Nov 16, 2009

Hey family,

Alright Haley, I can’t help it if I live half-way around the world and Mom loves me enough to send me Christmas goodies hahaha. So stop your whining. In normal circumstances, I would totally agree with you, but this is an emergency, okay! But you wanna know what’s driving me out of my mind? Here in Paraguay, they don’t have the Thanksgiving Day, let alone in November, so they just pull out all of the Christmas stuff after Halloween! It’s so annoying! But I have never heard anything about customs fees here in Paraguay, so I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist, and some missionaries get like 10 packages a day. Not even exaggerating... So I’m sure the mission would have mentioned something if the mission had to pay anything to get them out of customs. I would hate to be in Argentina if that's the case.

I talked to Sister Wade, and she was going to take care of everything and I signed my part of the paper, and she was going to have Pres. Wade sign it and then fax it in, so I’ll give her a call after this to ask what’s up with that. Everything should be good to go, I probably just have to remind her to get that sent off. Elder Hill’s mom mentioned that you sent that photo to her, so once again the mothers have creeped out the missionaries. Technology is not a good thing in parents’ hands. Changes are tough to call, especially a week in advance. Sometimes you wake up with the feeling of what’s going to happen the day of, that’s what usually happens to me. There’s a good possibility that I stay with Elder Comte this change as well, but I could also easily see myself going to a different zone. Anyway I look at it, I can’t see myself ‘dying’ here in Yvera, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be staying a zone leader this change. As for the last one, eight changes as a zone leader is a long time, so that last one I might drop down just to train, but that’s too far out to call right now. It all depends on how the leadership of the mission is when that change comes around.

I could totally see you as the seminary teacher mom, you always got up early. That’s still the one thing that bothers me more than anything, you early birds. I can’t stand peppiness the first thing in the morning. But this week was pretty awesome, it was pretty eventful, let me tell you. Pres. Wade went out with us to work for about 3 hours on Tuesday, and that was awesome. We just did a bunch of contacts and taught some lessons, it was great to learn from him. He doesn’t change out in the street with the people from when he’s talking to us, and he’s such a great guy, he brought little candies for all the little kids and people we taught and gave away a tie to less active member who we’re trying to get out to church again. Then on Thursday, Pres. and Sister Wade came to inspect the houses of the zone and to have the interviews with President that we get once a change, so they were mixing things up on us, normally we just get together at the Stake Center and have interviews their. So we spent all of Wednesday night and Thursday morning cleaning our house like crazy, so it’s a lot nicer now hahaha. I went out with Pres. and Sister Wade Thursday to show them where all the houses of the zone were, and my comp did a split with a youth in the ward. It was awesome to have some more one on one time with the two of them, they are such great people!

But then Thursday night, the power went out for like twenty minutes, and we found out later that it was ALL of Paraguay and half of Brazil! But wow, it was scary, it cut off at like 9.10, and we were walking home, and then all the lights go out. And let me tell you, Paraguay is not a safe place to have the lights go out. At first it was alright because the full moon was out, but after like 4 minutes, it was as if the lights went out again! But it was just the moon going behind the clouds. THEN it was scary, we had to go by the light of the cell phone, and everyone on the streets was scared, because they know how dangerous Paraguay is, and they were always staying away from other cell phone lights. We got to the house just fine, and Elder Gage and Elder Hill showed up about the same time, and we called everyone in the zone to make sure they were okay, and luckily nothing happened, and the lights came on like 10 minutes later. Whew, that was fun.

But yeah, that was the exciting week. Hopefully we have a wedding and a baptism this week, so pray for us. Love ya lots,

Elder Dennis