Week 5: Ciudad del Este

Hola everyone! 

I hope everyone is doing wonderfully in school or work or whatever everyone is doing!  I'm doing well! This week was actually pretty uneventful; nothing too exciting happened. But I did eat some realllly good food.. and some not so good food, but this week was definitely a good food week. 

So yeah, there wasn't anything super cool this week so I'll just run through what we do on an average day. So we get up at 6:30 every morning and pray and work out for 30 minutes. Then we shower and eat breakfast and then study at 8:00.  From 9:00 to 11:00 we have study as a companionship; we talk about what we are going to teach that day and we do role-plays and just study about how we can be more effective.Then at 11:00 I study Spanish for an hour, and at 12:00 we go get lunch. From 1:00 to 9:00 we go out and teach people and find people to teach. 

We have investigadores (investigators) whom we teach, but sometimes our appointments fall through so we visit their neighbors or just walk around and talk to people and try to set up more appointments. And most people have gates and fences around their yard, or patch of dirt, because there are so many stray animals that could easily walk right into their house. So instead of knocking on doors we stand outside their gate and clap until they come out. Kinda funny, but it makes sense here. And yeah we just teach people about our religion,  prayer, reading the scriptures and profets (prophets) and all that good stuff.  We just help them develop faith in Jesus Christ and our main goal is to baptize people. But that's not our total focus; we just help people develop their faith and talk to them about their problems or trials and help them recognize that God is really there and that he really can help. 

We are teaching a guy who has a terrible smoking problem, and we are just trying to help him overcome that. We are working with him a lot to help him overcome that addiction, so it's really cool just helping people and as they follow Jesus Christ and begin to live a more spiritual lifestyle it's cool to see how they change, how their attitude changes and the person they become. It's usually not super dramatic, but it's evident and awesome how the gospel can change people. 

And let's seeeee, on Tuesdays we have a meeting with our district and discuss how we can do better and share ideas about how to teach more effectively and stuff like that. On Mondays are called p-days, preparation days, where I get to write to family and friends, relax a little, do laundry, and best of all take naps. I'm a huge fan of naps. Also something cool about Paraguay...the weather is crazy. Like when I woke up this morning it was hot and muggy and not raining; now it's pouring and kind of cold. This past week I saw the coolest lightning storm ever. Just lightning that lit up the sky every half second. Super fun to watch. But yeah, that's my life in Paraguay in a nutshell. Sometimes easy, sometimes hard but always a good experience. So, adios! 

Elder Roberts