January 16, 2010

January 16,2010

Dear Family and Friends,

This week we attended our own ward here in Asuncion. We got a new bishop a couple weeks ago. He is a wonderful man who used to be the ward mission leader so he’s very focused on missionary efforts. He doesn’t have any counselors yet so hopefully he will find the right men soon. There really is a shortage of men in the church here. Most wards and branches have many more women than men. Our ward has grown though since we have been here. A couple nice families have joined the church and it’s nice to see their excitement as they spread their feelings about the church with others.

Monday was preparation day for the week of zone conferences. We always love the times when we can see all the missionaries. The missionaries love to come together and be taught and see each other. I always love to hear the talks they give at zone conferences. The missionaries give their talks in Spanish if they’re north American and English if they are latin. It’s really a good time for everyone to have a little empathy for each other as we improve our language skills. We really are encouraging all the missionaries to continue to work on their language. I keep remembering before the mission I was talking to Robert one day and he said that many missionaries get to a comfortable level with their language and then stop progressing. I’m glad he said that to me because it has helped me to keep working and encouraging others to always be improving. What a chance we all have to be really fluent in another language while we are here.

As I was talking with a missionary the other day he was telling me about his family. He joined the church by himself a bit ago. No one in his family is a member and they really didn’t want him to come on the mission. Right before he came his grandpa had some pretty major health problems but he didn’t let anything stop him and he came. He’s a good young man and is doing well already in these first few weeks since he’s been here. I’m very impressed with the dedication level of many of these missionaries who are here with little or no support but have testimonies and know they want and need to serve. When they go home they will be such a strength to their wards and branches.

We had a great three days of zone conferences. We focused on working with members to increase our missionary efforts. Mark has had training meetings the last few weeks with the district leaders so he has been working on helping everyone see the importance of working together to be more effective as missionaries. Hopefully by teaching everyone at the same time we will all be working better together. In the afternoon the assistants and zone leaders had practices with the missionaries while Mark finished the missionary interviews. We received a shipment of water filter bottles this week also. Each missionary received one at zone conference with enough replacement filters for the two years they are here. We are so excited because clean water is a problem here and this will make it so much better. When the missionaries are offered water at a member or investigator’s home now they can accept it and put it in their bottle and be good to go. The missionaries in Brazil received bottles a while ago and their cases of diarrhea went down by 75-80%. I am really excited about that because most of my medical phone calls are about diarrhea . It will really improve the health of the missionaries. When it is so hot the missionaries really need to be drinking 3-4 liters of water a day so now they won’t have to try and carry so much water around with them.

We gave all the missionaries a mission calendar at zone conference also. It has a photo of each missionary and highlights some important dates for the mission. They can roll it up and take it home at the end of their mission also because with all the photos and names it will be a good reminder of the other missionaries they served with. They all loved it. I’m sure we’ll give them another one next January since they seemed to like it so much.

We are packing up and heading off today to Encarnacion . We will attend church there and then Mark has district training tomorrow afternoon. Monday we begin interviews there in Encarnacion and zone conferences on Tuesday. Then on to Ciudad del Este for interviews and zone conference. We won’t return until Friday. Time is weird here. It seems like forever ago that we were out there but it has only been 5 weeks. We got our information on the new missionaries so we are already getting excited about receiving the next group of 15 on January 26^th. They look like another wonderful group of young men. We hope you all have a great week. We love what we are doing here and we love and miss you all.

Love, Mark and Sandy