Week 52 - Asuncion Paraguay - Villa Hayes

Dear Family,

Wow. 52 whole weeks already. Can you believe that?? I remember last Christmas so well--it´s hard to imagine that I've been in Paraguay for ten whole months and only have seven more to go. The time is going to fly by so fast. April Conference is going to be upon us in only three months, then Easter, then Mother´s Day (and another Skype chat! Yay!), then I´ll almost be home! It´s going to go by so fast. Seriously. Months seem like weeks to me now. I definitely need to strive to make the most of it.

This morning Hna. deVries and I were talking about that--about using our time wisely. We´d just read that talk in the Conference Liahona "A Time to Prepare," and I told her about how this year has probably been the most fulfilling, rewarding year of my entire life, yet last year I was a total bum and I have little to show for it. I could never just waste years to come because this year was so awesome. It doesn´t work like that--you´ve got to make the most of every day. God´s given us options of how to use our time. We´re going to be accountable to Him one day for what we chose to do with it.

Anyways, I´m glad to hear that you had an excellent Christmas. I haven´t gotten any of your packages or cards or anything yet, but I´m sure they´re on their way. :) Thank you so much for your letters and everything. Thank you Grandma, Mom, Dad, Goompa, Laurel, Ashley, and Amanda. And Hna. Messina, if you happen to be reading this, thank you for your letter, too! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas at home! 

My Christmas was a pretty typical holiday--a whole lot of hype leading to a relatively anticlimactic day. All week we´d been hearing, "Oh, la Navidad! I love the Navidad! We´re going to have such a blast! You´re going to get fed so much great food and see what Paraguay is all about!" I was really, really excited. But then when the actual holiday came, we saw nothing happen. Turns out they celebrate Christmas by having a big dinner starting at 9:00pm Christmas Eve and then shooting off fireworks at midnight and getting drunk and everything, only to sleep all day Christmas Day. So...we got no food (we had to go home before any food was ready to eat), hardly anyone wanted to talk with us because all their family was over or they were traveling, and we had a TINY amount of people come to church, even though it was only one hour this week to accomodate them. But honestly, I didn´t expect much else. :) I´m used to this by now.

I just felt bad for my poor companion, who´s fresh from the States (relatively) and was probably expecting something awesome to take her mind off of Christmas at home. I´m so unthoughtful. I didn´t do anything for her for Christmas. I was kind of trying not to think of Christmas at all so I wouldn´t get "trunky." She got to talk to her family on Christmas Eve, thankfully, but I could tell that on Christmas she was pretty bummed. So today, I made up for that. I called the Elders to come hang out with us today. We had a mini (late) Christmas feast at the chapel. We brought a cake, some deviled eggs, and sweet potatoes. The Elders brought drinks, and were supposed to bring some baked chickens. Turns out all the usually-reliable chicken stands were closed today, so we had hamburgers instead. :) It was pretty fun, though it was a lot more filling than I expected it to be. I think I´ve lost my ability to overeat. We had a lot of leftover food. We watched The Testaments, too, which made me cry, as usual. Hna. deVries had never seen it, if you can believe that! 

Oh, P.S. I´m still with Hna. deVries in Villa Hayes! I was SO SURE I was going to get Changed, but nope. This will be the longest I´ve ever been with one companion, and we´ll get to spend almost the whole summer in one of the hottest Hermanas areas. How lucky are we? :) God was really nice to us, though, and gave us a perfectly wonderful overcast, drizzly Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It felt SOOO nice after all the hot, restless nights. Our air conditioning hasn´t been working very well. We bought some new fans and we sleep with our frozen water bottles. Then when the water bottles melt, we dump them all over ourselves in the middle of the night. You were right--it works! We´re going to be moving soon, though, turns out. Our landlady wants to switch us places. She lives in the house next-door on the second floor, and wants to move to our house because her husband recently had surgery on his knee and can´t climb the stairs very easily. She promised us a new air conditioner if we agreed to the new contract. DEAL!!

