Monday, April 23, 2012

Saltos - week 6

Heeey.Hows life? Things here are pretty good. Right now I´m typing in a word document and am going to transfer it over later. Yay for ghetto internet cafes. Everybody here is busy watching goofy videos or something like that, and half of the computers are broken and so we´re stuck here going one at a time trying to not waste tooooo much time. Which is a pain too because last week we didn´t plan well, and Elder Wheatley didn´t get a chance to use his whole hour of internet. Partially my fault. Not cool. So we planned better this week, but yeah…. That’s how it goes around here.



Anyways. Things are great here. Getting all ready for changes again. Its crasy how fast this last one has gone by. It feels like a long time ago that I was an oficinista, but like just yesterday that I got here in Saltos. Funny how that works.Anyways. The news comes tonight so we´ll have to see how that goes. Theres potential for a descent amount of change, so we´ll see what happens. Its sad to think that after this one, I only have 2 more change days left in me before its goodbye Elder Humphreys. Crasy. I don´t really like to think about it. I´d be happy being a missionary for the rest of my life. Lol. That brings up the weirdest moment of the day though – I just recently got the trunkiest phone call that anybody ever gets on their mission. The ¨Hey… so I´m sending the info to get your plane tickets. Where do you want your final destination to be¨.Woah.Wasn´t expecting that one so soon. But apparently they are doing things a little bit ahead of schedule just because ¨summer¨ time is usually pretty busy. Oh well. Good thing I already have had a couple people telling me about my going home day and whatnot. Otherwise it would have been a bigger shock.



Anyways. No point in dwelling on that kind of stuff. These last 100ish days are going to be the best 100ish days of my mission. Which will be pretty cool because this last week for example were a really good 7 days. Tuesday we started the day by doing service. Usually we have district meeting in the morning, but the guy needed our help so we decided to just have our meeting a little later. We helped the member move some cheap crumbly bricks, take out an old barbwire fence, and dig a ditch so that he could put in a retaining wall sort of thing. All in a mornings work. Thankfully things go fast when there are 4 of you, and we didn´t get anything more than a couple scratches. Which was lucky because the wash lady is holding our dirty shoes hostage and so we had to do service in flip-flops/perfect Paraguayan style.Haha. We´ve also learnt that digging in this country is way funner than at home – not only is the dirt softer and easier to work with, but you wouldn´t imagine all the garbage and fun stuff that you find when digging. Lol. Anyways, our district meeting plan backfired when the zone leaders called and let us know that we were going to have a spontaneous conference call between the missionaries in the zone. Oops. So we had the first half of the meeting in our house, all muddy and in our slacker clothes. Haha. Anyways, the mission has been having a hard time lately getting baptisms and so apparently President was talking to the area presidency. Then he talked with the zone leaders. They decided that we just weren´t talking to enough people and so that the key to success was that we would have to start talking to more than 3 times the amount of people that we have typically been talking to in a week. So that was the plan. That meant a huge change in plans for most of us. A lot less looking for people that we already knew and a lot more time just talking to people.  It kind of got us start wondering when we were going to ever be able to get any lessons in or actually teach anyone if we were going to be busy talking to so many people. Haha. But we have the promise that if we would talk to that many people from now on, we will find one golden family a week. Whoa. That’s a pretty intense promise. So, we took on the challenge.



Anyways. We went to work. Talked with a lot more people. We also had the blessing of being able to go out and work with Cleverson for a couple of days. He´s great and we´re having fun meeting all of his friends. At first it was a challenge talking to so many people. Finding the time. Talking with groups of people that you would normally just walk by. But its actually been really cool. Not only have we met tons of people (some of which seem to be pretty cool), but rather than taking away from our teaching time, its actually helped us to teach a lot more lessons and get lots of new investigators. We probably had one of the more successful weeks here in Saltos. Rather than wondering what to do if one of our visits fell through, we were busy the whole time. Good stuff. The real challenge now will be being able to get back and talk to all of those cool people, while yet still talking to all those people every day in the coming weeks. Wednesday I did a division with Elder Staker in my area. He´s the senior companion in our district. It was great. Had a really cool day. Cleverson went with us too. He´s becoming a great little missionary. Hopefully a future one. On Sunday we had to try and help one of the kids in the ward with the computer so that he could send off his mission papers. Its tricky because basically eveyone here is either completely computer illiterate, or at least 99% computer illiterate (most seem to know how to work facebook. lol). Hopefully one kid can teach the other and we can get a few missionaries out of this town within the next couple of years. It will do this place wonders.



