Hola, que tal?

Hola familia!

Short on time today so I will try to recap my week real quick. Had 4 investigators come to church yesterday, pudette. Hmna Flecha was brought to church by a member since she can't see, but we have a baptism date for her this Saturday! Nery Reyes and his family are awesome. He has seven kids, their ages are 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, and 2. We contacted and taught him my second day here but couldn't find him for about a month. Finally he got a week off from work so we taught him almost everday this last week. He read all of First Nephi in 4 days, since then he read all the intro, Joseph Smith history, and 3Nephi 11. He is soo ready for baptism, I love it. We have some other great investigators that I`ll talk about next week when we teach them more, Jose Maria Mendoza and Miguel Nunez. So this last week we tried something a little different to get an inactive member to come to church. We made pancakes and omelets and brought it to him and ate breakfast. Don't think he liked my pancakes too much but he still came to church, success! I dont know if I told you this already but i watched 17 miracles, its the church's new movie about the pioneers, it is amazing. You gotta watch it. We just started working on building a volleyball and futbol field for the youth in our branch. Tough work but it will be great to have something for them to do.

Oh dad, my companions dad started the company LifeStrength. It's like Power Band but he says his is a lot better. I can't explain it but they use a different element which makes it more effective. He showed me a watch that has the same stuff in it, its sweet. So I told him I´ll try to get my family and school to support it and maybe he`ll give me his watch haha.

Oh 2 more stories, while I was eating lunch at a members home, my wooden chair broke in half and i hit the deck. I'll show a pic next week. 

Greese fire when it was still small

Writing in the soot before cleaning up

So the pic with a bonfire in our kitchen was an interesting story. We were boiling oil to make empanadas, but we made the mistake to put the top on the pan. After a few minutes a lot of steam was coming out so E Schone called me saying my oil is burning, jokingly. When he took off the cover, spontanious combustion sparked a flame about 2 feet high. So I thought it was hilarious so i took a picture. When Schone tried to put it out, he thought it`d be a good idea to blow on it. This just sprayed oil all over the wall and fueled the flame so its about 4 feet high. At this point black smoke is filling our house and we have no idea what to do. We had to do something fast before the cabinets caught on fire so Schone told me to fill up a bowl of water. I knew water wouldn't put out an oil fire but if we just sat there our house would have burnt down. So I filled it up gave it to him, when he threw it on, the fire went so massive it touched the roof and walls. I booked so fast in our back yard I was 15 yrds before I could say anything. When I came back the flame disapeared into nothing. A miracle! I still have no idea how that flame went out. I think it was God blowing it out saying ``you stupid missionaries``. 

Anyways gotta go. Tell that story to bro Parris, he`ll get a kick out of it haha.

love ya,

Elder LaFaye

Happy New Year

Hola familia,

(most of his letter this time was responding to dad about his job and football. Leaving that out)

I make pancakes and eggs for breakfast every morning, and sometimes for lunch. It was dulce de leche in my Christmas pic (caramel). Because we shop on Mondays, by the time we get to sunday night i sometimes run low on food, hence the apple and caramel haha.

I can't believe Keaton gets home this year, that was extremely fast. Tell Mark to just have fun, its the only 2 years you get to have these amazing experiences, some bad but most are good haha. You can give my email out to close friends, some days i might not get to answer them but i love reading about them. I'm not sending out any letters, too expensive.

Dad I'm trying to make the best of my half hour work out time to be able to beat you in an arm wrestle contest when I get back haha.

Te amo,
Elder LaFaye

Strippling Warrior

Merry Christmas

We ran out of food Sunday night. Monday is shopping day.

Carts pulled by oxen, very common here

Which club do you belong to?

Hola!

We are going to Skype Saturday at 3pm our time. So I think that's 11 your time. I sent a friend request to cassilafaye, so please accept, it would make me muy feliz. 

Another baptism fell through this week :( 17yr old Caesar is soo ready to get baptized, but he had to go somewhere last minute on Sunday. When they don't come to church we push their baptism date back. Still having problems with Monce´s mom, she does not like us at all. Hmna Flecha´s family couldnt bring her to church again. so we haven't been making our baptism goal of one per week so far, but they will all get baptized before I leave Guarambare. Just takes time.

lots of soccer fields

 

If you live in paraguay, youre either a fan of Olympia or Cerro, (soccer teams). Olympia just won the league and Cerro came in second. So the whole town errupted with fireworks, music and drunk people. It was impossible to find people to teach during the games, so we literally plan around soccer games. I'm Cerro, red and blue, but my companion is Olympista so he is super feliz. Cant wait till the olympics next year, that will be interesting. yesterday we were teaching hermano Vega, 90yr old who can barely walk, see or listen. But his testimony is very strong and is always happy. While all the fireworks were going off we asked him if which club he belongs to, Olympia or Cerro. He looked at us for a moment and then pointed to my name tag and said "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, thats my club." I love that guy.

