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
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