This week was great! Elder Liddell is learning so much,
and it´s super fun being a companion with a new missionary who is new to
Paraguay. It´s been cold almost this whole last week, and rainy for the
last couple of days (on and off since Friday
evening).
Juan was baptized and confirmed, so that´s super awesome, now
his uncle has someone to sit in church with, so that´s even more
awesome. Since it´s winter here, the water was pretty cold. Juan was
just super ready to be baptized, it rained super hard Sunday morning, but there was still quite a few people there.
I taught my comp how to cook hamburgers and hot dogs this week, as well
as how to use a microwave to heat up food, we´re having tons of fun down
here. This is his first time living away from home, so he´s learning
tons of things.
Every time we talk to anybody they tell him that he´s
demasiado alto (too tall), and they all ask him how old he is, and he
says 18, and they always say "se anota" (it shows). so that´s been kinda
fun. He´s six foot five, and he sticks out a lot here between all the
Paraguayans. He tried mandioca and he didn´t like it, so he´s in for a rough 2
years, at least in that aspect. The Gomez family is still shoving him
full of food, whether he wants it or not and whether he´s full or not so
that´s been super great, I taught him how to say he´s full, so that´ll
help him out a bit.
I do feel better, now I just am trying not to get a cold,
because it is cold here. I do not have diarrhea. One thing I appreciate in the mission
is solid poop, because it just feels so good.
Here in the fall most of the trees don´t lose
their leaves, it´s pretty nice. Here I just want spring to come (I don´t
want summer to come, just spring)
Could you send me the sweet and
sour sauce recipe?
Littering, carrying guns, carrying knives are all
illegal, but it happens very often. Since everyone does it, the
police do not bother enforcing it. That´s basically the way it is with
all the Paraguayan laws.
Villarrica is the paraguayan capital of the
harp, and there are quite a few people who play it here, and it sounds
really good.
We taught 20 lessons this
week, the rain hurt us a bit, as well as baptismal
preparations. We were cleaning mosquitos and spiders out of the baptismal font
in Villarrica. Creek baptisms in PasoYoBai are just so much easier. The creek is
about 2 'blocks' (there aren't blocks) from the chapel. We changed our clothes behind
towels. My
companion was homesick until the day of the baptism because baptisms solve
everything.
We haven´t met the chief, he lives super far away, the
branch president was planning to go out there in a couple weeks, but now
there´s going to be a baptism that day! That´s the best problem I´ve
run into in my mission.
I usually give my companion a good chunk of the
lesson to try to teach, and then I ´bear testimony¨ for a while
explaining the things better that need explaining better.
How many
people are in the ward now? It sounds huge. The most people I´ve seen
inside a chapel for more than a year is 118, and that was just a
fantastic day. Here in Paraguay I have never had a problem with too big of a
class, except in Sacrament meeting we had 40-something people ,and I
think we only have about 60 chairs in the chapel, so we had to move the
chairs into the Sacrament room, and then back out for the classes.
A member washes our clothes. My bed is fine, just a metal
bed with a cheap mattress. The blankets in this mission aren´t as soft
as they were in the other one, that´s my one complaint.
Paraguayans are
the kind of people that would get embarrassed if their neighbors think
they don´t have faith, so they always say they have a lot of faith (see
James Chapter 2).
-Elder Bowles
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