Weeding Paraguayan style

Hola familia, Well this has been an interesting week here in Acahay. Well on Tuesday, my birthday, our cell phone stopped working in our district meeting. We had divisions, and the district leader came to our area with me. On the way to our area in the bus, an American started talking to me. It is a guy named Cameron, who is from Las Angeles. He is in the Peace Corps, and has been here for 6 months. He also is a member of the church, but hasn’t been able to attend church very well. He lives in our area, but about 2 or 3 hours from the chapel. Later, we had the interview of José and it went well. We had to make some calls, so we had to go to a cabin to make some calls and figure out everything with the matrimony on Friday. Later we finally got all that figured out and I went back with my companion. On Thursday, the day before the marriage, we went and did service with José. We went and weeded…. Paraguayan style. We used machetes to cut down the weeds and stuff, it was pretty tough in the heat, but pretty fun. After that we figured out that they had to renew their stuff to get married, so we went to make a call and then returned. When we returned, Liliana, the member was crying. She tried to tell us what happened, but we couldn’t understand her. We took José aside and found out that he had been cutting more, and was tired, so he laid down in some shade. Then she came to look for him, and thought that he was waiting for someone. Anyway, they got in a big argument, and neither one wanted to get married. We talked to José, and had him do a prayer to see if he felt like he needed to get married. He did the prayer, and said that he felt like he did. We then talked to Liliana, and did the same, and she said the same. We then talked to the both of them, and we had them do a “companionship inventory” like what we do here in the mission. It worked really well, and they decided that they would get married. On Friday, at 12 we had the marriage, and then on Saturday José was baptized in the little river in our area. It was quite the stressful baptism, but it went all well in the end. On Sunday, he was confirmed a member of the church. Also on Sunday, I got fevered, and when we went to our house to eat afterwards, I collapsed on the bed and fell asleep. I felt bad the whole day, so we couldn’t go out and work or anything the whole day. After sleeping so much, I feel a ton better now.