I feel bad, though. Our house kind of has some problems. We have the one room still without a light bulb, our shower head still doesn´t work, and now we have a mouse problem. The stupid thing ate half my bag of popcorn kernals! We bought a trap the other day. The thing snaps so violently whenever I so much as nudge it, and yet for five nights in a row the mouse has escaped unscathed. Last night, the bait was half-eaten and everything! We´ve never actually seen the thing. Maybe it´s a rat so big that one time it got caught in a trap but was so big that it wasn´t killed, and now it knows better than to touch our enticing peanut-butter-and-popcorn-kernal bait. We´ll see. I want that thing to die, though. Before, I used to be all for humane traps. Now, after it´s smelled up our house and eaten my beans and popcorn, I want it OUT! :) 

But anyways, this was definitely a Christmas that I´m forever going to remember. It was definitely lacking on the whole charitable, Christian, peaceful feeling. Most of the people we shared with on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were listening to loud rap music and could have cared less about the birth of our Savior. But the messages that we shared sure touched MY heart. We used Luke 2 the most. I love the part where the angel comes to the shepherds. They´re afraid, but the angel tells them not to fear, because he brings good news that will be for all people--that the Savior has come! So many people here see God as something to be afraid of--someone who, if they don´t recite "Padre Nuestro" every night, will rob them of their basic necessities like health, work, and daily bread. But the coming of our Lord wasn´t something to be afraid of--it was something to give us hope and joy! The birth of Christ was the moment when God, out of infinite love for us, sent His Son to redeem us from our sins. With the members, we shared out of 1 Nephi 11 (I think...) where Nephi is learning the interpretation of Lehi´s dream. When he wants to know what the Tree of Life stands for, the angel shows him the birth of Christ. Nephi is so moved by the vision that he recognizes that the Tree of Life is the Love of God. Showing him Christ´s birth was the angel´s best way to show Nephi the love of God. We should all see it that way, too.

On Friday we had a little mission party at the Mission Office. We got an amazing lunch, of course, and then we watched those video clips that apparently they showed at the Christmas Devotional this year. They were really brilliantly well-done. Are they making a full-length New Testament movie from those or are they purely online clips? I just bought the interactive Doctrine and Covenants study guide DVDs from the office, and they´re so great. I love the videos on that, too. I´ve learned so much already. Anyways, after watching the videos, we went to the huge, scary public hospital to sing. I never wanted to set foot in there, but it was much better without the fear of actually being worked on by a Paraguayan doctor. It was nice and cool in there, too. The patients really loved our caroling. Several people were moved to tears. I love that our mission presidents had us go do service to celebrate Christmas instead of just partying at the office or something. It was really nice.

Well, I´ve got to go now. Merry Christmas again, and never forget to have Christ in your hearts all year round! I LOVE YOU!!

---Hna. Springer

Hey family! I know you just saw my beautiful face and all, but here are more pictures of me from this week. It was SOOOO good to talk with you this morning! I´m so happy. :) I LOVE YOU!!

1-The Elders with the stockings we gave them for Christmas (those are the fishing lines that I bought when I was with the latinas--we won't ever use them again probably.)

2-We had a mini-party last Tuesday where the Elders gave us whatever gifts they found on the way to the church. Ha ha!

3-One of the many adorable nativities in the neighborhood.

4-Caroling in the hospital on Friday.

5-Me trying to cool down before another loooooong hot night.

6-Our little Christmas feast

7-Another picture of our Christmas dinner

Week 51 - Asuncion Paraguay - Villa Hayes

Dear Family,

¡Feliz Navidad (almost)!

I hope your Christmas weekend is full of family, friends, laughter, carols, fudge, and charity. Thank you all for your Christmas wishes and your prayers, and for helping me to remember that even though I´m thousands of miles away from any snow or sleigh bells, the spirit of Christmas is still here with me. I swear I can feel your love. That´s the only thing I could ever ask for this year. :)

Thank you Grandma, Laurel, Jared, Mom, Dad, Ashley, Pam, Clayton, Madison, Lexi, and Cami for your e-mails this week. You´re all so sweet. Clayton, I especially liked reading about your armadillo. Who knew all this time I just had to go to Texas to see exotic wildlife? I really enjoyed the picture. Thanks for sharing that with me. 