Had an interesting thing pointed out to me the other day about Saltos. Its kind of a sad thing, but just an interesting note. Being such a tourist focused town, almost all of the teenagers actually work. Thats good that they want to be active and work, but it also means that this is one of the most un-talented, un-artsy places I´ve ever been to. In the words of the member, it just has a very low culture to it.Kind of sad. It great when you need a new pair of shorts, or a new jersy, but when it comes to having cool people that are into music, sports or anything like that, its kind of depressing. Anyways, thats just an interesting note on good old Salto del Guaira.


Thursday we had this super cool activity in the evening. There is no such thing as mutual here, but we try and have a ward get together every week. Well, sometimes the missionaries just get stuck in charge. Turns out that people were getting bored of a movie every week....lol. So this week they had a cool little play put on by a bunch of the recent converts. It was about the blessings of the gospel and doing missionary work. Turned out AWESOME. Great message, desent acting, and a really good turn out. Fun stuff. And I think it was because of it that we had a lot better turn out on Sunday. Hopefully they can keep up the good work.


Lots of rain this week. Lots of super muddy feet. You´ve never seen mud until you´ve seen Salto del Guaira. Dirtyest place I´ve ever lived. lol.



Saturday was elder Wheatleys birthday. I sneakily told acouple of the members about it and they gave him a surprise party. It was almost a disaster because they weren´t very sneaky, but fortunately Elder wheatley did a great job of not catching on. lol. It turned out great. Fun stuff.


Sunday we contacted people almost all day long to be able to get our goal. We´ll have to plan it a little bit better this week... oh well. met lots of cool people.


Anyways. Thats a wrap. Gotta go. I have internet now, so hope it all shows up. Glad to hear that you had a super cool Coldplay experience. Super jealous. haha. But yeah. Late as always. Have a good week! Love ya!



Elder Humphreys

Monday, April 16, 2012

Saltos - Week 5

Hola. Hows it going. Glad to hear that you all got home safe and that you`re doing well. Hope you`re all recovered and getting back into the swing of things. Its gotta be a little weird being back after so much time off. Hope you loved it.
 
We had a really good week. Nothing too out of the ordinary, but just great as always. This week we got to do a descent amount of service which was fun, and we also got success as far as teaching and finding goes. So thats great. A good lesson that giving up our time in service, the Lord helps us out to have the time we need for everything else. The sacrifice of service isn`t really so much of a sacrifice at all.
 
Monday we had a little less time to work due to the district meeting we had in the morning. But we were able to get a surprising amount of work done in such short time so that was nice. I also got the great news that a guy that we had found and taught in my last area got baptized. Thats pretty exciting. His name is Maximiliano, and I got to teach him about 2 times before I left the area. Always sad when you don`t get to be there and participate in the moment, but at the same time, really cool to know that I was able to participate and help another person get baptized.
 
Tuesday we had a kind of interesting moment. We had asked somebody a couple of days before if they knew anyone that was going through a hard time or anything and they had given us a referal for somebody that was sick. Bueno. So we went over to look for her on Sunday. Well, it was kind of awkward to find out that she had passed away already, and fortunately her family there wasn`t really interested. Oops. That was kind of weird, awkward and just different to contact a person that was no longer living. Oh well. Maybe we`ll try the house again in a week or two and try and talk to her family. Lunch that day was great. We have a member that just came back from Spain and she KNOWS how to cook. Tuesdays are now a highlight of the week. Had a disapointing moment that day too though. We had planned with Cleverson to go visit his friends. We decided to meet up at 6:30. Well, we showed up at 6:30 and... found out that there was some miscomunication He had said 3:30. Dang it. I felt silly because that was probably my fault. I did realize though that you have mix ups in any language though, so oh well. Guess I better keep practicing though! You need to be able to communicate not only in the best of times, but also over the phone when the recepcion isn`t that good. Still got work to do. Got to chat with Elder Patterson on the phone again. That was nice. Glad to hear that he`s doing well.
 
