¡Hola! Everyone
I´m in Paraguay and I just love it here!! The church is true and the owrk is moving forward!! It´s just amazing.
Well traveling down here was hard. It was long and I didn´t get much sleep. But it was fun to try to listen to all the Spanish and try to get a little bit of it. I keep expecting it to be like over in Israel where people were speaking in a different language but the minute they realized that you spoke English they would speak in English. But after a week I´ve realized that people just don´t speak English down here!! It is slightly crazy and way awesome. Well we flew from SLC to Dallas which was a pretty chill fast flight. Then from Dallas to Buenos Aires which was a long flight through the night. There was a little girl that kept passing out so I offered to help but I really couldnt do anything because I had had all of my nursing stuff with me but they said my carry on was too big so they took it away from me so I actually didn´t have any of it so I was just not a help at all but it is ok. It was entertaining and a great thing to distract me from the fact that I was super tired. I really like the fact that I am small because then I can sleep on a plane quite well when I´m not between two elders that I can´t touch or they freak out so I didn´t get much sleep but it was a good experience. So half of my district from the CCM (MTC) left the night before the Paraguay people because they were going to Argentina but we ran into them in the Buenos Aires airport which was super happy, I loved it oh so much!!! I miss my district they are all so awesome!!
So the country is just awesome. The first two days I was here it was quite hot like in low 80s with humidity so it was warm and we sweated a lot. All the people were saying that it is super weird for this time of year to be that warm. Well then we woke up and it was freezing. I mean it´s only like 55 degrees which isn´t bad but with the humidity and all tile floors and windows that don´t hold out the cold it is quite cold. The country is tropical, kind of, there are a lot of jungle trees but I´ve heard that a lot of the jungle has been chopped down and the trees we see now are just the reminent of it. But basically it´s like any other south American country. It reminds me of Peru but cleaner (well in some parts) I love it here, that is all I have to say!!!
So daily life is pretty awesome. We work really hard and run a lot between appointments because we like to chat until we realize we have to be to another appointment across the area in 5 minutes and so we will run!! It´s fun but at the same time hard because the roads are all made out of a type of sand rock type rock that is just laid there it´s not really paved down or anything os it is really ahrd to walk on let along run on. I´m amazed I haven´t broken an ankle yet. But we wake up every morning and go running for our exercise in a little park about a block away and then we come home do our daily study sessions and then it´s off to work and at 9 we run into the house hurry and plan and then drop into bed dead tired and talk about life and it is really awesome.
So my area is called Ita Enramada it is part of Asuncion but is quite beautiful. I´m on the part of the city that borders Argentina and we can see Argentina all the time from our area. Our area is a good mixture of people. I think it is quite interesting. So part of the area is what we call . . . chuchi (or fancy or rich) and then the other part is like the poor of the poor so we have a really good mixture and it´s fun to be able to switch from teaching on a dirt floor sitting on buckets right outside someone´s outhouse to teaching in a super nice house that makes me feel like I´m in America. It is really quite awesome. We have a lot of investigators from both areas so it is fun!!
Now for my companion . . . . SHE IS AWESOME!!!!!! Her name is Hermana Knapp and she is from Manhattan KANSAS. She is about my heigth and has curly brown hair. She is super fun, oh and she went to BYU-Idaho and we are pretty sure we have seen eachother because she has workeda t the writing center for the past 3 years and I´ve worked there and been tutored there as the Anatomy and Physiology tutor. So it is fun. She has been in Paraguay for 5 months and speaks the language amazingly. She is a way hard worker and we have to be going going goin for both of us to be happy. She makes me run every morning which is an adventure for her. Oh funny story of the week. We were running like two days ago in the morning and we were trying to make it across the street before the bus that was coming would get mad at us for getting so close to us and I stepped on the curbs with quite not enough of my foot running as fast as I can and fell HARD. So hard that my knees, my ankles, my arm, and my CHIN all were scraped amazing well. It hurt really bad but I didn´t have time to think about it because if I stayed there for very long the bus was going to kill me so I had to jump up and we just kept running to the apartment with blood flowing quite rapidly from my one knee. It was quite amusing and me and my companion laugh about it almost every day. But anyways my companion awesome. Al of our investigators love her and all of them have just joined in and taken care of me.
