More on Paraguay

So I think Paraguay has the biggest ugly chicken contest ever. Every house, hut, shack etc. has some new interesting looking chicken its pretty funny. Along with the ugly chickens comes the roads they are so funny cause I am in CaaCupe B its about an hour and half north of Asuncion. Go check it out on google maps. CaaCupe is about the size of Redmond and I live about 3 or 4 blocks north of the big white cathedral which is the city center. We live down town CaaCupe in a apartment type thing with two other elders. In total there are 4 of us here. Elder Lombardo and I take the southeast side of the city. And in case I’m wrong our church is on top of a hill on one side of CaaCupe and we cover the other side. Any way the roads, Downtown is all asphalt and good but just out side of downtown is all rock roads then outside of those roads is all dirt roads. I spend most of my walking on some sort of dirt road. It’s fun cause one minute you’re in a neighborhood and then the next we are on this little trail through the jungle to another neighborhood. CaaCupe is all sorts of types of stuff. Jungle, farm, city, and everything in between. My companion is from Argentina and speaks both English and Spanish which is really nice cause he is my walking dictionary. I like him he is a good comp cause he helps me out a lot, it’s nice. OK so our apartment is pretty much how cathryn described her apartment ha ha ghetto. There are 2 bedrooms one for us and one for the other companions. We each have our own bathrooms, which ours is fine but theirs is uh well its just ok its pretty run down ha ha. Then our kitchen is pretty ghetto we can’t drink the water and we dont have a fridge so all we have is a water tank dispenser and that’s  about that. So ya know how two missionaries in Romania died because of Carbon monoxide poisioning? That will definitely not be a problem for me cause all the windows and doors are wide open to let as much air as possible in. And since it is so hot I just quit drying off.  I take my shower and then just put on my garments so when I get dressed I’m soaking wet but my showers are cold so it feels awesome. So basically I go from being all wet from my shower to being all wet from sweating I don’t think I am ever dry! Cause it is summer here and around 90 degrees which is fine back home but man with the humidity and hiking all over a city the size of Redmond up and down hills I’m pretty much soaked in sweat all day. It doesn’t bother me that much cause that’s pretty much what I expected. For our meals we always have breakfast at our apartment.  There is a store like 4 apartments down so basically like less then a 100 yards is a store. And for breakfast I usually get bananas and a water bottle and some sort of juice. Then for lunch we have had some appointments and those are sketchy! Like for instance our last one was at at shack house thing and it was noodles and meat and I looked at the water and there was all sorts of floaties in it ha ha so i was like uh no thanks. Then I was like you can’t contaminate noodles so I ate those and then the meat was like huh… what’s my comp doing so I look over and he is dropping meat to the ugly chikens ha ha so I just played the I don’t understand card when the lady asked me if i don’t like meat oops. Yeah lunch is pretty sketchy, but if we don’t have an appointment we usually just stop by a corner store and buy a pop and crackers or something. Oh on a side note I never go pee here cause I sweat anything I drink back out ha ha. Oh and yeah some lady in the branch does our laundry twice a week so its the same as Matthew said it was in Mexico.  Spanish is coming along good the only problem is no one speaks it! Everyone speaks Guarani (two official languages in Paraguay – Spanish more educated, Guarani –local rural population) and when they do speak Spanish it’s in the vosotros form and usually mixed with Guarani. My first sacrament meeting started out in Spanish then slowly evolved into Guarani -- its fun.  My comp just looks and me and shrugs when that happens. So here is “como esta” in Guarani “'bae  chapa”  there is more but yeah its way different than spanish.

As far as the work we have like 25 investigators its nuts. We contact a little but the thing with contacting is no one works here so they all just sit around and drink Terere (an ice tea made from the leaves of the Yerba Mate plant). When we contact we clap (instead of knock) 4 homes and one out of the four is like yeah sure come on in and we teach the lesson commit them to baptism and then we leave but no one wants to go to church so it doesn’t do us much good. But we have two families that are actually interested and I am very excited for them. They are set to be baptized on the 12 of March so hopefully all goes well. Like Cathryn says it’s so fun to be serving the Lord!   It’s crazy how covered in sweat you get from walking down the road (or rather stream bed cause it got washed out from the rain) but you just smile and say this is so much fun!  but ya do and i love it.

Also I will send pics of Paraguay probably next week sounds good? maybe later today

love ya guys

Love,

John

PS- those boots I got were the best idea ever i love them they are both pefect for Paraguay. So Cathryn thanks for sitting in Big R for an hour and a half waiting for me to try on boots