Because of the cancelled flight, they had to rearrange all the travel plans and Elder Harrock was stuck in Buenos Aires until 10 Wednesday night. He's going Lejos, so he has a 10 hour drive from the mission office after that. On the flight from Miami to Buenos Aires, I tried talking to the guy next to me, and that´s when I knew it was going to be a real difficult my first while of the mission. So, yeah.
Elder Dahl got sent to Burubuja, which is in Asuncion, and means passion fruit. Elder Willes got sent to Kennedy, which is 2 hours away from the office in some direction, not sure which. My companion is Elder Hamilton, he´s so good at everything. He speaks English, so thats good. He´s from Colorado.
I'm in the city of Limpio, which is about a 45 minute or hour drive from the office in Asunción. We are in charge of areas Salado A and B until we get more elders in the house with us. Sister Madariaga told us that we had the mansion for our house, which basically means that it´s the nicest house in the mission, but it isn´t a mansion by any means. We have two areas since less of us came in than left this last change, which means the house is all ours. The kitchen has it´s own door on the outside of the building, and the toilet doesn´t flush. It is pretty nice though, Hamilton said that some houses in the mission are only as big as our bedroom.
We had a baptism on Saturday, Juan Carlos. He´s awesome, I wish I could have had a bigger part in teaching him.
Church was yesterday, I really didn´t get that much out of it, since I still can´t understand people that well. I can only talk at people, I can´t really talk to people or have a conversation because I don´t understand what they´re saying that often. I´m sure glad Elder Hamilton is a patient guy. All the really old people only really know Guarani. The younger people know both, but they mostly talk to us in Spanish with some Guarani mixed in. I have become an expert at telling when they are speaking Spanish and when they are speaking Guaraní, but I don´t understand any Guarani and only some Spanish, so that doesn´t really help much.
There are dogs everywhere, one keeps trying to get through our gate when we come home at night. It was pretty cold the first couple of nights here. The humidity fell onto the streets and made them wet, it didn´t even need to rain. The streets here are made of inpiedra, which is kinda like cobblestone except it just looks like someone shoved a bunch of rocks into the dirt road when it was wet or something. Most of our area is just straight out dirt road and there´s garbage everywhere. I guess they just burn their trash instead of having someone come pick it up. There are cows and pigs and chickens all over. We were talking to someone in their yard, when a pig came by and just started eating garbage.
We did service for Hermana Ramoa, which was cutting down bannana trees and pruning the ones that were still giving fruit. That was awesome, because we did it with machetes. Then we helped her make lunch, which was this noodle stuff, it was pretty good. Elder Hamilton said she would find out if he was a good cook or not, and then she said, "si la comida es mal, entonces tu cocinaste, si es buena entonces yo cocine." It was probably the only funny thing that I heard and actually understood. Then he told her it was good, so then she said that she had cooked it. They have what are called empenadas here which are mini calzones they´re good. They make salads at lunch (citas) which are somehow good even without dressing.
It is pretty here, there are a bunch of palm trees and mango trees everywhere that we go, its pretty cool. Hamilton said that when summer rolls around almost every tree we see will have some kind of fruit on it. The lemons here are orange, and the grapefruits here are yellow, but they taste just like they do back in the states.
The collectivos are pretty fun, the drivers are pretty pro. On the first drive into Limpio, the driver went to pass another bus and another bus was coming the otherway, so in between, three wide, like it was no big deal.
One of my suitcases got messed up on the flight here, the handle got pulled up and bent in half, so we emptied it and left it at the office, and president said he´d take it to get it fixed at the airport. We had to take it broken on the collectivo once though. After we were on Elder Hamilton told me the bus driver was telling me not to bring it on the bus, but gave up when I didn´t understand and just went on the bus anyways.
Elder Bowles
Everyone has a hard time pronouncing my name, so pretty soon here everyone´s gonna be pronouncing the e in Bowles cuz they have an easier time with that.
Ivan using a machete to prune and remove banana trees as service for Sister Ramoa in their ward.
Baptism of Juan Carlos on Ivan's first Saturday in Paraguay.
Asuncion Airport when Ivan arrived in Paraguay
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