Week 5 in Paraguay

It was so good to talk to you all on Christmas and so fun to hear everyone´s voices again. I had a little weird moment while I was hanging up the phone though, it really hit me I was still in Paraguay and I knew I wouldn´t hear any of you again for 5 months, but don´t worry, I´m completely fine. The work is progressing, we´re hoping we can get a lot done this next week and in the next couple months. Transfers are on January 6 and we don´t find out if we both stay or not until January 4. We´re both pretty sure neither of us will go and I´ll end up being the last companion Elder Dennis has. It was kind of funny listening to parts of Elder Dennis´s call home because the whole thing was pretty much plans with his family on what they are going to do when he gets back. It´s a little hard because all of the missionaries I´m living with are going home soon. I´m keeping my focus though.
Since I just talked to you, I´ll tell you what happened the rest of this week.
On Christmas Eve we all got together at the zone leaders house, where we live still, and roasted marshmallows and watched all of the fireworks. Christmas after I called home the President called and told the zone leaders we all got 25 mil extra on our cards to go out to eat for Christmas so we all went out together to eat at this pizza place which was really awesome. After that we sent off the Zone leaders convert to go be a local missionary out in Yby Ya´u (that´s Guaraní and its pronounced really weird because a Y in Guaraní is pronounced like a U using a lot of your throut with your toungue kind of in the back of your mouth so its like ubu ju-u, its weird) with Elder Canales because his companion went into the mission office to go home because his two years are up. I don´t know if I told you about these converts. Elder Reid, one of the zone leaders, found him in his area on a division and the first thing Fernando, the convert, asked him was how do I become like you, I want to be a missionary. Elder Reid told him he first needed to be baptized and the Fernando told him right there he would and got a baptismal date. He started reading the Book of Mormon straight through and took all the lesson and was baptized in 3 weeks, which is the minimum here, with his brother Orlando and his sister Maricel, who is the girl I baptized. Fernando is so awesome though, he plays soccer with us all the time on P-day and is so good. He has already started trying to learn English on his own with us and can already respond to greetings and things. He even cut his hair so that he would look like us and then this last week for 3 days he was companions with Elder Canales only a week and a half after his baptism. Both of the zone leaders are going home before he can turn in his papers to go on a mission himself. I was talking with him and we´re going to work things out so I can go through the temple with him next year before he leaves on his mission, its going to be so awesome.
Anyway, so back to our area, we had a ton of people lined up to go to church yesterday and all of them looked pretty legitimate and then it rained. When it rains here people just don´t do anything, they stay at home asleep because all of the streets flood and you can´t really go anywhere. The streets flood very fast. Anyway, we left our house at 8AM to go to church at 8:30AM. We didn´t get there until 9AM because of all the flooding. When we arrived the only people there were the President of the Rama (Branch) and his wife, so we were leaving to go and get two of the girls that said for sure they were going to go to church, they called us and told us we should wait a while because it is raining, but we just went anyway, and brought them an umbrella. We picked them up and they went to church and then we left again just before Sacrament meeting to get some more investigators, these 4 boys ages 10-12 and their mom/aunt they live with, but they all couldn´t come so in church yesterday we had 5 people, the President and his wife, Dirse, this pretty awesome member lady we have, and the two girls we brought and no one else. In the Rama (Branch) six months ago they had over 40 people go every week. It is kind of sad we have so few, but we´re still working hard to build the Rama (Branch) again. I don´t know if I told you but we just opened up this area again this change. It was closed before because of a bunch of problems in the branch and all went inactive and they started to have just about no one go to church everyweek, so they closed the area and just added it to the zone leaders area. That is why we keep finding all of these less active members that have all these problems and they won´t go to church. We´ve have decided now to focus more on converts, kind of like baptizing a whole new Rama (Branch), so we are really pushing towards the finding right now. The only problem recently has been that the new investigator we get don´t want to do anything when we come back for return visits, but we have a new year ahead of us and a couple of people working towards baptism so I think we´ll start having some success really soon, hopefully.
We found another house this week, 800 mil and its a lot nicer than the other one we were about to get. Elder Brazier and his companion who are also looking for a house are going to live with us because it is big enough to fit us all and is super close to his area. It´s an upstairs apartment with a nice balcony and everything. The best part is it is brand new, we´re the first people that are going to live in it. I´ll send some pictures of it when I can, oh and speaking of pictures, I have a lot and I just need to copy them onto CD´s and I am going to send them out to you, probably next week. I was going to send them out this week but the CD´s I bought didn´t work so I´m going to buy more and try again next P-day.
Elder Dennis was telling me that they were having problems with Facebook last change so President has asked everyone to make it so you can´t get on it anymore, so if you could just change my password and stuff and then save it somewhere so I can get on when I get home that would be awesome. You´re not supposed to send anything from it to me anymore, so you can check it once and a while if you want, but for me it´ll be like I don´t even have one.
Hope I can start sending you some awesome conversion stories soon.