Dearest Familia,
I am SO excited to read your e-mails about Amanda´s wedding. I hope it all went perfect and that you all had a wonderful time. I am so happy for Amanda. I´m so grateful that she found her eternal companion and that they´re sealed in the temple. I´m so so glad. I´m not gonna lie, I was pretty darn depressed yesterday. All through Saturday I had no problems, but on Sunday I woke up and immediately thought solemnly, "My baby sister/bestest friend has a husband. I´m not there to see her with her husband. I´m going to miss the first year of their marriage." Hna. Stagg sensed my melancholy, I think, because she was sure to keep me talking all day. It helped. But by the end of the day, after pining and daydreaming and missing you all, I realized that there is absolutely no sense in wondering what life could have been like. Had anyone come up to me on Sunday and said, "Hey, here´s a pain-free, honorable way for you to leave your mission and go see your sister," I would have said, "No way! I´m staying!" I just remembered all of the amazing people that I¨ve met here--all the amazing people I´m GOING to meet here in Paraguay--and it´s true. I wouldn´t leave for anything. It´s gonna be weird still, but God has promised me that He has something better for me than the memories Im going to miss out on.
We´ve had some amazing experiences this week that reassured me that I´m where I´m supposed to be and that I´m exactly what God needs in Mariano Roque Alonso B right now. Just last night we contacted the house of a man named Miguel. As soon as I´d finished telling him who we were and that we wanted to share with him and his family, he said, "God doesn´t exist for me. I don´t believe you and I never will believe you. God has never been there for me and I´m never going to join your religion." I´m not gonna lie, I was pretty taken aback and I was all ready to just say, "You´re always invited to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Bye!" Thankfully, I have an awesomesauce companion who doesn´t get discouraged so easily. She stood her ground and asked more about him--what had happened to make him think God doesn´t exist, then about his family and his life. We talked for a while, mixing in teachings about the Plan of Salvation, and the more we talked the more he changed from a hostile street contact to a hurt and confused neighbor. In the end, HE asked US when we would come again. Hna. Stagg just handled it so well. She knew just what to say and how to teach as we talked. It was amazing. Now Miguel has a totally different idea of the missionaries, and we´ll see how much the Truth touches him.
The Barrio Palermo (in our new area) is FILLED with people who will let us talk with them. Because they´re right along the road, before our boundaries changed the Elders rarely visited out there. But now that it´s in the middle of our new area, we go there all the time, and people are more ready now to talk. Most of them are related to Hna. Sanchez, funnily enough. They´re all really poor and pretty superstitious. With Hna. Sanchez that´s no problem. Things have been going worse for her since we showed up to teach her, but she says confidently every time, "Satanás is trying to stop me from listening to you. He knows you can help me." It´s such a relief to teach someone with so much faith.
Their superstitious...ness... actually proved to be a help this week instead of a hinderance. We were teaching Hna. Sanchez´s great-neice or something like that, and Hna. Stagg dropped cane on her pretty hard because she´s fifteen and has a child and is doing exactly what her parents did instead of really giving her child a better life by searching for help from God. The girl, Mariela, said, "Well, I had a dream and Christ told me that all I had to do was drink water." At first I was like, "Um...okay...it was a dream. That makes no sense." But before I said that, I got to thinking, and I quickly turned to the Bible. We read the story of the Woman at the Well, and how Christ told her that she needs to drink living water to never thirst again. Mariela thought long and hard about that, and I think she´s really starting to see that Christ really does have answers for her.
Hna. Sanchez had a dream, too, that we used to comfort her. Her legs have been hurting her really badly lately. Yesterday when we were visiting her she said that she only slept for a tiny bit the night before, and that she had a dream where Christ was carrying the cross. "He said something to me," she said, "But I can´t remember what He said." Hna. Stagg answered exactly what I´d been thinking, "Christ has felt everything that you´re feeling and have felt and will feel. He knows your pain and He´s here to help you through it." That really touched her.