I´m still not entirely sure what´s going to happen this Christmas. I´ve heard rumors of a mission party on Thursday, but we have Changes on Wednesday, so I might get transferred to an area that has already done their Christmas party. That would be sad to miss it. I´m really scared for Changes. Part of me would LOVE to be with a stronger branch, and in a cooler environment, but there are so many people who could get baptized in January and I wouldn´t want to miss that. It would also be sad to spend the holidays with complete strangers instead of a branch that is at least loving if not active in the church. I´d also really miss Hna. deVries. We get along so well. The prospect of a new companion is always scary. We´ll hear tonight (hopefully--tomorrow morning at the latest) what Changes are going to take place in the zone. I can´t believe my time as a Trainer is already over. This was a fast three months. I can´t believe I only have seven left! I can count the number of Changes i have left on one hand! That´s psycho.

I´m not sure what to expect for Christmas no matter which area I´m in. All I´ve heard is that on the 24th they stay up until midnight, then set off fireworks and honk their horns and get drunk and stuff to celebrate the birth of Christ. Then on the 25th they sleep in (we´re only having one hour of church, from 10 to 11 so they can all sleep) and have a big dinner I´ve heard. They don´t exchange presents until January 6th, which is when they celebrate the Wise Men coming to give gifts to Christ. That´s where the 12 Days of Christmas comes from, after all. 

Everyone keeps asking us why we haven´t made a little nativity on our porch yet. I sent you a picture of all the stuff they sell on the highway for it. I think it´s a very cute idea, but we don´t have time to weave palm flower branches together, and buying the little ceramic figures is way too expensive. Our house is actually quite un-Christmas-y now that I think about it...Oh well. :) 

We are LOVING mango season. So far there aren´t too many, but some of the trees further into the forest are just dropping them like crazy. They´re really small and very stringy because they don´t bother to prune the trees, but they´re still pretty darn yummy. And we have a tree by our house (see attached photo) with some HUGE ones that are so much better. So far we´ve only found one on the ground before the cows got to the rest. Every day when we come home we check to see if any more fell for us. We made mango juice with one yesterday (just mango, milk, ice, and sugar) and it was so yummy. I´m definitely a fan of this authentic mango stuff.

The work is continuing to go well. STILL no baptisms, but I´m honestly not upset about that. Numbers really don´t mean anything--I´ve never been more convinced of that before in my life--but it would be nice to end my mission with more than just seven baptisms on my record. I´m sure my President understands that I´ve helped so many more people than that, but still. Something I´m really learning though is that success isn´t mine to control. I know I´ve already written about that before, but this last week our Zone Leader, Elder Argyle, shared a story with me that has pretty much changed my whole outlook on mission work.

The story goes something like this (sorry if you know the story already and I tell it completely wrong): A man one night is visited by the Savior, who tells him to go push against this huge rock in front of his house every day. The man obeys, of course, and day after day goes out and pushes against that rock. It doesn´t budge at all, but he keeps trying. Years go by, and still the rock is exactly where it was before. Satan sees that the man is starting to become disappointed in himself, and so he whispers to him, "It´s impossible. You can´t move that rock. You might as well not even try." The man becomes discouraged, and starts to just do the bare minimum every day--going out, pushing on the rock a bit, then going home. Finally, he decides to make it a matter of prayer. He asks God´s forgiveness for not being able to move that rock--for not being good enough. The Savior appears to the man again and says, "My son, I asked you to push against that rock every day. I never asked you to move it, I just asked you to obey. Now look--you are stronger than you have ever been before. You have grown so much. I only asked you to obey, and you have. Now I will move that rock."

That hit me so hard, and I´ve thought about that every day since then. It´s so true--the simple act of obedience has made me so much stronger physically and spiritually. God never asked me to get more than seven baptisms. He simply asked me to obey. Now look how much I´ve grown! I can only imagine how much more I will grow as I keep "pushing against the rock" every day for the next seven months (and beyond).

We finally got the November Liahona too, so those amazing Conference talks have helped me loads this week, too. I LOVE conference. That was a Christmas present enough, just getting that and being able to re-live those talks. I especially love reading those by the apostles, whose voices I know so well. As I read, I can still remember them saying it, and the Spirit comes so strongly. I loved finally getting to read the Priesthood session, Relief Society session, and a few other talks we missed when the power went out. So beautiful! I´ve already read the whole copy, but now I´m gonna go back through and take notes and stuff.

