05 April, 2011

Are there any good men in Paraguay?

Well this has been a good week, a little interesting, but pretty good. To explain to you about the meat.... well pretty much all the good meat in paraguay, they export, and then sell the crap for a higher price. So in other words, there is no possible way to get really good meat here in Paraguay, and since my area is in the middle of nowhere, it is even worse. First off, we got a real map of our whole area, instead of just the city of Acahay. It is about 90 kilometers from side to side, in other words we have to take a bus just to get to another part of our area. The area is doing well, we have found a lot of future elders, and familes that we are now teaching. On Wednesday night, we got a call from our district leader telling us that we had interviews in Asunción the next morning at 8. We live a little bit outside of Asunción, so we had to wake up at 3 in the morning, get ready and take the first bus at 4. We got to the office at 8, and had our interviews. The president talked to me about my old companion, and understood everything that had happened there. It was a really good interview, and he helped me a lot with what he said to me about opening our area and everything. We have a lot of work to do with making it so that the ward actually has some families and preisthood holders instead of just women and children. Then on Saturday we went to a city called Paraguarí for the conference. I watched the first two in English and then the last 3 in Spanish. I learned a ton from all the talks. There seemed to be a couple themes that they focused on a little bit more. I feel like I got everything out of it that I was needing. I saw that it had snowed when they showed outside the conference center. On Saturday we went to pull out our money, usually 750.000, and could only pull out 700.000 because apparently the dollar dropped a bunch. The last time I looked it was 4200 guarani to a dollar, when I got here it was 5000 to a dollar. How is the economy over there? It seems like Barack Obama is doing quite well as president.... We had one investigator that came on Sunday to the conference. It was José, the one that is going to be married this Friday, and then baptized Saturday. If they both stay fatihful in the church, I'll be able to enter into the temple with them in a year or so. We have one member in our ward that has 5 children.... all from different fathers. A couple days ago we passed by her house the day after her now x-boyfriend abused her. He had punched her and beat up on her pretty badly, and almost killed her. We were guided there the next day, and talked with her for a while while she told us all the happened. I felt impressed to turn to Doctine and Covenants 121 and explained to her that sometimes we ask god: where art thou? that sometimes we feel alone and lost like Joseph Smith did. She said that she had asked that same exact question the night before, and so I asked her can you read your response from god then? I gave her the book, and slowly and sobbingly she read the two verses that I firmly believe in that time were a direct response to her prayers. We talked a little bit more with her, and helped her feel a lot better, and have more hope. She went to the conference, and seemed to be doing a lot better. After conference, a man stopped us and started talking to us about her. I asked him his name, and it was the same man (if you can call him that) that had beat on the sister. It was hard trying to talk to someone like that when I knew what he had done some nights before. It's really just a sad situation here, the women here in Paraguay just have such a hard time actually finding a decent man that doesn't have problems. Well, anyway, I'm doing well. I'm learning a lot more guarani now, I will probably be able to speak it by the end of my mission. We are having good success in our area, and everything is going well. We fixed our oven, and bought some things to be able to use the microwave. We are eating a lot better than we did the first week here. Well i hope everything is going well with you all. I love you tons. I'll talk to you next week! -Elder Ryan Griffin

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