Blacker, Chandler

¡Hola! OK, I had a pretty crazy week (definitely more busy than last week, lol).  I'll start with a real quick summary of the highlights, and then I'll start explaining the miracles. Highlights: -Elder Park is better (no longer sick) -I went bowling for pday -Found out the temperatures for our mini oven are listed in Celsius, not Fahrenheit (Duh! It makes so much more sense now) -We got chewed out twice for dumb things (my poor comp got personally insulted and attacked by the Elders Quorum President and the 1st Counselor, both separately for 20-30min, because we didn't tell them about our baptism 10 days in advance, which we didn't know until 5 days before and couldn't wait longer.  Can't please everyone I guess) -I dreamed in spanish (sure I dreamed that I couldn't understanding anyone and people kept giving me the wrong food because I couldn't talk to them, but still, I dreamed in spanish) -We answered somebody's prayer.  We felt like we should lea...

Hey everyone!  Hope you are well! First I want to explain the title.  Qué is kinda like how, like if I were to say, "How cool!"  Pucha is roughly translated to "the pits."  That's where we were this week... the pits. At least for my comp anyway.  I'm doing totally fine, but Elder Park got real sick this week.   We think he has dengue.  It's been going around here a lot.  It's symptoms are bad headaches, body aches, and overall just feeling really weak and tired.  So Élder Park has been sick like this since Thursday, and we haven't been able to do much since.  The good news... I've slept a lot.  And even better I've studied a lot.  We've been having a surprisingly good time while Elder Park is sick.  We've tried to keep our missionary purpose in mind and honestly I've had some of the best days on my mission recently. Everyday since Elder Park got real sick, I'll get tired of studying in spanish after a few hours and I'...

Hello everyone! Whoops!  Totally forgot to send an email last week.  My bad. I'm still doing pretty awesome though!  The missionary work here is crazy!  We have 5 people with baptism dates, none of them related or anything.  Crazy!  The work here is completely different than other places.  A lot of missionaries struggle with finding people to teach, no one accepts their message, and they get tired of not accomplishing much.  For us, the people are flocking to us and we just can't teach enough.  The problem is that everyone is interested about the gospel, but nobody actually wants to put forth effort to go to church or read the scriptures.  All 5 of our baptismal dates know the Church is true, they just never attend the meetings.  But we're working on it. I think a lot more of the challenges that we get in Paraguay are physical (that word took me so long to figure out how to spell in english, haha).  It's 115 outside every day....

¡Feliz Navidad a todo! This week has probably been my favorite so far!  The people of Paraguay love to feed us.  Especially since it's Christmas, we've been fed non stop and I feel sick.  All the food is so good here though.  There's only a couple things where I'm like "why would you ever want to eat that?"  But everything else is just awesome.  Like in Paraguay they like their rice one of two ways, covered in cinnamon and milk and different things to make a really rice pudding type things, or they like it as plain white rice with mayonnaise.  What?  Why?  I love the rice pudding thing, even though rice as a dessert is a bit weird, but mayonnaise on rice?  That's disgusting. I'm starting to really enjoy teaching.  We have a lot of friends right now, so our finding new people time is very minimal.  But I love going from lesson to lesson, trying to teach people the importance of following Christ.  In Paraguay, almost everyon...

¡Hola! I can't believe it's already pday.  So much happened but so little at the same time. I'll start with a few highlights.  My Spanish is actually insane.  Listening and talking is hard (yes, I know that's basically all of it, but hold on a sec).  I'm able to read the scriptures, or anything else, and understand ALL the grammar.  I know exactly why they say it the way they do, and it's helped a ton.  I do have to have a translator open for the words I don't know, but it's really only been one every few verses. The reason talking is hard is I'm constantly double-checking my grammar, because I want people to understand.  I end up trying to speak a little faster than I can think and I stumble a bit.  The good thing is, by the time I've finished talking, people actually do understand and my comp says my grammar is correct.  The real problem is listening.  A lot of people around here don't have many teeth left, and no one talks using their...

¡Hola mis amigos! I made it!  I'm like... an actual missionary now. I'm realizing how much I could talk about from this last week and it's getting kinda hard to decide what to write... So I'll start with my travels I suppose... I was in my room at the CCM with my roommates and most of them hadn't packed yet on the Wednesday before we traveled.  So we stayed up and got an hour of sleep before my roommates left.  I was able to get another hour before my comps left.  And then I decided to stay up until I left 90min later.  I ate a bunch of Ramen that my comp had received from a package in the mail, but he had to leave it so I ate it.  That was a vibe.  Chillin at 4 in the morning, no comp, just eating American Ramen. After the 2 hours of sleep, I took a 4hr flight to Panama city, which is ridiculously nice, and then a 6hr flight to asunción.  I arrived at the mission office at about 2:30 in the morning.  Yeah, it was a long day.  We went to...

Well, this is it, my last week here.  I can't believe I've been on my mission for a over a month.  It's really weird to be sending these emails instead of receiving them. Yesterday we were doing our Spanish class,  and we had a bunch of visitors walk in.  They were all in various leadership positions for the MTCs, including the head of all international MTCs in the world.  My teacher was expecting this, but he was still soooo nervous.  We did an activity where every student shared a mini lesson in spanish about a scripture to one of the leaders, probably so they could analyze our progress and the effectiveness of our teacher.  My teacher chose me to talk to the leader of all international MTCs.  I actually spoke so well.  I was able to share everything I wanted and the only times I had to slow down was when I had to make sure I used the correct grammer in different tenses.  I was basically fluent.  Not actually but the progress is r...