On Monday - my first real day out after being in the kitchen for so long, showing Aaron the country and then being sick for a week, we stopped by and visited a couple of inactive ones in the congregation. While small talk is not too much of a problem for us, when someone starts telling you their problems, they usually get emotional and start talking very fast. It gets very hard to understand them. Of course you can pick up one or two words and piece things together, to get a general idea but it is still very frustrating. We left one sister and I even made the comment to Mark - what use are we? However we had a reminder last night that we are not doing too bad when one of them made the effort to get back to the meeting and she came and gave me a huge hug. Then the mother of the other young girl came over to me and told me how much they had appreciated us stopping by and could we please come to her house another day soon. She said we encouraged her daughter to make plans to make it to all the convention. She nearly made me cry because I had been so negative about our abilities lately. Usually though when you hit a brick wall with the language, you are about to make another leap forward - so here's hoping.

Thought I would include this photo from last Friday night as I don't post a lot of photos of us together. We were taken out to see the lights of the city by the Ochoa Family - yep you have already met Fernando - who are just the sweetest people. (Sorry the photo of them is a bit blurry). Elvia has brought her children up by herself as her husband left them to go to America - the land where the streets are paved with gold - to make his fortune. It's a familiar tale here in Ecuador and of course a lot of times they never come back to their families - very sad. She has done an excellent job on her own though as the kids are doing very well.