Hola Familia,
Last week was yet another great week in the “guay”. I love Paraguay so much. We had a busy week of traveling around and doing zone capacitations (meetings). Elder Dickson and I are getting along real well. Tonight we´ll find out if he´s getting changed out or not. He´s been in the office for 5 changes now and he only has two changes left so he´d love to spend them out in the field, but he´s down with whatever. I´m glad you got the truck working, I´m positive that I had no gun fights in or near the truck, but if we´re coming clean about things that happened in the truck... just kidding I think I´ve already come clean about everything before I left. I´m a little nervous to drive again in the United Sates because the laws (or lack thereof) here a lot different and I´ve developed some pretty bad habits on the road.
So we taught a super cool lesson to Pedro about the Word of Wisdom but for some reason he was not able to go to church on Sunday (I think it´s because his member girlfriend wanted him to wait to get baptized, he didn´t but she did, so they all traveled Sunday morning). But he´s super cool and I know he´ll get baptized soon. I got the video of Eli singing. His little voice isn´t as little as I remember it being- it was super fun to watch. These days I don´t think I can even get trunky. I´m so afraid of going home that sometimes it stresses me out. I feel like I just barely started my mission but I can´t even really remember what life was like not being a missionary. As we were traveling with President this last week he looked at Elder Dickson and I and told us, "man, you guys are going home soon", haha (we deserved it because we were giving him a hard time about his birthday on Saturday). But it was nice because we were able to have a really nice discussion just about what to do after to stay strong and the blessings of serving a mission and how great it is being a missionary. I tried asking him about any possible way to extend, he said the chances are not good. That gave me a little hope that there were some chances (even if they´re bad ones) but then he said that our chances are as good as Elder Breadsguards´ were (and he didn´t get them). Dang.
So about the Easter package, don´t worry about sending it. I´m not even sure if it will get here before I go and I just got the package that had my shoes in it (love the package by the way, the sasquatch jerky was AWESOME!) and I think that will suffice. I really like all of the stuff that they have here in Paraguay. So like I´ve mentioned, we traveled this week. One of the places we did a capacitation was called Santaní. From there we had scheduled a division with some Elders that were in an area about 2 hours away (or so we were told) in a place called Santa Rosa. So we hopped on a bus from Santani and headed towards Santa Rosa. Our options for this little more than 2 hour bus trip were watch the movie they were showing, contact the 2 20 year girls on the bus, or take a nap. We were tired because we were working off of just a few hours of sleep and we knew that that night we also wouldn´t be getting too much sleep so we decided that our best option would be to take a little nap. The driver was advised that we were going to get off in Santa Rosa and normally they come and get you, plus we set alarm clocks on our phones to wake us up before we got there so we fell asleep. Well about an hour and 40 minutes later this guy walks back and asks us if we were going to get off in Santa Rosa and we said yeah, are we close? He told us to run off because we just barely passed it! So half asleep we just hopped off the bus and started trying to figure out where we were. Turns out we were about 10 km´s past the city! haha so we started trying to hitch hike back to the city because justito it had started to sprinkle as well! haha after about an hour a member came and picked us up and brought us the rest of the way over. Luckily we are now in fall (it feels like fall outside, it´s super fun) and we were in the middle of the jungle so it was just sooooooo pretty. The Lord really did a good job when He made Paraguay. When it rains here it just gets so green and beautiful. It really makes you think about the true nothingness of man and who´s really in charge. I´ve been studying a lot recently about Priesthood power and authority and I´m starting to understand a little better about just how much trust was put into each Priesthood holder. I did not quite understand the magnitude (as I´m sure I still don´t even come close to fully understanding) of the priesthood covenants. God literaly trusts them, priesthood holders, to act in the name of Jesus Christ, His perfect son. He trusts them to represent Him here on the earth, that´s HUGE! I´m going to try and be a more worthy priesthood holder, after all it is His power to properly perform ordinances necessary for salvation. I hope you have a great week and I love you all very much.
Con mucho amor,
Elder Zachary J. Hulsey
