Help with overcoming problems

Hola mi querido familia, Well this Has been good. Elder King and I are working together really well. We are working hard, and doing all that we can herein the branch. It is nice having a companion who is younger because it helps me have to be more obedient, and search for things that we can do better. We are getting along really well. He went to Utah State also, and also doesn’t like BYU. ;) No but we are getting along really well, we haven’t had any arguments or anything, and we are teaching really well together. We had just over 40 lessons in the week, and we found 21 new investigators. We are working hard to help the people progress, but unnfortunately the most important indicators (with bap. Date, in the reunion, and progressing) were all zero this week. Nobody came to church again of our investigators, and we aren’t really sure why. Usually it is a case of not explaining well enough for the investigators the importance of going to church, so we are trying to study on that, and see how we can explain it better for them so that they come to church. We found a family of 7 this week, 4 of the which could be baptized. We taught them the entire first lesson, and it was a fantastic lesson. They both had really good questions, and we left them with a Book of Mormon to read and pray about our message. We are going to visit them again on Tuesday and see how it went. A lot of the investigators that we have been teaching more time seem to be progressing, but for some reason aren’t coming to church, part of which might have to do with the cold that it is doing in the mornings. We only had 10 members in total that came to the church counting us, so it was another small group. Roberto, our recent convert came, and bore his testimony. It was awesome being able to hear one of my converts bear their testimony and hear how much he has progressed. The bishops storehouse here in Paraguay closed down recently and is going to be closed for 3 months. Unfortunately we believe that is the main source of the problems we are having with the members right now, because a lot of them were just coming for that. There was a rumor that the branch president was recieving money that he was supposed to give to the members, but that he was keeping it for himself..... we had to kill that fire in the week. Also another rumor was going around that we(the missionaries) had walked in on a member while she was dressing and that we saw her naked.... Which never happened. We are getting kind of frustrated with the members because instead of progressing, now they are getting even worse (spreading false rumors about the missionaries and the President). We are working on helping them, but the problem is that they lie to us when we talk to them, making it so that we can’t help them with their problems. There is one member that we visit that lives next to a downs syndrome guy named Juan Carlos. Every time that we go to visit the family, Juan Carlos comes over to listen. He can’t speak, and I don’t know if he understands, but I know that he can feel the spirit. It is really cool to see a special person like that who can feel the spirit, and follow it. We had a lesson with some drunk guys this week. They were in the process of drinking as we explained to them the Word of Wisdom. One of them started asking questions and recording us on his phone. Another was so drunk that he fell out of his chair. One of them however actually wanted to say the prayer at the end, and started crying as he asked his heavenly father to help him overcome his problem with drinking. He then wanted to give us a hug before we left. I don’t know if we will ever see him again, because he lives in a different part, but I hope that he really can change his life off of what we taught him. It’s been pretty cold in most of these days, and we have been making some hot chocolate every day when we get home to warm ourselves up a little bit. It’s really sad seeing the poverty of the people here now when it is cold, because the only source of heat they have is making a fire. Well I love you guys tons. Happy fourth of July. Have a great day, and shoot some fireworks off for me. Thanks for everything you do! Chau Elder Ryan Griffin