The week after Christmas

Once again, this week has absolutely flooown by too fast. I loved spending Christmas here. But the thing is, they don't really celebrate Christmas here. They celebrate the 24th more. That's when they have their big dinner and all of their fiestas, and then at midnight they launch off fireworks. We had permission from the president to be out on the street until 11 that night. I'll have to say that as 10:00 rolled around I was beat. But I only get 2 Christmases in Paraguay so naturally we stayed out til 11. We had Christmas dinner with the Bishop which was super fun. We had an Asado which is a ton of meat. But don't worry mom, I ate some veggies too :) they had this super yummy salad which is called Ensalada de Remolacha. Which Is sugar beets. I hadn't really eaten sugar beets before but I have to say that that salad was some of the best stuff I have tasted. I dont know what was in it but it was awesome!! So for Christmas Eve dinner I had meat and sugar beet (I think they made it rhyme on purpose!!)

But as for the missionary work this week, its been hard. Every one gets drunk. It makes it extremely hard to find someone that is sober enough to understand our message. So this week has been a week of on and off. With Tuesday being a regular day and then Christmas Eve and Christmas as awesome (because we just visited members and talked to our families!!!!!!) but then Friday, Saturday and Sunday were absolutely hard. It was extremely hot and everyone was still drinking. So it was a bit rough but it was expected. I also suspect this week will be similar.

We were able to have one good lesson this week with an investigator that had a lot of questions. You would be suprised how hard it is to find people that have questions about our church or anything. But he had heard that we worshiped Joseph Smith, and stuff like that, but he wanted to hear from us what we believe in so it was super cool. He also had lots of questions about the Book of Mormon, and so we explained it to him and after we asked if he had any questions and he said "So if I don't read this book, will I be condemned to hell?" We were a bit confused at how he got to that conclusion but we told him that if he read the book and prayed to know that it was true, and followed the footsteps of Christ and be baptized, it would save him from hell. It was amazingly powerful and it was awesome to see someone excited about reading this incredible book.

I would love to hear how all of your Christmases were so write me!!

Elder Jared