Email 02/23/09

This week was crazy. We NEVER stopped the entire week. I´m exhausted but it was a REALLY good week. It didn´t start off good though.

Wednesday night is called Ward night. The chapel is opened up and people come and play soccer or volleyball, I teach piano, it´s a nice night to meet people and be with the ward. The thing about soccer here is that it is THE most powerful driving force here for everyone. Everyone has their favorite team and favorite players, every male plays soccer all the time and most of the women do too. It definitely gets rough. I enjoy it because I´m too big to get pushed around. Well I had finished the lesson with Roberto Medina and he went out to play soccer. In about five minutes, maybe less, he was CARRIED back into the chapel. He had gotten hit pretty hard when he was in the air and he fell really hard on his arm. The problem was that ambulances don´t exist here and walking him home wasn´t the best of options at this point. Right after this happened all of a sudden all of the people that owned a car were suddenly really busy. Our life saver of the day was Hector Aguilar. He was there and he had his scooter. He took Roberto home and then he took Roberto and his dad to the hospital. We found out later that he broke his wrist and the bone right below the elbow. He´s doing better now.

In happier news, Rosalina hasn´t stopped smiling all this week. She absolutely loves life right now. Her daughter, Rosana, turns 8 on March 4th and Rosalina´s already planning the baptism. She´s an amazing woman.

Alberto is still taking the discussions with his family. He´s working with his lawyer on trying to get an exception on his house arrest. His family is still coming to church. One thing we found out this week is that he´s always been friends with the Aguilars and he was arrested for the same crime as one of the Aguilars that we haven´t met yet because he´s still in prison. Because Alberto had a wife and 4 kids his lawyer wasn´t able to get him out of prison early but it sounds like it´ll be house arrest for about a year or two.

More news about the Aguilars. This week we baptized two of the grandkids, Pricilla and Bryan. Bryan is one of Hector´s sons who is nine and Pricilla is the little sister of Jeanet and she is 8. They´re both really cute and quite frankly I´m attached to Pricilla. One of the last things a person needs to be baptized is an interview just to verify that everything´s good. Bryan had his the day before the baptism but Pricilla had hers the day of it. Bryan had told us that he wanted Barate to baptize him so when they got there Barate had the clothes to baptize him. Pricilla had the interview but when she came out she didn´t want to be baptized. So I asked her what was the matter.
"Wills I want you to baptize me but you don´t have the clothes so you can´t baptize me and I won´t be baptized unless you do it." And she started to cry and I absolutely melted.
"Don´t cry, of course I brought the clothes to baptize you." I´ve never seen anyone so happy.

The Guaraní is still a problem with the Aguilar family but the grandkids are REALLY picking up Spanish.

Transfers are this week. The way it works in our mission is that during the zone meetings on Tuesday mornings we found out who goes and who stays and Wednesday is the transfer day. So we get about 18 hours notice. I probably am going to be transferred but I really won´t know until tomorrow.

I love you all so much.