Our English class continues to go fairly well. We played Jeopardy this last time to review all the things that they´d learned. It was so much fun. We don´t usually have non-members show up, though. If we can´t get others to come, I think we may have to discontinue it. I´ll be sad if we do, but it´s been fun, and we´ve at least helped one person a lot. There´s this recent-convert kid in the branch named Sergio who is very shy and a little awkward socially. He lives with just his dad and his four-year-old brother, and we get the impression that his dad can be kind of mean to Sergio sometimes. When I first met him, he never smiled at all. He was the most serious kid I´d ever seen. Now, though, after the English class, he´s gained so much self-confidence. His dad praises him for his intelligence and Sergio´s made friends in the branch. He smiles so big when we show up at his house, and he loves greeting us in English. He´s also the Deacon´s quorom president (because he´s the ONLY deacon). Yesterday the district presidency came to the branch, and we did the sustainings of everybody, and when they proposed that we sustain Sergio as president of the Deacons, his face lit up so much. He felt so important. He has a place in the church. That´s what the work is all about. 

Well, time to go again. I´ll be talking to you (Mom, Dad, Sarah, and Ashley) on Skype hopefully on Saturday at 3:00. I´ll tell you on Friday if that changes. I´ll only have 40 minutes, so I´d like 10 minutes with each of you individually if that´s cool with you. I can´t wait to hear all about your pre-Christmas week! 

I love you all so much! Thank you again for everything, and MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

---Hna. Springer

Here are some more photos! Enjoy! I wish i had more. 

1-The mango tree by our house

2&3-Better pictures of the baby coati

4-Nativity stuff salesmen alongside the road

---Carly

Week 50 - Asuncion Paraguay - Villa Hayes

Dearest Familia and Friends,

Happy Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day and Feliz Dia de la Adoracion de la Virgen de Caacupe!! (The 7th and 8th respectively). We had quite the week. Our zone leaders challenged us to meet our daily goals every single day this week. They promised us that if we did it, we would have more baptisms and confirmations. So we worked as hard as we possibly could, and we did it! On Saturday, when we had six days of goals met and only faulted one more, we were so excited. But funnily enough, when we met our goals yesterday and successfully got 7/7, we weren't all that celebratory. We were just really, really tired. :) 

But we did have a good week. Three of our investigators either went to the chaco for Christmas break or are being hidden from us by their parents, but we have two investigators who are really doing well. One of them is the girlfriend of one of the members--Jasmin--and just the fact that she's dating a member kind of gives me hope that she'll go all the way and get baptized. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that--we don't want her commitment to the church to end with their relationship--but at the MTC we heard so many new missionaries tell their conversion stories, and so many of them involved member girlfriends/boyfriends! That's how Fabiola got baptized, and she's doing amazing. She still loves to learn so much, and she's super strong in the church. Hopefully Jasmin goes the same direction.

The other investigator is our dear Ruben. We visited him again earlier last week, after he failed to come to church. When we got to his house, he seemed okay, but as the lesson went on we realized that he wasn't himself. It was obvious that he was either currently on something or he had very recently been on something. We got through the lesson, but he just wasn't there. He was kind of snippy, and we left feeling really sad for him. Hna. deVries was devestated, thinking that he was a lost cause, but thankfully I've had experience with drug addicts in the past and I told her we just needed to forget that visit and remember how he'd been before when he wasn't under the influence. Honestly, I was just really hoping that I was right about him and that he sincerely did want to change. I was kind of in denial that we'd seen the other side of him. But then yesterday at church, after having not spoken a word to him after that last visit, he showed up out of the blue! He was his normal, humble, super polite self again, and it made us so happy. He was so sincerely apologetic and ashamed of how he'd been when we'd talked to him, and at church he was completely reverent and hungry to learn more about Christ. Then we went to find him at his house yesterday after church, only to find him helping fix a car along with two of our strongest families in the branch. They're totally friends already, and now my hope for him has doubled because the members live so close by and are so willing to be there for him. He gave the prayer after our little reunion there at the gutted car, and it was the sweetest, humblest prayer I've ever heard. He really is wonderful.

