It's Christmas Time!

Christmas is this week, holy cow.  Thanksgiving was like...yesterday.  Even though I forgot all about it and we didn't do a dang thing haha.  Heck, I just got here like...yesterday.

Ok so, first thing's first.  I figured out how to call you/you to call me, I just don't know when haha.  Remember the familia Insaurralde, the story with the lunch and not feeling well and everything?  The rich family and the dad is the second counselor in the steak presidency?  We will be using their phone.  You have to call this number, exactly as it is written  (Just like in America, the "-" are unimportant)

001-595-21-580-027

if that doesn't work

001-595-061-580-027

Just dial it like that, and it should work fine.  We don't know if we're going to call on the 24th or 25th, so what's gonna happen is I'll call you when we find out and let you know at what time to call that number.  All else fails, I know how to call you so I'll just call you and it will be super expensive for both of us haha.  If I were you, I'd buy a long-distance card so its cheap for you.

Ok, the story that I didn't have time to tell last week.  We contacted this lady Ramona Lopez on the 27th of November.  Last week, we went to look for her house.  These are the directions she told us "Enter by the Church of Cristo Rey, there are 2 houses made of wood next to each other.  Mine is the one with the 3 nisperos (a nispero is a type of tree)".  So we went looking, and we found the church, but not her house.  We stopped to ask a family who was sitting outside if they knew Ramona and could direct us to her house (which is usual, we always do that, people are friendly and help us out).  They started laughing, and we were like uhh...what's so funny?  One of the ladies was Ramona's daughter, and her house was right on the street we were on.  Coincidence, huh?  Oh it gets better lol.  They started asking all these questions like when did you talk to here, where did you find her, what did she tell you, all this stuff.  And we were really confused, because we were just trying to find her house and didn't understand why they were so weird about it.  We told her we were missionaries and had contacted her in the street not too far from this house, and she gave us these directions after we shared a message about the family.  They told us that Ramona was a member of our church.  Then they told us that Ramona was dead.  Ummm...come again please?  No way did we talk to a dead lady, but the house matched the description perfectly.  It was the house made of wood by the Church of Cristo Rey with the 3 nisperos, and these people were her family.  What are the chances of there being another Ramona Lopez in that same area with that same house description?  We couldn't find another house like it.  They showed us a picture of Ramona, but it had been 3 weeks, and we visit so many people and only contacted her for a minute we couldn't remember.  I still don't know what to make of it.  Maybe it was somebody else giving us this family's address and just using Ramona's name?  Maybe there really is by some chance another Ramona Lopez in the area?  Maybe we talked to a dead lady, I dunno.  Really weird though.  And really cool.

Anyway, no time this week for pictures, I'm already late.  Blah.  Sorry, next week for sure!  Even if I don't have time for a letter to go with it, I'll send pictures.  Love and miss you all!  Can't wait to talk to you!  Merry Christmas!

-Elder Moore

Miracles of My Mission

Ok so, you might not have noticed, but you didnt get an email on Monday lol.  Nothing happened, Im totally fine, they just changed our Pday for this week.  We had changes on Wednesday, so if you got transferred to a different area, they moved our Pdays to today so we could buy food in the new area and stuff.  Sorry mom, I know you were worried all week haha.  All is well :).  With changes, nothing happened with Elder Ganga and I.  We`re both still here, neither of us got transferred.  The way transfers work is that you find out that morning whether or not you`ll be leaving.  If you are, you take a bus to Asunción and then find out where you`ll be going, and then you go haha.  One elder in our district finished his mission so he went home yesterday and one other got transferred to a new area.

We`ll have our next Pday on Monday as usual, so don`t fret haha.  On Monday, I`ll tell you whats going on with being able to call home and how we`re going to do it.  I`m way excited for that!

Ok, so I call this edition of my weekly newsletter "Miracles of My Mission" because theres some pretty cool stuff that has happened.

I Touched a Monkey yesterday!

Hey everybody!

How is everyone doing?  Ugh, we are at a different internet place than we usually go to, and on this one you cant change the keyboard to English.  Drats.

Its December already, holy smokes.  Time goes crazy fast, Ive been here for over a month already.  Sheesh!  And what else is cool that I figured out is that by the time my birthday comes around, Ill have 6 months of my mission under my belt!  How cool is that?

So I got 2 sets of Dear Elders since the last email.  How it works is that we get our mail once a week through a service called the encomienda - basically mail goes to the mission office, and they get it to us every week.  Usually we get our mail during district meeting on Tuesdays.  Thats what happened last week.  But this week, because Elder Ganga is the district leader, sometimes he gets to pick it up a day or 2 earlier, so we got the mail yesterday.  I have Dear Elders from about November 17/18th - 20th and About the 24th or so - 29th.  The first ones dont have the date, so I cant be sure how early it was written.  But thank you all sooo much for keeping them coming.  I really love getting them, thank you thank you thank you!  Ill do my best to answer as much of them as I can here, but theres like 7 pages so...hah.