Wednesday we went to talk to one of our investigators. Well, he`s been in legal trouble in the past. It seems that his family has started getting used to lieing about where he is because we got a bunch of stories over the next couple of days: he`s just out signing some papers, or he`s working in brazil now, all the way to actually, he`s in jail right now. Right now we don`t know who to believe. He seems the most trustworthy of them all, but its hard when his family makes things up. We`ll see how that goes. Pretty interesting getting to teach somebody with problems with the law. In the morning too we got to do a service project. We were going to build a guy a house out of two by fours and a really big tarp, but somebody stole his wood the day before while he was out selling medicinal herbs for work. So instead we got to play in the mud, dig him a ditch, move a giant ant hill full of mean ants, and dig a hole to fix a water line break. All in a mornings work for one of the hardest working districts I`ve ever met. And good fun while we were at it. I felt really bad for the guy. He lives under a tarp with his son so it was nice to be able to help him out.
 
Thursday we had a cool experience where I saw how we can`t always just take things for face value. Somebody gave us a referral the other day. We followed up on that. In the end, the person really wasn`t interested. But we did get another referral out of them, and found somebody that is a lot more interested. Just shows how if at first things don`t go the way you want them to, a lot of the times, the Lord is just setting you up for success somewhere else. Hopefully we can see success with this family .If not, maybe somebody else down that road. That was the high point of the day. Made up for when the youth that were going to leave and do divisions with us bagged at the last moment and we had to find something to do. But, kids will be kids and I think it just taught us pacience and that we need to be ready for anything, and once again, if things don`t go ¨right¨, maybe there is a reason for it. We did in the end get to have our ward council meeting. Something that seems pretty routine back at home, but is something that is really hard for people to reliably do here. I deffinately didn`t go idealy, but at least it got done. hopefully we get to continue with that in the future. Also got to do more service that morning, cleaning up a member families front lawn. I think their favorite part was when I was half heartedly chopping at a dead tree with the ax, and later, they made fun of me for it because they thought I was probably the worst ax user that they had ever seen... they got a good laugh out of it. lol
 
Friday wasn`t the best day... wasn`t sure why, but later realized that it was Friday the 13th. Probably why. lol. But thats how it goes. Good days and bad days. The funnest part was trying to find this said shortcut through the jungle to save a whole bunch of time, but instead, getting laughed at as we went in and out of the forest, never being able to find where the secret entrance to the shortcut was. Better luck next time we hope.
 
Saturday on the other hand was great. Cleaned the church in the morning. It was filthy, but our district of 4 shined again. We got a chance to leave with Cleverson and his friend that baptized him, Fernando. We got to visit his friends that went to his baptism. Awesome. They are cool, and hopefully we can keep the referral chain going. Definitely the most successful day of the week. Then, I had to leave my companion with Cleverson to go do another visit with another member and Fernando. Not the most successful lesson, but great that they were so willing and helpful. Fernando also introduced us to one of his friends, and the day ended smashingly. The only down side was when I very generously offered to buy them all drinks for their hard work, and then upon reaching into my wallet, realized that I had spent all the money I had with me earlier that morning. Dang it. So that was kind of embarrasing as the member had to spot the bill. Lame.
 
Yesterday was good. It was the big soccer game between the 2 main teams, so we talked to a LOT of drunk people. Fortunately almost everyone here are just nice drunks and its never a big deal. I think also being on the Lords errand and doing his work also gets you a little bit more respect and protection which is always nice. Sounds like we`ll be moving this week. The plans are made. Our ward mission leader and his wife are passing through a hard time right now, and so thats no good, but hopefully we can help them over that.
 