It continues to be freakish hot here. I'm constantly wet with a sheen of sweat, and even with my umbrella I feel like I'm getting dried up like a raisin. Several of you have suggested that we soak our sheets or clothes or both in water before going to bed. Not a bad idea. We may just try that. I just hope it would help. It's so humid, I'm honestly not sure that it WOULD dry. Oh man, yesterday we totally jinxed ourselves by saying, "Man, we are so grateful that we at least have air conditioning!" In the middle of the night last night, our power went out and we lost our air conditioning and our ceiling fan. Our room grew steadily hotter, and we both just laid there, wide awake, staring desperately at the ceiling fan and waiting for it to move again. It was boiling. When the power did finally come back on, I said a prayer of thanks and fell promptly back asleep. Circulating air has never felt so good. Sadly, the power went out again at like 5:00AM and this time stayed off until 9:00, along with our water. Joy. Now all's well, though. I just pray that doesn't happen often or we're gonna have lots of restless nights. 

Good news! Mango season is coming on! We still haven't actually eaten any, but we've seen others feasting on them. It's so funny--they just wait for them to fall off the tree when they're ripe instead of actually harvesting them. We'll be in the middle of a lesson and all of a sudden hear a thump behind us, and the little kids go running off squealing excitedly to collect the fruit. They never share. :( But they assure us that soon so many people will have so many mangos that they'll just leave baskets of them in their front yards for anyone to take. We're excited. :)

So today for P-Day we went out to Benjamin Aceval (where our district Elders work) to say goodbye to Lilian--that RM girl who helps us do visits (both here and back when I was in Mariano). She's flying out to Utah today to go to BYU this winter! I am so excited for her. She's such a charitable, honest, hard-working girl, and she deserves every moment of happiness that she experiences in Provo. She served her mission in Salt Lake City, so she has tons of connections and is already United States-savvy, but she was so nervous today. Her poor mom was just silently crying. Lilian may honestly never live in Paraguay again, and she just got back from her mission nine months ago. But she had a great last few hours with her family, and was nice enough to invite us. We ate rice and beef and hot dogs, and she showed us all her pets (a dog, three cats, and two rabbits). Her aunt (Cesar's mom) was there briefly, along with her new baby coati. I immediately begged her to let me hold it and take a picture. I've always loved coatis (from what I've seen of them on Animal Planet) and was thrilled to get to see one in real life. 

People here have some weird pets. Pretty much any baby animal they find in the chaco, they take back to some pet store in the city to sell--monkeys, parrots, coatis, toucans, owls, you name it! I want to see some in the wild sometime. We may have to explore the forest again. I hear there are armadillos around here, too. Last night, Ruben was talking about how some people eat them, but he didn't know the word for armadillo in Spanish. He started describing it--"It's big, and it's like a turtle..." "Okay," I thought, "It's some kind of fish. Whatever." "Except," he said, "It can go like this," and he motioned it curling up. My jaw dropped when I realized what he was talking about. "You EAT armadillo?! You barbarians!" I was just teasing, of course. :) But really, I like armadillos. 

Anyways, I've now finished reading the Liahona for April conference, and I CANNOT WAIT to get the Liahona for November tomorrow. I love reading the words of the modern-day prophetes. Something that I've heard repeatedly recently is that when we listen to the prophet today, we literally come to know God better. The prophet is God's spokesman, and if we are familiar with their words and their ways, we're familiar with God. Also, there was a verse in the scriptures the other day about how when there's a prophet on the earth, we can rejoice as if Christ was already here with us, because we'll already be preparing to see Him. I have a testimony of that. The prophets are men of God and I just love reading their words.

Well, I gotta go. I love you all so much! Thank you for your letters, and enjoy the Christmas season while it lasts! Take care!

---Hna. Springer

Here are some pictures from my week. Well, actually, just from today. :)

1-Me and a baby coati! 

2-Hna. deVries at Lilian's house about to chow down on hot dogs.

3-Lilian on her way to SLC.

Love you all! Have a great week!

