Blacker, Chandler

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...

Hey everybody! I realize that you're probably a little confused. I seem to send an email every 5-12 days and it's pretty inconsistent. Sometimes I send it out on Monday, other times on Saturday. So when is my actual pday? Truth is... it's on Saturday... but only sometimes. We frequently have random things to do on Saturday and simply work so much that we run out of time to have pday. For example, the Saturday before Christmas I was in Ciudad del Este doing a Christmas conference. I got back late Saturday night completely exhausted. We took pday on Monday but I had so much work that I just worked for the first half and then we did our shopping and basically only had pday for an hour. Then we took pday again on Saturday, only 5 days later, but in reality I hadn't had a real pday for a couple weeks. So if my email writing is weird or inconsistent, sorry haha. Anyway... I have had some crazy weeks. During the whole Christmas conference and end of year period, I got pretty b...

You know... sometimes it is just really hard to describe all the things I do in a week and have you understand what it is like.  I always describe very briefly all the adventures I have but I feel like you are lacking the whole story.  I'll try to get better at that So, to contradict what I just said, here is a short list of all the things I did this week without much context: -We received new missionaries!  I went to the airport bright and early to pick up the missionaries, take their pictures, and we went back to the office to do a little conference.  We had the church all set up for a little conference with the newbies.  We presented my slide show, revealing their first comps and presenting ourselves as office Elders willing to help them in all of their needs.  The next day we helped them all get their visas and sent them off to their new areas. -We had transfers!  About 100 missionaries showed up at the office and we h...

Helloooo It is kind of weird.  I'm like actually in Paraguay.  Things are different here but I have been out for long enough that it is no longer weird.  I just casually run through stop signs as if that happened everywhere.  Oddly enough thats just a paraguay thing. Anywayyyyy.  These last two weeks were pretty tiring.  We had 16 missionaries go home.  They came to the office a week ago on Friday and didnt leave until tuesday.  It is really hard to work with so many missionaries in the office.  Most of everything i did was to help them before they left.  I recorded all of their final testimonies (which is actually super fun to make the video)  and helped them pack their bags light enough for the scales, and drove them around everywhere.  They literally went everywhere haha.  We had to drive them to the temple, to dinner like 3 times, to the airport at about 7 random times that were conveniently st...

Well hello there!  How was your week? Not surprisingly, I couldn't remember what I did this week.  To help me remember, I took a look at the photos that I had taken during the week and found out that I only had pics of the broken laptop.  What a shame.  I have been working for more than a month on fixing this thing and the only thing I have achieved has been annoying the IT workers at Dell and at the Church until they have essentially told me to shove off.  Yayyyyyy.  That was funnnnn. Other than that, I had a pretty good week.  I took a lot of people to do the whole visa thing all over again and waiting in the Paraguayan version of the DMV brought me a lot of joy.  Just so you know, the Paraguayan DMV is a little different than the states.  It works a little bit more like the one shown in Zootopia. I also waited in lines at the airport.  (It is really hard to make this email sound interesting) Something actually exciting that ...

Holaaaaaaa I hope y'all are well!  This week was super boring!  We did nothing!  ....Okay well that's not true but it's all I can remember.  In reality I did a lot this week...probably. Here's a few highlights that I can remember... -A living Apostle of the Living Lord came to say hi to me (There were certainly some other not-quite-so-important reasons) -We're planning 4 conferences that will all happen in only two days Everything else I did seems rather insignificant by comparison.  I mean, I sent out references, started recording facebook shorts about the gospel from various missionaries in the mission, and went to two birthday parties on the same day (one of which had way better food than the other), but most of that is pretty normal.  If all my emails were just describing the process of how I figured out that José Martinez actually lives in Ciudad del Este and NOT Madrid Spain,  I think you would all get bored pretty quick. The Gong conference...

Wowzers.  I have had quite the week.  I have no idea where to start.  So much happened that I can't remember any of it.  I'm just going to start typing and we'll see what comes out. So this week we had transfers.  Transfer week is always the most busy ever.  This is the week that I prepare to not sleep a wink.  It always starts when the missionaries that are headed back home arrive to the office.  They all got here a week ago on Saturday.  We took them to the temple, and to go get souvenirs, leaving me with basically no pday last week, and therefore little time to prepare for this week.  I also recorded their last testimonies and made a video for them before they left the mission. Sunday we had stake conference.  Right now I am in the same stake that I was in when I started the mission here in Paraguay, so I saw all the members from my old ward.  It was pretty funny because I was here for stake conference when they did it about...