Big Leaf City...

October 07, 2021

Well this week has been super crazy, starting off I finally left San Ignacio. On Monday evening we went up to the office in order to get transferred out to my new area. While there I ran into a bunch of my MTC buddies which was sweet. I haven't seen like any of them since getting here so it was a super cool reunion. On Tuesday evening I shipped out to Caaguazú. Which is a decently sized city in like the dead center of Paraguay.

Also Caaguazú is a guarani word that literally means big Yerba. Yerba is the crushed up leaves that everyone drinks around here in their maté. So I'm basically in big leaf city. It's a really cool place. My area is insanely small in comparison to San Ignacio. But it's super cool too, to actually be able to go to my entire area. I've already met some cool people here and the fact that we have like 3 other companionships that live really close is awesome. We can actually see other elders quite often and not after a 2 hour bus ride like before.

Being in a big city is weird though at first my sense of direction was way off, I honestly had no clue where we were going at first but now we're doing okay. It was easy in San Ignacio because there was only like 2 big roads so I based everything off of that but here every road looks exactly the same so it definitely makes it interesting haha.

My companion's name is Elder Coumans. He's from Arizona and this is his last transfer in the mission. He's a good guy and pretty funny.

Being in the big city definitely has its perks though. We went to a Korean restaurant for lunch one day. And it wasn't Paraguayan people attempting to cook Korean food. The owners of the restaurant are actually Korean and they make some pretty fire food. I had like some peanut chicken with French fries. (Yeah it has an American spin on it).

Also this week was General Conferance. Which was absolutely sweet. Some great talks were spoken and it made it even better that a couple of pur amigos watched part of it and really enjoyed it. It was super cool we went around this week asking people a question. "If you could ask God anything, what would you ask?" Then we promised them if they watched General Conference they would find their answer. We didn't even answer their questions at all we kinda just left them on this cliff hanger hoping it would hook them into watching Conference.

I also met one of the most interesting 15 year olds in my life, his name is Jorge. And he's hilarious. At first he taught me how to play a game called Freefire. It's a game that's huge around here literally everyone plays it. It's basically fortnite but on the phone. And I almost won but sadly I didn't. After that told me that he has 2 girlfriends and showed me pictures of both. I ask what's gonna happen when one of them finds out about the other and he just looked at me and said "they will never find out". And then swore me to secrecy that I would never tell people around here about it.

Also interesting, Jorge has an older sister who was hanging out with us we were having normal conversation. I was getting to know her because I'm new around here and this family has been meeting with the missionaries for a while now. So I need to get to know everyone. But then all of the sudden some dude pulls of up his dirt bike (everyone has them) and then they just start making out right behind a tree. So that was super fun to be a part of haha. Definitely interesting.

Yesterday we were out clapping houses as we do and we asked this guy if he had some water. (A completely normal thing that people do here, you just ask for water and they'll bring you some and be super nice about it) but this guy was funny. We asked for some water he looked slightly annoyed ran inside and grabbed a 2 litter of soda that was emptied out and had water in it. And a metal cup and just gave it to us. So we said thanks and left it was super weird but kinda sweet because now we have this metal cup that's super cool.

This next week will be super interesting I'm leaving tonight to go back to Asunción because we have mission leadership training tomorrow which should be super cool. Also Elder Christianson (I think that's his name) of the seventy is coming to do like a mission tour here in Paraguay. So I get to help plan the joint zone conference with him and maybe get to work side by side with him which would be super cool. I guess we'll find out about that in the future.

Also we just had daylight savings down here so now I'm 4 hours ahead of Nevada.

I love you all

Elder Schofield