Today was normal. Got myself a Paraguay jersey which is pretty nice. Only cost about 10 bucks if you do the conversion, so you can`t lose there. I also realized how many people Ive neglected to write back, so hopefully I can get on that and that nobody feels unloved for my lack of focus and desires to write letters every week. I`ll try and do better.
 
Dad. As far as the school goes, you can sign up for Winter if you want. If not no big deal. Don`t know what you`d pick for classes. Glad you`re feeling better. I liked what you said about your lesson. It reminded me about somthing really cool that I read in the Liahonna in the youth section about Guardian angels. Not something you read about every day, but that is really cool. As for housing, I`m fine with anything. As I said, after being here for so long, my old university house sounds like a luxury palace, so I`m not really worried. Set me up as you will. But thanks for all the help. I really appreciate it.
 
But yeah. That was the week. Sorry it wasn`t too exciting. Things are awesome here. As you said, knowing how little time is left, I`m really just trying to make the most out of every day. I really do love it here, and it`ll be a sad day when its all over. I love being a missionary and I know that what we share can really help these people. And theres nothing better than being able to share that message. Hope you have a great week, and talk to you in 7!
 
Love,
 
Elder Humphreys

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Saltos - Week 4

Hello. Hows everybody.
 
We had a really good week. Hopefully this week the keyboard can keep up with everythng that I want to say....
 
Glad that your trip is going great. Don´t ¨die¨ early! thats what they always have to remind Elders once they start getting old like I am...lol. No worries here, because I just have more desires to work knowing that I have little time left. Too bad its not the same for everyone. But I´m glad your all safe and having fun wracking up the memories.
 
Anyways, as I said, the week went great. Monday was pretty normal. Had that service activity that took up most of the day. Good, but normal. Tuesday... also normalish. I taught district meeting again and talked about working with the members and helping them to realize the improtance that they have in the work and how we can help them know what we need and expect from them so that we can better work in unity. Something good to remember for after the mission. As for the day of work... not the easiest. We walked a lot and didn´t really see much success. Oh well. Thats how it goes some days. The highlight was at the very end. It was one of those moments where it was late and dark, but rather than give up a little early being already near the house, we went for one last visit, and were able to get a really good lesson in with a new investigator. Hard work pays off.
 
Wednesday was interesting. We got a decent amount of work done. This week we tried to visit our investigator Cleverson every day to make sure that nothing kept him from getting baptized. It was kind of funny though because he knew everything so well that we just started to run out of things to teach him. Just verify if he had any questions. Answer them. Make sure that there wasn´t anything wrong. good to go. Had an interesting lesson with one guy. He is one of those people that just speaks a lot of Guarani, and although he usually understands what you say, its kind of tricky to get him to open up or really get excited about the gospel. So we just had a little time to share and I gave him a list of Questions of the Soul that are answered in the book of Mormon. Well, I´ll give the spirit all the credit on that one. Not sure if we´ll see lots of fruits come from it or not, but it was just cool to see him open up and express all of these questions that he has about life. Hopefully it will help him get more excited to read the book of mormon and such, even though it will be tricky for him to understand it (the Libro de Mormon is written in pretty fancy spanish that is really hard for the majority of Paraguayans to understand. We are a much more simple people. :) For service in the morning, we helped re-build a ¨Tatacua¨ which is basically a little mud igloo that they use as a oldschool oven. You build a fire inside and then after the wood is all burned out, this igloo thing is really hot and you can put food in it and cook it. Everybody was using it this week to make the traditional ¨Chipa¨ for easter week. We ate TONS of chipa. Its too bad because I no longer like it as much as I used to. lol. So we did the service in the morning and then watched it get made at a different house in the afternoon. Cool stuff. We also got news that we can live in a group of 4 anymore so that means that it looks like we´ll be moving. More news on that in the future.
 
Thursday we had some crasy winds, and a cool light storm in the distance. It was a disaster because it hadn´t rained in forever so I felt like we were on Tatooine. Had a big Easter lunch at a members house. good stuff. Also spent a good amount of time talking to a REALLY drunk member from another area before he knocked his bike over, broke of the brake lever, and then still decided to drive away on his motorbike at full speed to go on an half hour long trip back to his house. Hopefully he made it all right.... he said that he wanted ME to visit him and nobody else. He also gave me a great big hug before he left and got his hair all up in my face.... poor guy.
 
