Week 40 in Paraguay Change 7 Week 2

Down here everything is pretty relaxed right now. Just normal P-day fever. About the week, this last week seemed to just fly by, I honestly don't even really remember it starting, but a lot of good things happened. First of all, Zone Conferences are over, I got to go on Wednesday, there is this new focus with all missionaries all over the world on teaching skills. The church has come out with this whole new training program to help missionaries become better missionaries. It sounds like it is really going to help out a lot of things. With that the leaders of the mission are attending this 4 day training this next week, I think I already talked about it a little bit, I went out to Pedro Juan on a division for the last one, but now its my turn to go because this one is for young leaders. It focuses on eight specific points from Preach My Gospel to help missionaries focus more on helping their investigators understand their purpose and feel the Spirit. We have been applying just a few of the points recently in our area and the outcomes have been really awesome. Just this week we put five new baptismal dates for the 10th of September, on Justin's birthday, hopefully they go through so I have an awesome birthday present for him. Tonight we might be putting three more on the calendar, so eight to be baptized that day. We were planning earlier in the week with a map of our area because we pretty much have nothing happening right now, and we decided to contact these five secluded blocks on the other side of our area where we never go because it is a huge walk to get there. So we get out there and the very first house we contact we go inside and put three baptismal dates on the calendar, and have since then put another one in the house. There is a single mom that lives there with three of her kids, ages 23, 19, and 17 ish. The 23 year old is also a single mom, and all of them are preparing to be baptized. They are seriously some of the best investigators I have ever had in my mission, and they actually understand really well, which doesn't happen very often, well pretty much everyone in this area does. They read and discuss the Book of Mormon with us and all should be at church tomorrow. I think two of them will come for sure, the other two are a little iffy, but we've got faith. Then there is this other girl, Lurdes, that let us in and we shared the gospel with her and her two children and she is also one of the best investigators I have ever taught. She has so much desire to do what is right and look for what Heavenly Father wants her to do. She has a few more problems though, she is living with someone and they aren't married, and they have been together a long time, but marriage isn't a problem, except he isn't the father of the children and we aren't sure if she was married before? Divorce is a problem here because it takes a very long time and is expensive, so hopefully she never got married in the first place so we can just get her married and baptized. We haven't ever talked to her boyfriend yet. Her two sons, ages 9 and 11, both play soccer Sunday mornings, so getting to church might be a little problem. The other date we could put tonight is with this single girl named Alicia, she has already been to church once, but since then she has kind of fizzled out. We are going there tonight and we are going to either leave her with a baptismal date or we are going to drop her.
I am really excited though to be able to go to the training meeting this next week and start applying all of the points. We are having more success in our area right now than I think we have had since I got here in the office, and I really think it is because of these new things we are applying to our teaching. It still is kind of hard to plan from 4:30 to 9 though because of how few investigators we have. Generally the investigators we have are really awesome right now. It is really sad thought considering everyday before I got the office we planned from 10AM in the morning to 9PM at night without any problems filling the whole day, and now we have trouble filling more than 2 hours, and we just end up contacting the rest of the time. I am really excited for the near future, and I really hope we can get Lurdes to church tomorrow and prepared for everything, because if we can get her and her boyfriend married and baptized on the 10th of September, that would be a family before I hit my year mark so I might have a chance to go through the temple with them to get them sealed before I go home. If it doesn't go through that way, I think for sure we will be having baptisms again before the end of September.