La Gira . . . Two Down, One To Go

This might be my best email ever. Buckle up y'all 

I swear... it just gets better every time. You know it's been a crazy week when I take pday on monday. It means I was so busy that there was simply not time to take a break. Shall I jump right into it? Yeah.... why not?

Soo..... This transfer we are doing a total of 3 giras (La gira is what we call it when the office travels the mission to put on conferences, generally happens once every 6 weeks and its always the busiest and most hectic week, other than transfer week.) We usually leave on a gira for 3 to 5 days. During these 3 to 5 days I am constantly working to set up conferences or participate or do whatever random last-minute errands need done. Consequently, I am not working in my normal office job, leaving me backed up on references and things like that. Basically, gira = lots of work.  

In a normal transfer we put on 5 conferences. This transfer we are doing 14. Which, simply put, is a lot of work. For a quick list of conferences

- 2 Christmas conferences (Extra big, Extra work)

- Leadership council

- 8 Conferences with Elder Costa of the 70 (Let me explain below)

- 3 Regular zone conferences

Ugh... One email just isn't enough to give y'all a good understanding of what my week was actually like. But this week was the week with all 8 conferences with Elder Costa. To start the week off, we stayed up way too late taking missionaries to the airport. We had a surprising amount of Elders that have been going home recently all for different reasons. Then, on Tuesday, we found out at about 6pm that a new Elder was going to be coming to the mission completely randomly in the middle of the transfer. So, after helping some people in the hospital with the van and taking the van to the mechanic, we left at about midnight to go to the airport. We slept very little. The next day we helped him get situated and were ready to get him off to the bus station with his new comps. Well, having a new secretary we aren't quite on top of everything yet. So we left for a bus station that was 20 min away, 18 min before the bus left. Somehow, following true paraguayan traffic rules, we made it on time. Whew.

Due to many last minute surprises and complications, we had to take two cars to Ciudad del Este and there was no room for Elder Eastmond or I or any of the tech equipment... therefore we also had to take a bus. We were not prepared for such a travel, so we started scrabbling around to get everything ready. In our rush, we almost missed the last bus to Ciudad del Este. Missing that bus basically meant no conferences. We left even later to the bus stop than we had last time. After pulling some risky driving moves guided by the spirit, I pulled up to the last traffic light before the terminal. I immediately parked the car while waiting at the light and shouted to Elder Taylor "Take the wheel!" and jumped out of the drivers seat. Elder Eastmond and I grabbed our suitcases and big tech equipment and some packages for other missionaries and ran bumbling over to the bus station as fast as we could. By some miracle we were the last ones on the bus. God is good.

We got there late on wednesday night and walked about 10 blocks with all our heavy equipment to our nice little hotel. We arrived physically and mentally exhausted, so we did the next logical thing and ordered dinner. The food took a long time to arrive, but it was worth it. In all the rush I had failed to eat food except for sketchy bus food. We finally made it to bed. The next day we spent the entire day running random errands and setting up tech stuff. It was exhausting. Our errands included:

-Buying new tech (Sounds simple doesn't it? It wasn't. We went there that morning and they wouldn't let us buy it using the Church card because we aren't the original owners. There was a small window of time where we could go with the guy who has the card in his name and we realized that we left late and the store would close before we got there. This piece of tech was absolutely essential, so we sped over to the store and got stuck in traffic about 5 blocks away, just 3 min before the store closed. Elder Eastmond and I jumped out of the car [again] and sprinted to the store and made it right as the owner was closing up and leaving, he told us that there was a second location with better options just 4 blocks further in the big mall. So we took off sprinting all over again and were able to buy the needed part.)

