Yukyry - 1st week in Paraguay

Hey Family!

I am serving in a place called Yukyry (you can find it on Google maps by typing in: YUKYRY, Caaguazú, Paraguay) which is like the most jungle part of the mission! It is awesome! the people are amazing! We clap outside their gate and almost everyone lets us in and we teach like all day! Our house is the worst house in the mission, but it is really awesome at the same time. It is horribly made and it is tiny. We are looking for a new house though. I have pictures and will try to send them. I don't know if I can here. We are in a computer shop right by the street where we pay per hour too use it. 

The food here is pretty good. There are dispensias everywhere which are like convenient store booths. I went to a couple ladies houses for lunch and one gave us airline food with napkins from the airline... which I have no idea how she got. The other is a chef who works for 2 weeks straight and has one Sunday off. Her food was amazing!!! She made us some chicken with shell noodles underneath and some really good sauce over the top.

My companion is Elder Bredsgaurd from Arizona. He has almost been out a year and is a really good missionary!! I am really lucky to be his companion... We have so many investigators and he is a really hard worker and walks fast everywhere we go.

The flight was LOOONNNG I sat next to a guy working at Illinois University and he put in his earphones and left them in the whole time! Even when he ate! So I talked to him for like 5 min at the end of the flight about baseball... it was dumb. The flight from Argentina to Paraguay was horrible. I Almost barfed like 4 times and the people next to me were freaking out.  I couldn't speak Spanish to them, or I felt like I would throw up. But I didnt - false alarm.  I had motion sickness for that whole day of meeting my comp and president and going to the Temple which is a beautiful Temple.

Anyway, me and Elder Bredsgaurd took a taxi to our area and the roads here are horrible - most are just dirt with sharp rocks underneath. Then we went out and worked. We met with the Fox family and and talked about the plan of salvation - it went really well. While we were teaching, a chicken walked right in the middle of everyone and nobody cared! There are so many chickens here. I hear a rooster call at least 3 times a minute. And at night they all make a ton of noise. The people here are way funny, too. We stopped a guy on the street and asked him his name and he said, "Super Gallo," which is like super rooster! HAHAHA - it was awesome.

WE ALSO HAD 2 BAPTISMS - two days ago! Noellia and Carmen! I baptized Carmen! It was awesome! The people here are super poor - like their houses are made out of trash bags half the time. It's really humbling seeing how happy they are with so little. We also talked with this guy in the ward named Axel Lopez and I am almost positive he is going to serve a mission! I love it here! Even though my Spanish sucks (which is also really humbling), it is amazing participating in lessons that you know that they know that our message can change them and that they can know it's true through prayer and asking our Heavenly Father. The best part about Paraguay is the buses!!!! They are nuts. They don't stop half the time and because the roads suck they are really rickety and crazy. The owners decorate them in crazy ways and drive super fast. Something else that is awesome about Paraguay is that everyone is always blasting music.

A couple days ago we went to like the outskirts of our area called Nuevo Asuncion and it's like a 30 minute bus ride north, I think. Anyway, there is a Guarani reservation here and the people are really funny. We clapped in front of a woman's house and she said that she "accidentally locked herself in her house". Everybody has some ghetto gates here and it was locked.

Church was awesome! I bore my testimony and a ton of other people did too. The bishop is amazing! He bore his testimony about how families can be together forever and that through the atonement of Christ it is possible. His 6 month old daughter died a week ago and my companion said it was super hard on their family, but their dad didn't even cry as he buried her. It is a really sad story, but the faith of the people here is amazing. We are also working with a woman named Mada whose son is getting baptized on Saturday. His name is Adam and he is the most awesome kid ever! He is nine and knows about everything we teach him. His mom has a drinking problem though, so we are trying to get her over it and be a better example for her son. It was super sad on Saturday when we had the baptism - he couldn't come because his mom was drunk and he wanted to take care of her.  He knows it's true and we are working really hard with his mom.

We are finding new people too teach everyday and my Spanish is getting a little better. I can understand what people are saying most of the time.

I love YOU GUYS! Thank you so much for the letters and prayers and I hope everyone is doing well!



 HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BEKAH!