--Carly

Week 49 - Asuncion Paraguay - Villa Hayes

Mis Queridos Amistades,

Thank you Mom, Dad, Ashley, Grandma Springer, Sarah, and Amanda (twice this week!) for writing to me this week. Happy birthday to both of my Grandpas!! (I´m pretty sure...if not, sorry. I have a horrible memory) I love you all so much and I´m trying not to miss you too badly as I start playing my Christmas playlists on my iPod. 

Honestly, though, it doesn´t feel like December at all. Thankfully this weekend has been a lot cooler, but last week was SO HOT. We drank our 20-liter jug of water in under four days, just guzzling it like camels. It got so hot that even our air conditioning couldn´t penetrate the heat at night, and we would soak our sheets with sweat. That was a very tiring week with so much lost sleep, tossing and turning. I almost considered just sleeping on the tile floor (those sheets felt so thick and hot), and at one point I just got up and guzzled some tap water (after our 20 liters of mineral water ran out) out of desperation. I haven´t gotten sick yet, so yay, but I probably shouldn´t make that a habit. :) The heat just built up and built up and built up...and then on Friday we were teaching in this house and a freak wind storm came out of nowhere, rattling the house´s thin walls so hard I thought they were going to collapse. It only lasted like twenty minutes, but dust was everywhere afterwards, and now the weather is totally cooler and overcast. No rain, though. I don´t think rain would help the problem much--just put more humidity into the air. Ew.

We had some really great teaching experiences this week, I´m happy to say. We went to go teach Cleto (that guy who´s president of some international Guaraní-speakers association), and I don´t know what kind of shindig he´s running at his house, but his yard was filled with indigenous people. When we went in asking for Cleto, they all wanted us to shake their hands, and then Cleto had us share for all of them. There were seriously like twenty people, some out in the yard with us, others listening with rapt attention from inside the house. I´m not sure how many of them understood Spanish, but I was reminded of those meetings for the early Latter-Day Saints--just a big group squished into a little house listening to the prophet. We´re not prophets (not even close), but it still felt cool to bear our testimonies about Christ. I totally forgot to practice my Guaraní on them! I was so mad at myself afterwards--I´ve been practicing my testimony in Guaraní for weeks!--but who knows? Maybe the gift of tongues was in affect back there. :)

I´ve been studying Guaraní with a lot more diligence lately. I read a talk from April conference about how we should receive chastisement as a great learning opportunity, and how we should be constantly self-correcting (but not hard on ourselves, necessarily). As a result, I´ve decided to re-read my whole Spanish book just to re-learn the rules and perfect anything i haven´t perfected yet. I´m also trying to ask members about Guaraní a lot more. Hna. deVries is really getting into it, too, and it´s becoming lots of fun.

Meanwhile, we´re still teaching English. This week our class was really cute. We tried to teach them English sounds, but they didn´t have the patience for that, so we taught them how to ask for things instead. We want to teach them really useful phrases. Last week we taught them to approach and introduce themselves to a native English speaker, and this week we taught them to ask, "May I have a cookie, please?" "Thank you." By the end of the class, we were able to go sit off to the side with a plate of cookies, and they came up one by one and did a whole dailogue with us. It went like this:

"Hello."

"Hello."

"How are you?"

"I´m fine, thank you. How are you?"

"I´m fine, thank you. My name is ____. What is your name?"

"My name is Hna. Springer/deVries."

"Nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you, too."

"May I have a cookie, please?"

"Yes you may."

"Thank you."

"You´re welcome."

"Goodbye."

"Goodbye."

Now they´re totally prepared to ask strangers for cookies! :) 

We had some really great experiences teaching people this week. I´m sad that I´ll only be able to tell about a few of them in the time that I have to e-mail today. First of all, when we were visiting a long-time investigator, she told us that her neighbor´s been asking her to have us go visit him. We excitedly went to meet him after teaching her, and met a man named Benjamin. He seemed like a really nice guy, and we immediately invoked the Spirit by singing a hymn and saying a prayer, and listening to him tell us about his hospitalized brother. We testified of Christ´s power to heal us, and he thoughtfully said, "Oh...so you believe in Christ?" "Yes..." we said, and we told him about how He is the head of the church and we do all that we can to follow Him. He sat there for a while, then went into this shpeal about how Jehovah´s Witnesses don´t believe in Jesus Christ. He´d said at the beginning that he sometimes read the Bible, but then he started quoting verses and flipping to verses all about Christ. As he went on, we realized that he was actually a pastor for a church in the neighborhood, and that he´d been prepared to Bible bash with us, thinking that we were Jehovah´s Witnesses. We got out of there gracefully, but he had seriously been prepared to try and convert us to his church. We probably won´t go back there very often, if at all, but I´m just SO GLAD that we talked about Christ and rejoiced in Christ and proved ourselves to be Christians right at the beginning. Now, whatever he may think of us, at least he can´t say that we´re not Christian. We were really happy with ourselves after that experience.

