Week 54 in Paraguay Change 9 Week 5

So another week has gone by in the greatest mission on earth, and President’s plans are pushing forward. The biggest thing Elder Foster told President to do with the mission from now on to get the baptisms back up is to teach the rising generation correct principles quickly, pretty much to have great trainers. He told President that being a trainer should be the highest calling in the mission, more so than zone leader, and only excellent missionaries should ever be trainers. So this last week we had a lot of special changes all involving zone leaders so they can all train when the new missionaries come in December. There are going to be 9 new Elders and every single one of them will have a trainer that was a zone leader this last change. We worked a lot with that this week, and it looks like it is really going to help the mission, its logical, trainers really do affect the way a missionary turns out.

Other good news, finally for the very first time yesterday President talked about me getting a replacement, I had been waiting for that day for the longest time. He came up to me while I was at my computer and asked, “Elder Adamson, how long to do think it will take you to train a replacement?” Then I showed him this new training program I was making to speed up the training process, and, in indirect terms, he pretty much told me the day I would leave the office would be January 19th, which means probably the 29th of December my replacement will come into the office and I’ll have 3 weeks to train him. I can’t believe I have already been here in the office for 5 months. Time has gone by so fast. President wants me to finish my training program by the end of next week to be able to make a final decision on how long I will have to train and when I’ll be leaving the office, so I’m going to be working really hard this week to make it as detailed as possible. It already is pretty detailed, I already have 51 pages with hyperlinks and things and I’m only on week 2 responsibilities of a 6 week change. It’s a really cool document, I made it so it has all of these cool links, so you’re reading what you need to do and you think, “I don’t know how to do that” and the words are actually a link, so you click the thing you don’t know how to do and it takes you right to the page that explains how to do it, then on the bottom of the page it has a link right back to the page you were on, it’s really nifty, and really helpful. Anyway, so that’s my big project for right now, I like to call it the “If I do this really well I might get out of the office sooner” project, so I’m working really hard on it. With all this crazy stuff going down in the mission, who knows, maybe I’ll be training when January comes, the way it looks right now, and by what the assistants have told me, when I do leave I will either train or be a zone leader, honestly I’d rather train, but we´ll see what happens, it kind of looks like President from now on wants people to be zone leaders before they train, but you never know.

So, I don’t really have tons of time to write, and honestly I don’t really know what to say, other than the changes happening in the mission it has been a pretty normal and boring week, Thanksgiving wasn’t really anything special, everyone kind of forgot and then at the end of the day Elder Dailey and I went to Burger King to get Thanksgiving dinner, which turned out to be not such a great idea because we ended up eating around 10 PM and it didn’t sit very well the next day. I’m glad everything went well for Becky performing in the Forgotten Carols, I wish I could have been there. It would be wonderful to be in some snow too, Christmas really makes me miss snow. It is so hot here right now, 95, but it even feels hotter, and it technically isn’t even summer yet. I have this little side bar on my computer with the weather here and the weather in Spokane right next to each other and sometimes I like to put them in Celsius because it makes it look like it’s so cold there.

Anyway, as for P-day, our dueños finally came over today with a metal guy and a carpenter to fix the damage that was done when the house was robbed, so our house is pretty safe now. The construction here is so funny, how unprofessionally professionals do their work. Last week they came over to get all the measurements of the front door to make the piece we needed during the week and they came to install it and all the measurements were wrong, it was funny and they had to drill through the metal and make new holes. Then after that we all went to Cocodrilo, that gym we go to, to play some soccer. There was this guy there practicing that plays professionally here. He was born in Costa Rica, but grew up in Miami, so we just spoke together in English the whole time and we had him play with us, he just dribbled right around all of us the whole game, but it was still really fun. I think Cocodrilo is really doing me good, I was worried when I came into the office that I would gain weight sitting down all the time, but I’ve actually lost about 6 pounds and toned out a lot more just by going to this gym an hour every morning, I attached a picture to see if it reminds you of anything, but yeah, I love going to the gym in the morning.

Anyway, I’m about out of time, I love you all so much, hope you all have a great week and enjoy the Christmas Season with snow, because you never know, next year you could be celebrating Christmas in 100 degree weather, enjoy it while it lasts, I love you all, Elder Adamson V