Dearest Familia,
Thank you Dad, Mom, Laurel, George, Goompa, Nana, Grandma Springer (and Teresa), Sarah, and Ashley for your e-mails and the fun pictures this week. I feel so loved. :)
I just spent almost my whole hour writing individual e-mails so I´m sorry if this one is short and/or makes no sense. And sorry if I´m not very descriptive or interesting. How about next week you guys send me some questions so I can know what would interest you?
The weather here in Paraguay continues to be completely unpredictable. Earlier this week it was beautiful and sunny. Then later it got too hot. Then towards the end there was a wind so strong we could barely move if we were walking into it. Then, of course, on Sunday it poured rain AGAIN! Is that crazy or what? Two weeks in a row where every day leading up to Sunday is just perfect for church attendance, then WHAM! Apparently people here need to learn to humble themselves and go to church no matter what the weather, and THEN the weather will be perfect to go. We actually had pretty good attendance this week, though, compared to last week. Hna. Tua´one and I successfully got two VERY menos activo families to come. They hadn´t come in so long that the Elders (and many of the members, sadly) thought that they were new investigators, not old members. We were very proud of them for coming.
But yeah, the rain was a mess yesterday. It poured so hard that after we dropped off some members and had to make our way back up the hill to home, it was like climbing a waterfall. The streets literally become rivers. There´s no dry path to be seen, and if you´re not careful you´ll get swept away. Thanks to boots and buses, we manage to get from place to place just fine, but Paraguayans are not very willing to leave the house when the neighborhood is in such a state.
Today marks one year left of being a missionary. Accordingly, I´ve made several "New" Year´s Resolutions. Mostly I want to become a much better listener. Hna. Tua´one often calls me a space cadet because I tend to zone out during lessons. :) She and I also started jogging as a new goal for exercise, and I want to read the entire standard works in Spanish and learn to bear my testimony in Guaraní before the year is through.
I feel like I´ve changed a lot already, though. I´ve especially become a lot bolder than before, thanks to having my testimony challenged so much by misunderstandings and just blind prejudice with some people we contact. Hna. Tua´one thinks I¨m going to become a lot more violent, too, because lately we´ve been working with a girl named Isa. I think I mentioned her in like my first e-mail from Paraguay. Anyways, she´s a newer convert and she likes to come do lessons with us, which helps us a lot in completing our goals. She´s cool for the most part, but sometimes she gets into these temper tantrums. One minute she´s smiling and helpful in Gospel Principles, the next she´s throwing her book and storming out of the room saying, "i´m never coming back!" Anyways, she´s taken a liking to me, and this means that she punches me a lot because she likes to play "Slug Bug." So I play, too, and at first I was really whimpy with hitting her, but since she never holds back, I´m getting a lot better at punching. Not good, I know. :)
We got to watch "The Testaments" twice this week. I LOVE that movie! First we watched it with the Flia. Granado for FHE on Monday, and then on Tuesday we had another FHE with the Flia. Bogarin. Last week, in parting, we´d asked the nonmember dad of the family if there was something we could do for them. He said, "Make us dinner!" We laughed, an he was like, "No really. You asked what you could do. If you´re good missionaries you´ll make us dinner." He likes to tease us Mormons. So on Tuesday we went to their place an made tacos for them. They loved it. Hna. Tua´one knows how to make home-made tortillas and they are super good. They also really liked the movie. None of them had ever seen it before, an I was especially happy for how entranced the oldest Bogarin was. He´s 18 and was planning on serving a mission when I first met him, but lately he´s been having doubts. He couldn´t take his eyes away from the movie, even when his dad came home and started teasing us again, and in the end his eyes teared up as Hna. Tua´one and I burst into tears (I can´t help by cry every time). We really felt the Spirit together, and I now feel a lot closer with the lot of them.
So far this has been a perfect Change. We met our goals every day this week, too, and we had some great quality lessons. With Rosana we talked about the living prophet, and she almost cried as we told her how much our lives have been blessed because of God´s guidance. She loves reading the scriptures. Mario is also doing well. Before we could even mention church, he told us that he´s planning on coming with us next week. We read the testimony of Joseph Smith at the beginning of the Book of Mormon the other day, and he really liked it. I honestly think he believes it all.
He´s so funny, though. I wish you could all meet him. Whenever we go over there, he knows that I´m the shyer one and that Hna. Tua´one is the one who always tries to communicate and get him to do stuff. So when we show up, he arranges the chairs so that he sits next to me and far away from Hna. Tua´one. Then he vents to me while Hna. Tua´one is trying to get his attention. Whenever he sees her mouth move, he just says, "Shush!" and goes on. And when she gives him a piece of paper with info or an invitation or something on it, and he´s not done with his story, he´ll just hold onto it and not read. If she tries to take it back, he pulls it away. He´s very controlling, but can you blame him? It must be hard being deaf.
Shoot, I´m out of time. I had other things to tell you about but they´ll have to wait until next week. Sorry. I LOVE YOU ALL!!
---Hna. Springer
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