One of the inactive members in the branch had a really tragic week. (McConkies, you may not want to read this next part out loud to the kids). Just hours after we´d left her house on Tuesday night, one of her sons came home very drunk, got into an argument with her other son who´s a drug addict, and brutally stabbed him to death. You can only imagine how devestated she was--one son dead, the other a murderer, and not even the assurance that her son is now resting in the paradise of God. We visited her several times over the next few days, but she was never in a state to talk. We mostly just sang and prayed. Saturday, though, we went there, and she asked us why death is necessary and how we can know that there really is life after death. I was so happy for my knowledge of the gospel in that moment. We used the scriptures to explain the Plan of Salvation. She asked, "How do you know that that´s really true?" I testified that I know, because a prophet told us so. I believe in the prophets, and therefore I have the assurance that there is life after death. And I´m very, very grateful for that.

We successfully earned the trust of our Ward Mission Leader, Osmar, this week. Before, he would often give us references, but he never would really strive to help us out or find time to talk with us. We´ve been trying to get his little girl baptized for ages. The other night, we went over there to visit her yet again, and Osmar basically said, "Look, this is YOUR responsibility. She doesn´t understand baptism, and that´s YOUR job--to make her understand so that she´ll want to get baptized." I kind of bristled at that, but instead of getting angry, we taught probably my best lesson on baptism we´ve ever given. We explained how baptism is a cleansing--it´s like washing yourself free of mudstains before entering a clean, white house. We explained how it´s like entering into a race to win a prize--you can´t win a prize if you´re just watching on the bleachers--you need to enter and run and THEN you´ll earn the prize. After that, Fiorella was easily able to explain back to us why baptism was important. The Spirit was strong, she accepted a fecha, and Osmar now loves us.

I know he does, because on Friday he called us in the middle of lunch to ask us to go meet his friend, Ruben. We dropped everything and went, of course. Ruben is 28 and he´s met with the missionaries a ton before in the past, but he´s had problems with basically every addiction in the book and admitted to destroying a copy of the Book of Mormon one time. Our lesson with him was AMAZING. We taught about the Gospel of Christ and brought the Spirit, and Ruben showed to us that he really is so humbled by his past mistakes and so ready to change everything around. He bore his testimony of the Savior and practically begged us to baptize him and expressed sincere wishes to be free from guilt. We used the scriptures so much and reassured him so much, and in the end he solemnly reached into his pockets and pulled out his packs of cigarettes. I just silently reached out my hand, and he silently handed them over (I promptly destroyed them as soon as we got back home to finish lunch). I know he´ll probably have lots of issues before he´ll get baptized, and who knows if I´ll even be here for that, but I will never forget that lesson. In the end, he said, "This has been the best day of my life. I never want to lose the Spirit that I feel now." We gave him a new Book of Mormon and invited him to read it whenever he has free time, so that the Spirit will be with him all the time. I´m really grateful that Osmar introduced us to him, and now Osmar is doubly impressed with us. I feel like a real missionary with a real ward mission leader now.

Well, time to go. I hope you´re all having a wonderful week getting Christmas decorations up and putting presents together. I discovered this week that instead of putting up a Christmas tree, most Paraguayans make hand-made little "stables" out of reeds and such and put little ceramic nativity pieces inside. Some people have huge collections of them. I´ll try to get a picture to send you. They´re really cute, and look much more authentic than the plastic pine trees we´ve seen every now and again.

I LOVE YOU ALL!! Thank you for everything! I hope to hear from you again soon!

---Hna. Springer