Nov 30, 2009

Opa, ¿Cómo vai vocé?

Well, changes. So I´m no longer in Yverá, and I´m not a zone leader anymore either! Instead, I´m training!! That was awesome, I´m super excited for that, I was a ZL for forever. But yeah, it was good that I was training, because I probably wouldn´t have met E. Adamson, cause he went wayyyyy out Lejos to Pedro Juan Caballero, a city out on the border of Brazil. Luckily I was training though, so now I get to go out and work with him everyday. That´s right baby, I´m opening an area in Pedro Juan, a little branch called Rama 2 (´Branch 2´), and I´m training the other New Yorker! I couldn´t believe it when I heard, the other Elders back in my old house, E. Gage and E. Hill, both knew of E. Adamson by some way or another, and they were teasing me that I was so old as a ZL that I was just gonna drop down and train him, and it totally came true. It´s amazing how small this world is, let me tell you! So now I´m just a District Leader, but we´re living with the ZLs out here while we look for a house to live in, one of whom is E. Reid, from the MTC, so that is awesome, I love that guy.

It´s funny how I have some weird traditions in the mission though. Both times, I trained the day before a major holiday and spent the whole day on a bus to get out to my area in the zona Lejos, and so my childrens´ first day in the field was a major holiday, Christmas the first time and Thanksgiving this time. And I´ll have spent both my Christmases in the mission while training. We´re right on the border of Brazil, so I´m dealing a lot with Portuguese again, luckily I had plenty of training in Saltos, and this time around I understand just about everything and am speaking a lot more. I really love the language, I want to be able to speak it fairly fluently by the time I get home.

The branch is in ruins, but don´t you worry, E. Adamson and I are going to get things back in shape in no time. On Sunday there was a total of 15 people in the building, including the 3 investigators and the 3 kids under 8 that came... so basically just like Saltos when I showed up out there. There are a couple amazing members though (they´d have to be to keep going in situations like that) who are helping us out quite a bit, and we have some awesome investigators right now that we´re working with who are super excited for everything. I´m really excited for the change up of the routine, and E. Adamson is a stud, he already basically speaks Spanish, he just runs into a lot of trouble with the Portuguese and the Guaraní, which we have to deal with quite a bit out here too. It´s such a melting pot here, the people just mix those three languages together, and it's amazing but I understand it all. I´ve really fallen in love with foreign languages, I´d love to keep learning more after the mission.

Well, I don´t have much time today, but it sounds like everyone is doing awesome, and I love you all a ton. Sis. Wade said she´d find out what happened to that paper, and I´ll see her on Wednesday so I´ll check up on it again. I don´t have a phone yet out here so I can´t call her easily and remind her. Thanks for all the support.

Love,
Elder Dennis

Tracie here - just a fun fact: the new missionary that Josh is training grew up in the Albany NY Stake. He and Haley went on a few dates when they were seniors in high school. We knew he got called to the same mission as Josh and were thinking that it would be pretty neat if Josh got to train him - pretty cool that it actually happened :)