Email 03/16/09

The only kind of restaurants that exist here are buffets but they´re a lot smarter than us, they charge you by the weight of your plate. Homer would not last long here. We went to one for my Birthday, the whole district. There are 8 elders in this zone and technically we´re in the same district but the zone leaders never do anything with us. So my district took me out to eat and we found a brownie mix and we made that for dessert. It was really good actually.
Elder Perez is 23, he was a convert at 9. He goes home in August. His mom joined the church before him and his grandma joined the church a few months ago. He´s pretty good with the Guaraní but understands more than he speaks. Life is so simple, we get up, we walk, we work all day, we walk home and we talk the whole time. It´s nice and light.
We do our own cooking, and quite frankly we´ve gotten good. We´re going to make peppered steak and fried rice today, we´re going to make a lot to have for future lunches. We´ve been going through the recipe book I brought from home and we try new things.. Because we have to cook our own lunch every day we´ve gotten creative.
A lady in our ward does our laundry and I love it because we get the laundry back the next day, rain or shine. With Hna. Lilian we could wait a week or more to get our clothes back so this is a nice change for me.
Ca´a Guazú is about 3 hours in a bus from Asunción and about an hour or so from the Mission Office.
Raquel didn´t come to church this week. Her little sister did but she didn´t. She is having a little opposition from her "husband". Husband is a very confusing term here because it doesn´t mean that they´re married. If Raquel isn´t married and her live-in boyfriend is against being baptized and married, we´re pretty much sunk.
We did find a family this week, we´d been clapping houses ALL day and we came to this house with a HUGE family. Mom, 8 kids, son-in-law and a granddaughter. They ALL sit and listen but the crazy thing was that they couldn´t speak a SINGLE word in Spanish. Not one thing. And I´m not good enough in Guaraní to teach, and neither is Perez but we had some serious help. Everything we said in Spanish during the lesson they understood and EVERYTHING they said in Guaraní we understood. We asked the mom if she would pray to know the truth and she said she didn´t need to. She said she knew what we taught was true and then she asked us where and when our church was. After the closing prayer we couldn´t understand each other. And they all came yesterday. ALL. Every family member that was in the lesson plus the husband and two more kids. Something wonderful is going to happen with this family because we had some serious celestial help during the lesson.
One of the blessings of a transfer is being able to reap where others have sown. A 20 year old named Luis was baptized on Saturday. He is so awesome. His girlfriend and her family is one the two rocks of our branch. Familía Sanabra. Everyone bore their testimony at the baptism and the spirit was electrifying. They live in Ciudad Nueva.
The other rock family is Familía Rossy. They live in Constitución and they always help out the missionary work out there. Our branch building is in Ciudad Nueva and so it´s hard to get people from Constitución to go there. So one thing our Branch President does, only if we feel we have investigators that will come, is have a sacrament meeting at the Rossy´s house. It´s quite the sacrifice that he and the other leaders do to have ANOTHER church service a half hour away but it SO helps the work here. We had 5 investigators come to this meeting. The president really is amazing.
Thank you so much for everything and I love you so much.
Elder Frank Wills