ever told me that missionaries have been robbed in this area in the past. but yeah, so i wanted you all to know that those people know. and about carrying money...we normally never take money with us anyways. the only reason we had it was because we were going to buy food right after. but now we usually just carry a couple pesos and if we have more money than that, we´ll hide it in like our socks or something.
this week has been really great for elder mortensen and i here in alto san lorenzo. we haven´t taken out baptismal dates with sara and valeria yet because we´re waiting for sara to take out a marriage date first. we talked to them both this week about baptism and both sara and valeria told us that they wanted to be baptized. so we explained to sara that we believe in all of the laws and that marriage is one of them. so she told us that shes going to get married now. it turns out that the only reason her and luis hadn´t gotten married yet was because she was never sure about it. apparently, luis had tried to get her to marry him a couple times, but she never would. but after we explained to her why we need to be married, she told us that she would. so this week they´re going to the registro civil to set a marriage date. we talked to valeria and she said that she wanted to get married the same day as her mom, which will be really cool. i´m guessing that they´ll probably get baptized sometime in april, so we´re really stoked about that...we´ve also had another really awesome experience happen this week. so a while back, we found a guy named luis who had been listening to the lessons almost a year ago. he lives in our area, but always went to church and listened to the lessons in la plata because he would work there. he really liked going to church there in la plata, so we were told that the baptism would belong to the missionaries there. but the other day we talked to him and he told us that he had prayed and recieved an answer that he needs to start coming to church in our area. he came yesterday and really loved it. hes really all ready to get baptized. we just need to talk to him this week and take out a baptismal date with him. we can probably even get him baptized at the end of this transfer, which would be really awesome.
mom, just so you know, we called the president and our leaders the night we got robbed. its actually something that you´re always supposed to do because they have to fill out forms and some stuff like that too. but yeah, thats all taken care of already...oh yeah i´m also glad that you liked the picture that i sent last week. i´m gonna try to send that memory card that i have in the next couple weeks. its been full forever, so i´d say that its about time to send it home hahah. dad, i was just thinking...do you know if people in ecuador speak another language besides spanish? because i´ve been finding out that a bunch of countries here in south america have their own languages that they speak. like paraguay also speaks guarani, which i´m still learning...actually it was really cool cause yesterday i met some people from paraguay. the wife didn´t really want to listen, but i started talking to them a little bit in guarani and they really warmed up to us and listened haha. it was pretty tight. but yeah you´ve also got peru and bolivia, which speak different types of cetchoa, which i´ve started learning a little bit of too. i´ve only learned a couple words and stuff in that language too, but its way cool to learn new stuff like that. so yeah, that made me wonder if ecuador has anything like that. sean, i´m stoked to hear about the chargers hanging on to, sproles, merriman, mcneil, and some others. its crazy that we got rid of cromartie, but he must really not be as great as we though he was. oh well...hopefully the lakers and get their act together too. and dude about the trivia...like i wouldn´t know that song. i still sing that song sometimes! dude of course its mayday parade. speaking of them, did you ever get to hear more of their cd? i wanna know if it was that good or not...what else, no bluebird sightings whatsoever haha! toma che! it sounds like all the wedding plans are going well too. love ya bro. paige, are you still thinking about doing cheerleading? i think that would be really cool and something that you would really like to do through high school. so you´ll have to tell me how thats going. bridg, mom tells me that you had a pretty fun birthday party friday night. i hope that you had a really great b-day. i was definately thinking about you on saturday.
well i´m pretty sure that thats about it for this week. i love you all and thank you all for your love and support. i truly consider it a blessing to have a family as awesome as all of you. be sure to tell everyone back at home that i say hi too. until next week...
con cariño,
elder ryan hall