Semana de Oro (Golden Week)...

This week was pretty amazing so I'm going to just jump right in.

Last Monday our entire district came to San Ignacio in order to have a district activity and district council in person. It was ridiculously fun to have everyone here, our district is super tight group of friends which is awesome and it will be really sad to leave them one day. But we played games, ate good food, played poker until really late into the night. Needless to say it was a great time.

We sent them all home on Tuesday afternoon, and then got to work that afternoon teaching some people. Wednesday night we had planned to go to Pilar so that's what we did. So we got to see a couple Elders from our district again. We did divisions with them and it was sweet. Elder Jorgenson is one of the Elders out there and he's awesome. He's from San Clemente, Cali and used to be in a band out there. He grew up surfing and playing guitar, an all around super cool guy. And then what's even better, a member in Pilar loaned him a guitar so he played Led Zeplin, The Doors, and The Smiths songs for us all night. I went on splits with this Elder named Elder Pavon, a Paraguayan Elder who is super funny, and speaks a little bit of English. While on divisions with him I gave two blessings which I always love to do. It's such a spiritual experience. But on a less spiritual experience I got told I look like a blonde Leonardo DeCaprio by two different people that day. This one girl was like "hey mom doesn't he look like Leonardo DiCaprio" and the mom says " no but he looks like that actor from Titanic" Needless to say I was pretty pleased with that haha. This girl then proceeded to take pictures of me from all different angles telling me that she was going to send it to her friends. I don't know how I feel about that, but if I get an acting job here in Paraguay you all know why.

Also, Elder Pavon loves to take pictures impersonating the statues around Pilar so that's why there's a couple of those haha. This girl also came up to us and asked where I was from I told her to guess but she still had no clue. Elder Pavon said "where do all of the blonde haired blue eyed people come from" she still had no clue so I told her I was from the US and she lost her mind. I told that she can now tell all of her friends that's she has a friend from the US and when she heard that she said she had to take a picture and put it on her story. So I'm pretty sure I'm famous in Pilar now.

We took our regular midnight bus home and got a solid 3.5 hours of sleep. But getting up was absolutely worth it. We went out that day and had probably one of the best days on my mission. We found seven news, which means people that accepted a lesson and want us to come back another day to share more. It was such an amazing day full of success which our area really needed because we have been leaving our area so much we haven't had a bunch of time to work in it. So we knew it was a gift from the Lord that we had such a good day. When we got home that night, I had the feeling we needed to say a quick prayer thanking Heavenly Father for the great day we had. I kid you not I've never felt the Spirit stronger during a prayer in my life.

I also bought a water gun the past week. And I'll bare my testimony to the fact that it's the small things in life that make you happy. I brought this water gun to a lesson we had with our really good friends Gustavo and Adaliz and Adaluz. Elder Stillwell was helping Adaluz with some English homework and Gustavo and Adaliz continued to try to mess her up. Like confuse her about what she was saying. So I whipped out the pistol and shot them a couple times with water saying "hay que escuchar no mas" or basically "hey just listen" and everyone lost their mind and was cracking up it was so funny.

The nice part about being way out here in San Ignacio is we have to walk a lot on roads where there is like nobody around just a couple houses. But there are like a million dogs everywhere. So when we're are on the roads when nobody can see, the water gun comes in clutch for getting dogs away from you. It's honestly so funny because these dogs have no clue what's happening. Anyway the water gun definitely put a smile on my face.

We went back out to our favorite city of Santa Rosa and while there we were walking and this group of like 9 girls aged from 14 -40 stopped and asked us where we were from. We told them were from Paraguay and whenever we say that everyone starts cracking up and proceeds to tell us that to be from Paraguay we need to be fatter so because we're not fat we're clearly not from Paraguay. We ended up having a fire lesson with with. On our way home from Santa Rosa we accidentally left our phone in the car of the member that drove us home. So it wasn't a big deal because we would just get it back in the morning when they came to church. But that means that I didn't know that the branch president tried calling us to assign me a talk that night. So we got to church and right before sacrament meeting started I was told to give a talk. So that was definitely fun, but it think it went pretty well, I talked about the importance of the sacrament and how the blessings are like a road map to heaven.

We didn't take P day on Monday because Elder Stillwell had to go up to Asuncion to do some stuff for his immigration papers. And Elder Johnson from Ayolas had to do the same. So we decided that me and Elder Harris (Elder Johnsons trainee) would work here in San Ignacio on Monday and then take P day all together on Tuesday. So for about 2 days I was working with Elder Harris who has been here for 4 weeks but he's really pretty good with his Spanish. It was definitely weird being the one people looked to to answer all of their questions and the one with that had to understand stuff I couldn't just defer to my comp. But it went really well and we had some super amazing lessons and new people that we met.

Elder Harris and I were walking one day and we saw this group of people shoveling all this dirt into wheelbarrows and tben moving into the back. I asked this lady I'd she wanted help and she looked at me kinda confused, like "what's this dude that's all dressed up in a white shirt and tie gonna do with a bunch of dirt" however she said yes to my question. I quickly took the shovel from her hands and got to work. We helped these people for about an hour shoveling and wheelbarrowing. And throughout this hour we became homies. We were getting this stuff done so quick the lady asked "well now what am I going to do" I told to sit and relax as two white boys do her work. She started laughing so much. It was such a good time I can't wait to go back and help them out again.

Then last night because Elder Stillwell and Elder Johnson got back we played some poker super late into the night and I won the whole thing so it just ended this week with a solid W.

But to end this email on a slightly more spiritual note than poker, we have three people getting baptized next Saturday. Two of them are sisters, one is 8 and the other is 10 who are the kids of an inactive member. And the other one is Maria Gomez who I have been working with since my first transfer in San Ignacio like 4 months ago. It's been such an amazing experience watching her understand what the gospel is and watching her desire to be baptized grow. All in all it really was the golden week.

I love you all, write me if you want to give me a life update or just say hello

Elder Schofield