Hola familia
Whats up everyone! We had another great week in Paraguay. But holy cow my cousins are so lucky meeting all of these basketball players, I couldn´t tell you one thing about whats going on in the NBA right now, but if you´re wondering about south American soccer I hear all about it. Gosh this week was pretty insane. There were changes last week and Elder Williamson and I are still together, but he was made the district leader. They split our zone so the other elders that we live with aren´t even in our zone anymore, it´s kinda funny. Anyways my new district is me and Elder Williamson and two companionships of hermanas, so it´ll be pretty tough keeping up with them because the hermanas work a full (all of the Paraguayans say that phrase). But the Elders that we live with had changes. The one that left was named elder Dickson and he was replaced by a new missionary who just got here so he´s being trained. It´s kinda fun seeing him getting trained because I hadn´t realized how much I´ve just grown into the mission but seeing a new kid I remembered having all of the same concerns and everything. The new elder's name is Elder Mechaca and he´s from Monterey Mexico and he used to be a boxer before the mission. He´s pretty funny and he speaks Mexican, it's a little different than Paraguayan Spanish. Paraguayan Spanish is pretty simple and mixed with a lot of Guarani (any kind of phrase like what you sent me dad is said here in Guarani) so I´m really glad to have a Mexican in the house because I´m learning tons of Mexican slang and phrases. So we had a couple of miracles happen last week. Benigno has been hiding from us lately so we were about to drop him, then we were teaching these two girls that live with a member family but they didn´t really have desires for baptism either, so we were at the point of loosing all of our best investigators. But Saturday we were able to talk with the girls and then again on Sunday and they want to get baptized this week! Then we talked to Benigno and it just so happened that this branch president from a branch in the stake was visiting and he helped Benigno a ton in this lesson. At the end of the lesson we asked Benigno what he thought about baptism this Saturday, he said he doesn´t want to this Saturday, he´d rather do it this Wednesday! The only problem is that each of the investigators have some hurdles that we have to get over so we´re praying a full for some more miracles, but I fully believe that this is the Lord´s work and that if I do all that I can than he will make sure whats supposed to happen happens. Anyways so yeah we might have three baptisms this week or we might have 0, I´m so nervous. But the work out here is great, we´ve been trying to work more with the part member families and contacting houses closer to ours. A lot of the part member families have members that are super strong and active so I think that a lot of the missionaries that were in this area before just assumed that others have tried with their non-member family members so maybe they didn´t bother, same thing with the neighbors that live close to us. Pero no es así. We talked to one of the neighbors and she was so excited that we finally stopped by, she said for years she´s seen us leaving the house everyday and sometimes even wave at her but they never arrived at her house. This week is looking pretty good.
So like I said they split the zone. I was a little bummed because I have some friends that just got taken out of my zone and my old zone leader was super awesome (he was almost exactly like good´ol Elder Otterstrom. He was telling me stories of his high school days and the things he did and the way he told his stories was just like Jeff. Elder Johnson, the zone leader, is one of the greatest examples of a missionary that I´ve ever met and I imagine Elder Otterstrom is the exact same). But anyways the new zone leaders de repente decided to do a division with us last Friday and I went with my new zone leader named Elder Harward. He´s from Orange County, California and a spitting image of Russell Allphin (he doesn´t know nearly as much about music as Russ but he´s got a great love for it and he´s picking up the piano). It was such a fun division and it made me a little envious of all of Russ´s companions.
Bueno, les quiero mucho. Espero que tengan éxito esta semana y que toda salga bien. La semana pasada me dí cuenta otra vez en cuánto al amor que he ganada por el Señor, su obra, y su gente elegido acá en Paraguay. Yo sé que esta gente realmente es especial, es una gente loca pero la quiero demasiado igual. Yo sé que vive mi Señor, y que cada misionero que hace su parte y trabaja duro va a poder acercarse mas a Él y disfrutar la misión. Ya no quiero volver a la casa aun después de que cumpla dos años acá, me gustaría aun mas tiempo porque la obra misional da mas gusto que cualquier otra cosa que hay. Que tengan una semana maravillosa y disfruten todo!
Con amor,
Elder Hulsey