Our apartment is what you would call Chuchi. Hermana Knapp was telling me we had a super chuchi apartment and we were driving from the mission home to it and I expected you know American like style but you guys would definitely not call it Chuchi. It´s two bedrooms (one of the bedrooms the light doesn´t work and so we don´t use it. One bath a huge living room and good sized kitchen and a storage room and a laundry room with a sink and wash board for our laundry (but dont worry one of our ward members does our laundry) but it isn´t very chuchi I mean it´s nice and we have warm water which is happy but it isn´t as chuchi as I though it was going to be. I´m emailing pictures to don´t worry.
The food here is let´s say . . .. greasy . . . they fry everything!! And I mean everything!!! But I´m still losing weight just because of all the working and running and walking. It´s really bland because they don´t use any kind of sauces and they barely use salt so it´s interesting. They love their bread. They have this stuff called Sopa which is like corn bread with onions in it. I hated it at first but it is growing on me. It´s really hard because they give us HUGE portions and if you don´t eat it all they are super super super super offended. I´ve walked out of a lot of houses ready to throw up becuase i was so full. My stomach is stretching though and I just don´t eat antying excpet at the people´s houses.
Our investigators, for the most part, are awesome, We had one pull the whole we saw them in the yard and they ran inside when they saw us and sent her husband out to tell us she wasn´t home. It´s just not her time to hear the gospel even though she showed a lot of promise. But we do have a few amazing ones and we work a lot with the menosactivos and they are awesome as well.
Miguel. Miguel is 19 years old and is the most amazing kid in the world!!! Holy Cow he reads the book of Mormon and really wants to find out if this church is true. We taught him my first day and my companion tried to have me speak, and I¨m nt very good so she had to translate everything I said into Spanish taht actually made sense. But the spirit was strong in that lesson. Sadly we missed the next lesson. We were at a lesson on the opposite side of our area and the lady just talked and talked and talked and so we were late by like 30 minutes even though we ran as fast as we could to his house and he had left to work by then. But we teach him tomorrow so we are excited.
Rocio. Rocio is 31 years old and has a little one year old boy that happened from a one night stand. She feels like she made a huge mistake in her life and even though she loves her son it´s really hard. She really wants to change and has the best spirit known to man. We had a great lesson with her yesterday and we were all crying because she can speak English so I can actually participate and such. It is quite awesome.
Familia Paniagua. They have 3 kids and then the parents. Elisha was baptized like 6 weeks ago and is doing so well in the church I swear she knows the scriptures better than me. Then I had my first baptism Saturday which was Erika Paniagua who is 11 and is amazing girl. She also knows the scriptures amazingly!! Then their brother Pablo is 18 and we got him to church yesterday which was great. He promised us Saturday that he would come and when we got to their house Sunday morning he was stil asleep. My companion is really good friends with this family because she has been teaching them for like 4 months or something like that and so she marched up the stairs and knocked on his door, woke him up, and he came to church were he had a great experience and got ot see Erika confirmed. It was quite awesome. Their whole family is amazing. They live in basically a giant garage that they have build rooms on like stilts that goes about the garage where they work and it is quite scary walking upa nd own there I felt like I was going to die and the whole thing was going to fall over. They feed us all the time and we teach them and slowly the family is getting baptized. Next is Pablo and we are hoping in a couple of weeks.
Familia Gauna. They are menos activos and they are amazing. The reason they dont go to church anymore is they ahve a 7 year old son that is severely autistic and so it is hard to dea with him. It was hard just to teach them a lesson. But they are awesomea nd ahve a strong testimony of the gospel and they have now committed to switch off every other week coming to church so we are excited about that.
We have a lot of other investigators and menos activos we are working with but those ones are the ones that I feel like their family and I just love them to death.
Well I love the gospel, I love the people, and I love it all. All friends sorry you can´t write me on my email you have to write me through dearelder which actually gets here in like 2 weeks so just keep writing me!!!
Love you all
Hermana Hubbard
