November 18

another hot week in paraguay. the heat here is really just ridiculous. on friday, it got up to 100 before lunch. around 3 it rained for half an hour or so then stopped, which just made it worse cus it didnt rain long enough to make it cool down, and the rain evaporated and made it super humid. a bit later though it started raining again and didnt stop, so it cooled down a bit. from what i've noticed, the weather has a cycle that lasts about a week. it'll rain, and be relatively cool for a few days, and gradually get hotter until it's super duper blazing hot, and then it rains again. if this continues throughout the summer, i might manage to actually survive.

but anyways. we have rodrigo and tamara set to be married and baptized this saturday, but we've been running into some problems. they didnt go to church yesterday, cus the member that they live with is travelling, and we havent seen them since friday, so we havent been able to set the details of everything very well yet. also we have stake conference this week, so they cant get married/baptized saturday afternoon, which is kind of a pain. also, because we havent been able to see them as much as we had planned, i'm not sure that we'll be able to get them completely ready by this weekend. they definitely do have real desires and real testimonies, but i'm just not sure that we'll be able to do everything we need to do in the short time we have. they asked us a bit about the rules of missionaries and stuff, so we explained a bit about how we dedicate basically every moment in the two years to missionary work. rodrigo asked if we had girlfriends back home, and after i replied no, he told me to visit him in paraguay when i'm done with my mission and he'd be happy to introduce me to someone, which was funny.

we had one investigator in church yesterday, which is a bit sad after having 5 last week, but its still pretty cool. this investigator, nelly, is super spiritually hungry, like every time we talk to her she has a ton of questions and just wants more knowledge every time. i think her parents are members, and she used to go to church with her family 16 years ago, but she was never baptized. shes awesome, we invited her to church, and she said she would go, but that she was gonna go a bit later, so we didnt bother passing by on sunday morning. she showed up after the first hour, and told us that her friends had invited her to go party last night but she denied cus she wanted to be able to wake up on time to get to church. her only problem is that she smokes and drinks, but she should be able to stop without too much trouble after she goes to church a few times and is reading the scriptures.

we also had an inactive member come too, which was awesome. he's actually the elders quorum president, but hadnt been to church in two years or so. we had visited him once before, a month or so ago, and visited him again on saturday. he showed up to church on sunday, and came to ward council and everything too. the branch president had an interview with him, and said he's excited to be back and to be helping again, which is awesome.

we visited ernan again too, and had two awesome lessons. we watched the 20 minute video about joseph smith with him and he related with him super well, like he's confused and wants to learn more about God, and we committed him to go to church with us and he agreed. we went by sunday morning and he said the same thing he had said every other time, that he had commitments to go to his church, and that he couldnt come with us. he's always awesome when we're teaching him, and he shows desires to learn and understand and stuff, and he reads the assignments we give him in the book of mormon, but he just wont ask in prayer if the church is true, and he wont come to church with us.

elder Christofferson was cool. both paraguay missions went, asuncion and asuncion north. i got to see all the people from my mtc group, which was cool. he wanted to greet every person individually, so all the missionaries made a line to shake his hand. that was cool too. for a lot of the time, he just answered various questions that the missionaries had, which was awesome. he's a really humble guy, like he opened up saying that sometimes when he studies the scriptures with his wife, she asks him questions that he doesnt know how to answer, and said that he doesnt know everything, but then when we were asking him questions, he would pull out scriptures that answered the questions perfectly, it was inspiring how well he knew the scriptures.

Elder barahona, the new elder in our apartment, is a cool guy. we went on splits on wednesday and we get along super well, we have a similar sense of humor and everything.

this week's been a bit difficult in that robert, one of the members who would accompany us like every day, cant accompany us anymore, cus he has school and had been helping us as an excuse to not go to school. the branch president reprimanded us and told us that we cant use him anymore, so we had only a fraction of the number of lessons that we usually have with members present.