April 8, 2008

Hola mi familia (y amigos),

Well this is my last letter from the States, so I'm truly excited right now. I made a list mom, so hopefully I cover everything...

First of all, this week I purchased a Book of Mormon and Himnario in Guaraní, and it is definitely not spanish. I wish I could attach a picture of what it looks like, its definitely an indian language. They don't have a pronunciation guide or grammar book on it or anything here, so I'm not quite sure how to say things, but I've already started recognizing words and have a basic understanding of some of the ways they work. I just really wish I just knew how to pronounce things, then it would be easy, but I don't have the luxury of searching the internet for such a thing, so I'll just have to wait til I meet some natives to figure it out.

Thanks for all the stuff about your missionaries from all those years ago, its awesome that you're trying to connect with them, I'm sure they love hearing from someone they taught. And oh my goodness, you've confused the heck out of me woman! I got your email before you letter, and I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about with the sound system... I think I've figured out that you've figured it out and don't need my help though, which is good, cause I wouldn't know where to begin from so far away. Oh, and the reason that email didn't go through last week was because you sent it to the wrong address, not my missionary one. But I can't help you there, I don't remember what my information was, but Dad as the Bishop has administrative powers to make you the webmaster, log in as him and you'll be able to do that.

Conference this past week was awesome, but the last session was the best. Second best was the Priesthood session (sorry mom, you always miss out). President Monson is just hilarious, and I loved his talks. President Uchtdorf was also very good, he spoke several times and I enjoyed each of them as well. The only bad thing about Conference was during the Sunday morning session, the MoTab just completely slaughtered one of my favorite hymns, "If You Could Hie to Kolob," with some awful rendition of it. Thats one of the hymns you just can't change up. Overall, I wasn't all that impressed with the music selections this new director has made so far. But everything else was great.

So I'm definitely ready to get down to South America... and get a new companion. The time has come and gone for me to get a new one. Thats all I'll say about that.

So on to what I know you're just dying to find out: The Flight Information. By this time next week I'll be in Paraguay. We start out be heading to the airport and taking a 2pm flight out to Atlanta, where we have a very short 1 hour layover, followed by a 10 hour overnight flight down to Buenos Aires. There we'll meet up with the Argentine half of our district (we're heading down with a group of 13 headed to Asuncion North, and they're going down a different way with a group headed to Argentina), and we're all excited to get that chance to see each other one last time in South America. We get in to Buenos Aires about 8am, and have a 3 hour layover until we take a 1 hour flight up to Asuncion, where we'll be getting in about noon local time. All in all its about 15 hours in the air, and will take about 20 hours to get there. I'm so excited, we're all ready to just go pack our bags like right now!

Well there's all the information, and you can probably expect a call from me on Monday at about 3pm your time from the Salt Lake Airport, where you get to finally hear me speak fluent (ha ha ha) spanish. I know the girls will be getting home from school about that time, but can you pretty pretty please pick up Cole from school early so he can be there too?? :-) I don't know what to say about dad... its not like he can get picked up early from work. Maybe I'll try calling when we get to Buenos Aires as well, which might be early enough to catch him before he goes in to work on Tuesday.

Thats all I really have for this week, all is steady and slow, though there's so much excitement that we're about to leave. Next time you get a letter it will be from South America, and it probably won't be for 2 weeks since we kind of miss the P-Day as we're traveling. I hope a get a native companion that forces me to speak spanish, all is going well and I have no doubt that I'll be able to continue to pick it up quickly. And maybe I'll actually have some stories to make my letters somewhat interesting then, we'll see.

Love you all,

Elder Dennis