Wow, last week went fast. I barely know what to write about that you don´t already know! Plus we were in Asunción all day today, first trying to find new shoes for me and Elder Hobby, our district leader (I utterly failed to find anything above a size 10. Curse my size 10 1/2 feet!), then trying to find the Pizza Hut, which we were told was just a few blocks away but turned out to be a few MILES away. Now we´re all trying to cram our internet time in last-minute. The stress is killing me. I like being able to plan out my e-mails beforehand, but whatcha gonna do.
I loved reading your e-mails this week, though. Thank you Goompa, Grandma Springer, Dad, Mom, Amanda, and Sarah for your letters. Oh, Grandma, I hear that I have another package waiting for me in the office, and I´ll be getting it on Thursday. Yay! I´m excited. Paraguay mail can be slow sometimes, but it´s never been MONTHS late, like some missions I´ve heard of, and I´ve never heard of anyone losing anything in the mail. Thankfully.
This week probably went by so quickly for me just because it was so exhausting. The heat just drains all energy out of me. I´m considering chopping all my skirts five inches shorter and possibly all my sleeves and my hair as well. :) We´ve been having a rainy weekend, though, which is refreshing but also not super fun to work in. Last night we actually went scurrying home a little early because the lightning was getting insanely close. I´m fine working out in torrents and heat, but lightning is just too scary sometimes.
It´s so bizarre to me that your days are getting shorter and cooler while mine are getting longer and hotter. Sometimes it almost feels like it really is November, though, because lots of trees around here are covered in red and orange and yellow flowers that from a distance look like leaves changed colors. They´re really pretty. Today in Asunción there was lots of Halloween stuff leftover, so I guess there they celebrate it a bit, but here in Villa Hayes there wasn´t much going on. They had a sort of Día de los Muertos a few days later, but nothing close to the candy gluttony that happens in the States. As for Thanksgiving---that´s nonexistent. It´ll just be a normal Thursday for us. We won´t be eating turkey, probably. I´ve never eaten turkey, nor heard of anyone eating turkey around here. Lots of people have turkeys as pets, but they prefer their cow femur bone and dried fat chunks over nice roasted turkey. I´m sure Hna. deVries and I will make some mashed potatoes or...yeah, that´s pretty much all we could make around here that´s remotely Thanksgiving-ish.
Anyways, this last week was also exhausting because we worked SO HARD. The quality AND quantity of our lessons has improved so much lately. We are now masters of getting in (we clap almost every open door or talk to anybody sitting outside doing nothing), getting straight to the point (instead of chit-chatting, which Paraguayans do with much more gusto than we do), sharing an inspirational scripture from the Book of Mormon (instead of the Bible, which we´d been doing--it proved to get us nowhere), and just setting the tone for the Spirit, being smiley and friendly and firm in our doctrine, and putting a return date. We felt so accomplished at the end of every day.
And yet, we are doing so poorly with finding new investigators and progressing investigators. We only found TWO new investigators this week, and pretty much none of our long-time investigators are keeping their commitments. I´m not sure what we can do to find news. As I said before, we´ve been working hard in that respect. As for progressing, I guess we need to teach them better the importance of keeping commitments, but their main stumblingblock is church attendance. Even when it´s not raining and all of their Sunday tasks are re-planned or whatever, we still can´t get anyone in to the chapel, and we´ve pretty much concluded that it´s because of the members.
I don´t know what it is about this branch, but not even the members want to attend church. If it wasn´t for the American family and the President´s family, who pretty much run all aspects of the church, the chapel would be empty. NOBODY arrives on time, and NOBODY stays until the end. It has been getting so frustrating, and I don´t know--maybe we need to stop focusing on new investigators and such and focusing more on re-activating the members.
We´ve been doing lots with that lately. On Thursday we held our first informal English class to offer service to the members and get to know them better. Since we decided kind of last-minute to do it this week, we only had two pupils, but it was a fun, cute lesson. We taught them how to introduce themselves in English, then taught them body part vocabulary and taught them "Head, shoulders, knees, and toes." It was fun. I never thought I´d be an English teacher, but here in Paraguay at least it´s pretty fun.
We´ve also taken Relief Society into our own hands. After two full months of showing up at 8:00, waiting a half hour for the President´s wife to show up, waiting in vain for the Relief Society President (or ANYBODY else) to show up at all, and then holding a short, hodge-podge lesson, Hna. deVries and I decided to show this branch how it´s done. We got there at 7:50 and set up the classroom with the Relief Society motto (thank you, Mom and Dad) and an agenda written on the board. At 8:00 sharp we commenced the lesson, just us two, with a song and a pray and a recitation of the motto. Then we took turns reading to each other and explaining a lesson out of the manual. As the President´s wife and daughters came in one by one, we didn´t stop to greet them or anything. They were forced to sit down quietly and listen to the lesson. It was a LOT more spiritual than usual, and hopefully they´ll want to come on time next time. We brought a few brownies just as positive reinforcement--just enough brownies for those who showed up first.
Yesterday, it was Hna. deVries´ and my task to give talks in sacrament meeting. It rained cats and dogs, and so nobody showed up except the American family, the President´s family and President´s counselors. The microphone stopped working two minutes into Hna. deVries´ talk, so people stopped paying attention quickly and were either having whispered conversations or sleeping during her wonderful talk about the importance of reading the Book of Mormon every day. That irritated me so badly that when I got up to give my talk on the importance of church attendance (to the tiniest congregation I´ve seen in Villa Hayes yet), I pretty much just ditched what I´d planned to say and just laid out what I was feeling. I didn´t get mad or anything, but I was almost on the verge of tears as I explained that our investigators don´t want to come to church, this branch is like one of the dying olive trees in Jacob 5, and I KNOW that this branch could be so much more amazing. I don´t know if they were paying any more attention to me than they were to Hna. deVries, but whatever. I said what I had to say, and now we´re gonna work as hard as possible to re-teach about the Book of Mormon and church attendance every time we visit members until it finally gets through their heads.
Sorry, I´m not trying to be bleak or anything. I haven´t given up or gotten discouraged with this area, but the mission isn´t always fun and games all the time, you know?
So, a funny story to lighten the mood :)--on top of our water heater not working (which is actually REALLY NICE with how hot and sweaty we get), the lightbulb in our study room died. We haven´t had time to go search out a new one. We tried to live by sunlight during the day, but at night it proved a problem. Thankfully, we have an extra room with practically nothing in it, so we dragged our desks and moved all of our stuff into that room to study in. For a whole week we were fumbling through that dark front room every night to reach the study room and having other little issues with it...Then suddenly it hit Hna. deVries-- "Uh...why don´t we just exchange the study room lightbulb for the one in the spare room?!" Wow, we´re smart. :)
I love you all SO MUCH!! Have a wonderful week, thank you for your letters, and never stop being awesome. :)
---Hna. Springer
Photos from Week 46
1-the teeniest frog I´ve ever seen in my life
2-"Fall colors" (actually just red and orange flowers)
3-Me by the river
LOVE YOU!!
---Hna. Springer
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