Les amo muchisimo, tengo un muy pudette familia. (pudette=cool in guarani)

Love,

Elder LaFaye

See you in a week!!!

God speaks to her in her dreams. . .

Hey Familia,

I´m doing great. But we didnt get to baptize Monce again. This time we had water, a cake, members, everything but Monce. We went to find her at her grandmas house, her grandma loves the gospel but doesnt go to church so she is less active. But she still fully supports Monce in her baptism decision and is excited for her. When we get there she was saying a bunch of stuff I didnt understand. Through translation I found out that the grandma and the mom (also a less active) had an argument 30 minutes prior about her baptism. The mom was saying Monce is too young to know if she wants to be baptized so she took off on her motorcycle and took Monce to her aunts house like 30 minutes away. Very discouraging. So we are going to work with the mom and get her another baptism date. We had 7 other baptism commitments but they fell through again because they didnt come to church. That is the hardest thing to do, get people to come to church. I love the people here in Guarambaré, but it is hard to get them to come to church. I can get over 20 commitments to attend church from non members and less actives, but when Sunday comes around they are no where to be found. Anyways, I will try to make the rest of this letter a little more uplifting, haha.
I have to tell you about some of our investigators, they are definitly people the Lord has prepared for us. We have been teaching hmna Flecha since before i got here, she has the faith of Moses I'm sure. She is very old and blind so she cant come to church very often, and she lives out in the jungle so its a good 30 minute walk to church. Every visit she will tell us of her dream she had the night before. One was about when she was washing her clothes in a bucket of dirty water, then saw a bucket of clean water and wanted to wash her clothes in the clean water. I'm almost positive God speaks to her in her dreams after the things she has told us. Oh and she has an awesome pet monkey. I was afraid to hold it because they said it might bite my ear, so here I am close enough to it.

Thomas is my newest golden investigator. he came over as we just started a lesson with a recent convert and sat down with us. We couldn't teach the restoration fast enough. He was fascinated with the Joseph Smith story so we read JS history also. Just when we thought we were done he asked about why we cant drink coffee, so we gave him a quick overview of the word of wisdom and he loved it. The only bad thing is he lives 30 minutes away so we can only teach him when he comes to David´s house.
Real quick, if you have room in that package can you put in my addidas sandals? shopping around here is interesting. Fruit is extremely cheap, but things like a box of cereal or sunscreen is rediculous. i just bought 50 eggs for the week for about 3 or 4 bucks. But a box of frosted flakes is almost 5 USD, weird. I cant find any tortillas around here so i miss my mexican food. But im a king at making empanadas.
Love you all, your awesome. Gracias por todo.

Love,

Elder LaFaye

(they have the hardest time reading my name)
ps i can only send 3 pics at a time.

Our goal is to baptize one person each week

Buenos dias familia!

It's been a pretty crazy week. I was sick the first few days from some bad chicken I had on the flight from Brazil to Paraguay. I threw up like 10 times. Bet that wasn't the first thing you wanted to hear from me, haha. Anyways, my trainer, elder Schone is awesome. I couldn't have asked for a better trainer/companion. My area is about 2 hours south of asuncion, a super small town called Guarambaré. We are the only missionaries in this area so we kinda run this place, ha. Dirt roads, all kinds of different houses, tons of chickens and dogs, ox pulling carts, everyone drives a motorcycle here, very poor people but very humble and always willing to talk. We almost never tract but we do a lot of contacting. Everyones outside so we just stop and talk to people on the street. we dont knock on people doors, mainly cuz half the people dont have one. so you walk up to their yard and clap a few times. We were going to baptize a little girl Monce on saturday, but after we started to fill up the font at 1:00, we came back at 6:00 and the plug came loose and all the water was gone. She was soo sad. So we will get her going next Saturday. Our goal is to baptize one person every week. It's do-able but we have to work hard. We don't have a big church building like in Tucson because we only have like 30 active members, so we have a meeting house. There are a ton of less active members here so half our time goes to them and the other half goes to finding new investigators. I am learning a lot of spanish and a little bit a guarani. I think Guarani was the language of the Lamanites cuz its just a bunch of one syllable noises. Just went food shopping, I miss Frys and Walmart. I hear sending a package is really expensive and takes 1 to 2 months to send, but if you were planning on doing so, can you send some of this stuff, big tub of crunchy peanut butter, trail mix, sunscreen, white baptism pants and a white tie, power bars or cliff bars, recipes for syrup, pancakes, speghetti sauce. If it costs too much to send don't worry about it. Well, got to go preach the gospel. Love you all, hope you are doing buenicimo. I´ll send some pictures later. Talk to ya next week.

Love,
Elder LaFaye