Friday the highlight was definately in the morning. The evening was interesting too though. We met up with the nearest leader to our area (a district leader that lives 30 away by taxi in a completely other town), and we went to Cleversons house. He passed the interview. And not only did he pass it, but blew Elder Richins away with how good his anwers and testimony were. Awesome. Ready for baptism. He also made the final decision of who was going to baptize him. We were etstatic to hear that he chose his friend who is a recent convert of 2 months and introduced him to the missionaries. We were a little afraid that he might pick one of us, but we knew that it would be way cooler if his friend did it. As for the rest of the day... the distant storms continued to the point were the power in the whole town went out. And I mean OUT. No street lights or anything. It was crasy. Fortunately there is a little light on the top of our cell phone or it would have been worse. lol. Fortunately we were able to go back to Cleversons and fill out his baptismal record by cell phone light. Good stuff.
 
Saturday was a little bit of a disaster, but a great one. We spent the morning cleaning the church. The other 2 elders had another service to do, so that left me and Elder Wheatley to clean the whole thing on our own. Fortunately it didn´t take too long. Then we did lunch, studies, and invited a couple people to the baptism. Didn´t teach a single good lesson. Then we went and taught Fernando how to baptize. I told him to bring his white shirt to the baptism, but apparently he forgot. We got to the church, made a cake (which was sad because we were fasting), and then people started showing up. Great turn out. A good number of members, and 7 investigators. Crasy. The coolest part being that we didn´t know any of them. They are all Cleversons friends. we´´re going to get to know them better this week. Things went well. Didn´t get as many pics as I´d like but oh well. Sorry, I forgot my camera, but hopefully you can find the ones that they posted on FB? I´ll send some next week. Anyways, the only rough part was when we realized that fernando didn´t have a white shirt for the baptism. So in a small moment of panic, I lent him my sweaty one and wore his t-shirt. haha. Oh well. The baptism was great. You could really feel the spirit, and Fernando and cleverson both loved it. I had to put on a slightly wet shirt at the end, but it was totally worth it. Awesome feeling.
 
 
Got a good sleep with the hour change. Now w´´re back close. Cleverson got confirmed on sunday. Great day at church. Had another great lunch visit. Today we had early district meeting, and then got to have a BBQ at our house. Good stuff.
 
Anyways, I gotta run. Love you all! The church is true. Find your friends and invite them to church. You´ll be glad you did! Love ya! CHAU!
 
Elder Humphreys

Monday, April 2, 2012

Saltos - Week 3

Hi. hows it going. we had another good week here in Saltos. not tooooo much to report this week. especially because i wrote a little bit later last week. which is probably also good, because for one reason or another we keep setting our selves up for failure here. i don´t know why, but we always walk half way across town to print of letters, and then rush back with about exactly an hour left to write before pday ends - and there are never enough computers for everyone. so that means somebody is going to be missing out on time today. lame. not sure why we keep making the same mistake.
 
Anyways, i´ll try and give a quick run down so that my comp can get on. glad to hear that your week went well. Oh. just kidding. my comp just got a computer. this keyboard is still the worst one yet though, and so I´m typing about half speed. ugh. Anyways, super cool sounding trip. i can never remember when you´ll be getting back either, but I´m assuming it´ll be soon. so make the best of it! remember that you´ll probably never be there again. lol
 
So yeah. as for me. you already know up until Wednesday morning i guess, so tht maks things easier. feels weird having written not so long ago. anyways. this week, things started shaping up. we´ve been talking to lots of people, and we´re starting to build up our investigator pool. starting to find people that we can actually teach. that makes things a lot nicer, easier and effective. rather than running around in circles, we can actually sit down and share with someone. awesome. wednesdy we got to go over the baptismal questions with cleverson. he knew all the answers and really has a solid testimony of all of the points, so thats great. shouldn´t be too many problems there. so that means that this week should be his baptism. he´s been great to work with. really accepting, and willing to do his part. everything you could ever really want from an investigator. and he has great member support, and so that is great too. that afternoon we also got to get 2 member families togther at one of their houses. on one hand, not the most effective missionary thing, but I think it´ll do wonders for ward unity. 2 great young families that are now better aquainted and ready to make form eternal friendships. reminded me of a lot of good family friendships back at home, formed because of the unifying power of the gospel. Awesome.
 
