Week 3 in Paraguay

I´m just about to 3 weeks now in Paraguay and it is pretty sweet. There was a lot of tough stuff that happened this week. It´s been a pretty hard area for us here. Well for Paraguay, probably anywhere else missionaries would love to be doing what were doing, but its been a little hard. We had 6 people with dates to get baptized this month and it looks like all of them are going to have to be pushed back and most probably won´t even get baptized at all, at least while we´re here. We had this family of 5 sisters all lined up to get baptized on the 18 of this month, but none of them are really excited now. When we first met them they seemed so golden, all of them went to church, they still read the Book of Mormon and pray everyday, but they just don´t seem to understand what they have to do to get an answer. Now it really just looks like they don´t want to change. They have a very Catholic family and there aren´t really any doctrinal issues, but they seem like they don´t want to give up their Catholic family traditions. Elder Dennis and I were a little sad about that one. We also had the 10 year old son of the recent convert we have, Recencio, we are planning on giving Recencio the priesthood this week and he was going to baptize his son on Christmas, but he didn´t bring his son to church because he said he didn´t have any clean clothes and converts have to have gone to church at least twice before they are baptized so we are going to have to push him back to New Years Day, I think we are going to see about if we can get permission from the president to baptize him because he is in a complete member family that goes to church and he is a young child, but it looks like the baptism is probably going to have to wait. Recencio´s daughter also turns 8 in January so he is going to get the chance to baptize two of his children within a couple months of being a member so we are pretty excited about that. We´re going to focus really hard in these next couple of weeks on getting some new investigators with baptismal dates so we can have a least 4baptisms in January. The biggest problem for us right now though is we don´t really have too many members who can help us out. We have these standards of excellence that the President gave the whole mission that our goals shouldn´t be lower than every week. The goal for lessons with members present is 23 per week and we had 10 members in church last week, so that is definately our hardest one every week, but the Lord really has been blessing us though, it seems like all the time we are finding these less actives that just pop out of nowhere that help us out and we are able to get our goals. It´s just like something one of my good friends from the Museum of Art sent to me in a dearelder letter this week, he told me while we are making goals we should keep in mind what the Lord´s will is and He will help us to accomplish the goal because it is His will. Well I thought about that and I realized that President Wade is a man called of God to direct this mission, and he has told us 23 lessons with member present is the Lord´s will for every area, every week, so if that is the Lord´s will, no matter where I am, it is possible and I can testify that has been the case. It seems as though we have been having a pretty rough time here these first couple of weeks opening the area, but the more I look at it the more I can see the Lord´s hand in all that we are doing here.
There is this huge family that lives adjacent to the same plot of land Recencio lives on with his family and so every time we go over to talk to him with Derlis (his 10 year old son) we meet and talk to this family before or after. We´ve all become pretty good friends and they like listening to us but it didn´t really look like it was going anywhere with them. They we´re just really genuine nice people. Yesterday we are walking down the road and Rueben, one of the boys in this family, stops us to say hi and tells us that his brother´s wife that was pregnant just gave birth to her baby and it had died it her womb. We went over to see how the family was and they all seemed to be alright. They had the baby there in a cardboard box in the house and the mother was still in the hospital. I don´t know how the got there and everyone was just kind of looking at it and touching it. They had some good questions for us and were really receptive to our message.

I´ll share a few things about Paraguay to end off, motocycles are like family cars here, we see 3 or 4 and sometime 5 people all on one at the same time. They are everywhere here, and speaking of driving, its no rules here. It literally is the definition of offensive driving. You can pass people whenever you want, no one stops at intersections, and J walking is how you walk around. Today we took two taxis to Shopping China, something awesome I´ll have to tell you about later. They raced there, cutting down back roads and passing each other with cars coming the other way. Oh, and its normal to have 3 cars wide on a 2 lane street, and I have never seen a speed limit sign here.
The most defining thing about Paraguay are the bugs, it is so loud here all the time because of the bug noises. I think I get about 5-10 new mosquito bites everyday, most of them being on my feet which are the worst.
If you´re out on the street here and you´ve got to go to the bathroom pretty bad, people just go out on the side of the road, everywhere here. In Asuncion I saw a guy going on a tree that was part of the landscaping of the road and that is totally normal, no one thinks it´s even wierd here.