I´m finding a lot this week that there are always people right under our noses, and we can´t be too hasty to write them off. For example, Hna. Granados´ mom lives with their family, and she´s always just kind of been this Catholic background figure when we go over there. But this week we invited her to a ward Mother´s Day activity. She came, and when we visited the family again on Saturday and Sunday, she was SO NICE to us. She loves Hna. Stagg especially, and is just as great and loving as Hna. Granados. We love her, and she´s been there this whole time but we never really tried to teach her before. Now I have total confidence that she´s going to accept the Truth someday.
The Mother´s Day activity was really fun. (Mother´s Day is always the 15th of May here, by the way). There were only like five actual mothers there, but a lot of people from the ward showed up to put on a show for them. There was salsa dancing and singing and a tiny two-year-old recited a poem about her linda mamita (SO CUTE!). There was a girl there who´s only six but is a very talented, pretty famous ballet dancer here, and she gave me my first look at traditional Paraguayan dancing. It involves big, frilly skirts and balancing pots on their heads. :)
Paraguay really goes out to celebrate Mother´s Day. Everyone was partying yesterday. The moms seemed to be really enjoying theirselves with cakes and visits with their female relatives. It was really cute. The men, however, jumped at the chance to get drunk, and none of them had work today so they could get EXTRA drunk, and so we kind of steered clear of their groups yesterday. Hna. Sanchez´s nephew was making an idiot of himself while we were at their house, proposing to Hna. Stagg repeatedly and assuring her that he would chase off her boyfriend if he came after her. She told him she´d think about it. It was hilarious. Hna. Stagg and I always laugh at the fact that all we needed to do to feel pretty and get proposed to was come to Paraguay.
The weather´s been improving a lot lately. Today it´s sunny but both Hna. Stagg and I are wearing sweaters. Yesterday it almost felt like Christmas because it was cloudy and cold and felt like it was going to snow or something. And yet it also felt like the Fourth of July because everyone was hanging flags and decking out in red, white, and blue to be patriotic. We sang their national anthem in church yesterday. It was fun.
Guess what we did for our P-Day today? Picked lice out of the hair of four little girls. How fun does that sound? Yesterday in church we noticed that our friends, the Chicos, had really bad lice, and so this morning Hna. Stagg and I went to the pharmacy to buy special shampoo and combs to get rid of it. The lady at the counter seemed quite concerned when we told her that the two of us needed FOUR of each. It was not a fun task. There´s something extremely satisfyin about taking something nasty and turning it clean and gorgeous again (hence my dog-washing job in the past), but it was back-breaking work. We had to rub lotion on their heads first and let it sit for an hour. They did not want to sit still, and then kept touching their hair, touching their clothes with their hair, touching each other´s hair with their hair...it was very stressful. Then we washed their hair really well with the lice shampoo, and one-by-one combed through their hair to get rid of all the parasites and their eggs. One girl has very short hair so she had no problem, and the girl with really long hair takes good care of it so while it took a long time, it wasn´t too hard. The youngest at four years old, was a trooper. She barely complained at all. But the ten-year-old was SO mad at us by the end. She had the worst of it, and her medium-length hair was really tangled so it was really painful and took forever. We did all we could to console her, but finally she just ran off and wouldn´t let us near her with the combs again. So we just left all the supplies for their abuela to take care of them later. I think we dealt with the worst of it, but I´m still worried that they have lice all over their beds and clothes, and the grandparents and brothers claimed they didn´t have lice so we didn´t treat them. I hope it doesn´t just keep getting worse and worse. But as for today, I feel good about helping them out during my free time, and now if my kids ever get lice, I know exactly what to do. :)
Well, that´s all for this week. I love you all so much. I´m glad you had a fun weekend and I hope you´re all happy and healthy. Take care! I LOVE YOU!!
---Hna. Springer
P.S. Computer´s being dumb again. No pictures. But you got the ones in the mail so that should keep you for a while. Send me pics of the wedding!!
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