New Years...

January 04, 2022

This week was interesting especially because time kinda just flew by and I feel like I just wrote one of these. But it was a great week.

For the last week and today I've had my p day on Saturday because last week was Christmas and today is New Years Day. And one might think, "oh that makes sense it's so the missionaries can celebrate the holidays and stuff like that. But in reality it's because Paraguay dies on these days. Everyone celebrates Christmas on Christmas Eve staying up until midnight and then opening presents. Everyone celebrates New Years, well the same way just without presents. But because Paraguay is Paraguay, the people get very very tired from their exhausting night of staying up and talking that they are too tired to wake up the next day and legitimately sleep for the majority of Christmas day as well as New Years haha.

This week was pretty amazing though. We started it off on Sunday having a great day and meeting some very cool people after church. We went and met with this lady who is a member but the rest of her family is not. She has 2 daughters and a husband. Once we showed up the 2 little girls who were playing outside ran inside saying "the missionaries are here!! The missionaries are here!!" Which was a good sign. Usually kids here are very shy or at least the ones that I have come know. But these 2 little girls were the exact opposite. They later ran outside with handfuls of pictures and started showing us pictures of everything. The best was when they showed us pictures of their school class and proceeded to tell every single rumor about every single classmate. It was hilarious. We had a great time getting to know this family and I cant wait to return and get to know them better.

On Monday we traveled out to Ciudad Del Este for our Christmas party. It was an awesome time to be honest. We got to enjoy Christmas with a bunch of our friends and other missionaries that we haven't seen in a long time. There was a bunch of stuff to do like ping-pong, different sports, and some really good food. They also had some stuff planned like a couple videos they had made of stuff all of our families sent in. Shout-out to the fam in my Taco. Miss you guys but miss the Taco more.... needless to say I had a great time out there. Then we came home Tuesday night and got back to work on Wednesday.

Met with a lot of good people including the 2 people we have on date for baptism. They are 2 girls both in their 20s who are really cool. One is named Lilianna and the other is named Miceala. Mica told us that there is literally nothing that is going to stop her from being baptized she knows that this is going to change her life forever. And change it for the better. I'm super excited for the both of them.

After that we came out to do divisions in the neighboring city called Oviedo and went with Elder Watson and Maynes pretty cool dudes. While on divisions we were looking for this dude named Luis who missionaries before us had talked to. We had a general idea of where he lived because the other missionaries put a point on the map. We show up to his house and ask the dude if a Luis lives here. He quickly told us no and that his name was José. José was cleaning up his yard so we offered to help. His wife then came outside when we done cleaning up and gave us some water. But we asked if we could share a quick message with her. She said yes but that her husband Luis didn't want to. So yeah, happens all the time. Luis lied to us saying he didn't know Luis and was named José. But it's all good because we shared a lesson with his wife and it was a great lesson. And the end she was tearing up and when we gave her a Book of Mormon she was incredibly happy because she knew it would help her in her life.

It was a great week. I hope you all had a great time and a great new year. Love you all.

Elder Schofield