Hello!
This week was a lot of fun! It started off on Monday with us heading over to Ciudad del Este to stay the night before the multi-zone Christmas conference. The next morning we headed on over to the church building and were greeted by the AP’s, office Elders, and a ton of Christmas decorations. To start the conference President Faundez explained that he wanted this conference to be a bit more relaxed and informal than previous Zone Conferences. He said that serving during the holiday season away from your family is difficult, so he tried his best to bring the family to Paraguay. We had a spiritual section but quickly moved to play games like foosball, ping pong, and other stuff like that until lunch. Afterward, we had a talent show and a bunch of other little activities. Even Santa came! Eventually, it was time to take pictures and head out. Pretty interesting experience, I have never had a conference like that on my mission, but I was grateful for the opportunity to be with other missionaries and feel the Christmas spirit.
The Santa is in reality our financial coordinator Elder Westover, but we’ll pretend he’s Santa. The jackets we are wearing as a district are “PedidosYa” jackets. PedidosYa is essentially the door dash of Paraguay. You’ll see these fellows zipping past on motorcycles with big backpacks strapped to them, delivering food to different people. So these jackets for some reason are very coveted by the gringos of the mission, and nobody knows how to get them. Every time someone talks to a PedidosYa worker they avoid an answer and just leave. That changed until we talked with a member in Coronel Oviedo named Hector who works for PedidosYa. He said that he can buy us jackets and so over the past month, we have been buying these jackets so everyone in the district could have one. We acquired enough, and decide to flex on everyone at the conference with them. Thus this picture is born.
On Friday it was New Year’s Eve, and our Zone Leaders had planned to do exchanges with us in our area. While they were traveling from their area, President sent a text to the mission saying that P-Day would be changed to Saturday and we would have a half P-Day on Monday. There would be no buses to take the zone leaders back to their areas so they decided to spend the night and spend New Year’s Eve with us. I went on divisions with Elder Yañez from Chile. He is a great missionary, and I loved talking with him about my district and the challenges we face in our area. They do New Year’s Eve a bit differently here than in the states. After midday literally EVERYTHING closes, it was quite bizarre. We were still able to do lots of work and have great lessons but when dinner time came around there were no restaurants that were open. So we all scrounged up all the food in the apartment and made a smorgasbord of food for us to eat. I wouldn’t like to spend my New Years’ Eve any other way.
Finally, we had an extremely interesting experience at church. Elder Maynes and my other Zone Leader, Elder Schofield, put a friend we are teaching named Amado to be baptized. He came to church this Sunday and we were very excited, especially since it was a fast and testimony meeting. That excitement was tested however when a very inactive member started bearing his testimony about a bunch of stuff that was super weird and was drawing the spirit out of the meeting. President Bianciotto went up to tell him that it was time for someone else to bear his testimony, and the member started shouting at President, saying that he wasn’t done and had other stuff to say, and eventually stormed off out of the building. I was kind of annoyed, thinking to myself, “oh come on the day we have an investigator at church this happens?” But then President Bianciotto bore a powerful testimony which brought the spirit right back into the room. After his testimony, there was a big huge line to bear testimonies because everyone else also wanted to add to what was shared. The spirit was super strong, and even Amado went up to bear testimony and it was an awesome experience. The power of a testimony is incredible, and I hope you can all find ways to share your testimony with others this week!
That’s it from me, I’ll talk to you all next week!
Elder Watson