Okay. now i just lost 5 minutes because the zone leaders had a silly question about a baptismal goal. Oh well. more hurring i guess. anyways, we worked hard throughout the week. thursday was nice. the only sad part was when this one lady never showed up for her visit. we had to plan it in another place because her family doesn´t like us, but she knows that the book of mormon is true. sadly she never came. but we wont lose hope. got to help out a future missionary though. thats one of the great things about this ward - there are a lot of kids getting ready to go on missions. they are always fun to help out.
 
friday was like a little christmas at the house. they send out stuff to our house evey 2 weeks from the office by courier. this week i hit the jackpot. not only did i get some great letters, but I also got tons of reimbursment money, 5 new pairs of garments (that were desperately needed), AND a bunch of the stuff I had been missing. i had talked to the Hermana about the stuff I had missed the other week and she gave me some bad news. she had found the bag, asumed that it had been left over by some retired elders and asumed it was good for regifting. so.... a lot of my stuff got lost in that way. realistically though, I think a lot of it went to people that need it a lot more than me, and so realistically i´m not all that sad. thankfully i don´t have toooo much time left on my mission, and so i was planning on giving a lot of it away anyways. but, I got a lot of it back, adn a lot of it that she gave away she replaced with other stuff for the time being. i´m mostly just glad that i have my pillow and towel back. your neck starts to hurt if you sleep without a pillow, and its not really that much fun toweling off with a tshirt. haha. anyways, hopefully your not mad about me losing my stuff. i was actually glad to hear that my jeans are being warn by a cold indian, and that my nice big jacket will keep a cold freezing paraguayan missionary warm throughout the coming winter. hope thats not bad. as for me, i´ll survive. :) As for the rest of friday, it went swell. i think we´ve been doing better relying on the Lord for help and putting our hearts into the work. we basically spent the whole day in lessons, with an especially nice one at the end with a member family and their neighbor.
 
Saturday we got ready as usual and made the half our treck to La Paloma to watch general conference. it started at one here and the bus left town at 12. worked out nicely. not many members, but that was alright because the power was out and we missed all of the morning session. :( Oh well. It came back on for the rest of them. I really enjoyed the church news and the bible history documentary before it started. the church is awesome. spent the next day and a half basically living off of cheap cookies, plasticy candy and a 3.3 litre bottle of soda. Yum... lol. Conference was great and I loved every minute of it. my favorite talks being by elder scott, pres uchtdorf (priesthood) and M. Russell Ballard. any new temples on the way by the way? learned tons. no time to elaborate though. sorry. just watch it!
 
this week is going to be a little crasy. its holy week leading up to easter so most people wont be working and we´ll probably get offered lots of traditional paraguayan food. this week we also followed presidents council and made lists of habits to break that disinvite the spirit. that was great. now we have a 40 day challenge to leave all of those things behind. should be trick but worth it. some things are hard to quit, so a lot of them will be purged off during the weeks i think, as i have so far failed in many of them. lol. we´re tryin though and thats what counts.
 
bY the way.... HAPPY BIRTHDAY ERICA! HAVE A GOOD ONE. TO UNCLE KEN ALSO. STAY YOUNG AND CLASSY.
 
thats about all i got time for. this week we tried to do service, and instead wasted most of the day sitting, and about 15 minutes working. oh well. its the thought that counts.
 
thanks for eveything. hope the week continues great. the only bad thing about conference was that rather than talking much about missionary work, they seemed to talk more about families and spending time together. not what i needed to hear... lol. oh well. just let you know that i miss you all tons and am super excited to be together again. however, im also going to stay focused as i get this awesome opportunity to take part in the best work in the world. love you tons! have a good one!
 
Elder Humphreys