-Buying whiteboard markers

-Finding a rubber band (That was so dumb, I just needed a way to attach two microphones together and the church had nothing! I finally went rummaging through all the drawers in the secretary's office and in the last drawer was one singular rubber band sitting there unused and all alone. Miracles)

-Redoing the entire tech setup like 3 times (They had a suprise meeting at 8pm that night after I had spent hours setting everything up right, I wasn't there so they just threw all my things in the corner and had their meeting. The worst part was they took my rubber band. I had to search another 20 min to find a different one. I ended up at the church until almost 11 that night setting up)

-Attempting to get tables sent to the church building from other wards, but it didn't work out because we couldn't fit them in the car. We had to go into every classroom and steal tiny wooden tables and push all of them together and we ended up with exactly the amount of chairs that we needed if they were all squished together

-Elder Costa kept making surprise requests, requiring last minute changes to powerpoint slides and audio adjustments and the ability to use two computers on a projector and more microphones that connected to the zoom and things like that. It was really hard and time consuming because I was not prepared for all the changes. I was lacking tech equipment and could only buy a few things.

Anyway, the whole day Thursday was just kinda a mess, but luckily there were no conferences that day, just time to prepare. We got back to the hotel late and spent about another hour waiting for other missionaries that traveled from far away to get checked in to the hotel. We woke up early the next morning to go run a few last emergency errands and then got to the church to finish the setup. That whole day (Friday) was filled with conferences. We had 4 there. One for all missionaries in the whole mission (with many participating on zoom), one for just missionaries in person about spiritual things, one for just missionaries in person about more mental health things, and one for all mission leaders (with many participating on zoom). I ran around everywhere changing the tech things that they needed, sometimes between conferences and sometimes just between or during speakers. I also sent a few missionaries to the hospital and helped coordinate with insurance DURING the conference. That was soooo much fun. After all the conferences, we took Presidente Calderwood, Elder Costa, and their wives to the airport, so they could fly to asuncion and make it in time for a meeting. We took their car back that day, traveling 5 hours back.

We arrived late in asuncion, and of course, I had a lot of work to do. We had to do the entire set up all over again, but much worse. Elder Costa wanted a lot more mics and a lot more interaccion from the audience. I was in the church for hours late at night to get it all set up. I finished and my setup was okay, but I was a little frustrated. I needed more mics. I wanted to go buy some, but it was already almost midnight and nothing was going to open before the conference started at 9am the next day. So we went home and I didn't like it. I wanted it to be better. The audio was going to be terrible. Late at night, in my apartment I suddenly had a revelation. I knew exactly what I needed to do. In fact, I became so confident that I let us sleep in. All the way unitl 6:30am. We got up, got to the church and I started to set up all over again. I ditched the entire church audio system (which was broken) and brought my own giant speakers. Connected mics to the giant speakers, and downloaded an app onto a phone to use it as a mic for the zoom. Putting that phone between the two speakers, I could have anybody talk and everyone in the chapel would hear it through the speakers and everyone on zoom would hear it through the phone. I set up the zoom and the laptop and mirrored the screen to a giant tv so that Elder Costa could see all the zoom participants. I also left the projector ready to be connected so that I could change the whole setup between every conference. Man, that was insane. After that whole day of conferences and sending more people to the hospital in the middle of the conference again, I was tired. So, after finishing the conference at about 5pm, I worked the rest of the day anyway haha.

Wow.... I think this week wins. I feel like I have never had a busier week. And I haven't even finished. On Sunday we had a baptism! This is our third week baptizing in a row and all of the members were super excited. Historically, this area doesn't have a lot of baptisms, but with this new streak we have going our ward is pumped. The whole font situation is terrible though. We spent about an hour just trying to drain it. After trying many things, we ended up with a power washer and many buckets, and we drained it in about 90 minutes after that.

Okay... I'm not going to lie, I could keep going, but I should stop. I will warn you though, in a meeting this morning I found out that I probably will be too busy the next two weeks to have pday. So consider this email as the weekly letter for the next two weeks as well.

God is good! No matter how busy I am, the evidences that He really is there helping us in every moment are just too big to deny. He loves you! Don't doubt it!

Have a great next 3 weeks! Talk to you later!

Elder Blacker

To reach out to me.... send a message to chandler.blacker@missionary.org

Sorry for the lack of photos.... I had uhh.... other things on my mind