Pizza Hut - Pizza Buffet

Hey everyone,

So this week there is just one announcement really.  We´re having 2 baptisms on Saturday!!  They are 2 guys named Coco Insfrán and Osvaldo Gonzales.  Coco has been an investigator here for like 4 months, and finally he´s ready to get baptized.  Osvaldo is the brother of the first councelor in the bishopric.  It feels good to have another baptism.  Good way to start December, I´d say.  Pray that everything goes well.

Today was kind of a crazy day, and we have a lot of stuff to do, so I don´t have the full hour on here like usual.  Sorry :(.  But we just got out of Pizza Hut here.  Oh, so good.  They have pizza buffet where you pay 20,000Gs (like $4) and it´s all the pizza you want.  Let´s just say I ate a lot haha.

I have some cool stories for next week as well to tell you all.  I´ll also update you on the baptism how it went and everything.  Love and miss you all!

-Elder Moore

The Lord is Taking Good Care of Me

Short on time this week.  Obrero is still good.  I´m slowly but surely getting used to it.  There are some excellent members here, so that really helps me make the transition.  Even better, we have 3 EXCELLENT families that we are teaching, one of the which we put a baptism date with yesterday for the 10th of December.  I´ll focus my next email on the investigators and stuff that I have here.  The Lord is taking good care of me.

I just want to tell a story that happened to us on Sunday.  It was the afternoon, and we were walking to a teaching appointment.  We were just half a block away from the house, and it was raining like crazy (which is really odd for this time of year).  A taxi pulls up beside us really slowly and rolls down his window.  There´s 2 guys inside, and the taxi driver was like "Elders!  Get in, I´ll take you where you´re going.  You´re going just right here to the church right?  I´ll take you there, just get in" and he reached and opened up the back door.  I felt one of the strongest urges I´ve ever felt that told me that under no circumstances should we get in that car.  It was weird that he offered to take us to the church that was just 2 blocks away, and we were just half a block

Obedient to His Commandments

Hey everyone.  I apologize if I gave you a bit of a scare last week.  I was just kind of in a melt-down mode for not being able to say goodbye to any of those people, and it had just happened a few hours earlier, and I was just still coping with everything.  I´m doing better.  Still kinda sad that I had to leave especially without goodbyes, but I figure that I would have had to leave at some point anyway which I knew was going to be hard.  I´ll get to see them when Dad comes to pick me up anyways, so that will be a big blessing for me.  I wrote a letter to the ward today to explain what happened and apologize for not saying goodbye and to tell them all how much I love and appreciated them, so that kinda bummed me out again and made me think about it, but I´ll be just fine.  I always am.

Here in Barrio Obrero is very different.  It´s completely city, there´s not any open fields or hardly any trees or anything.  Kind of reminds me of downtown Reno with rock-paved streets lol (side note fun fact: "Reno" is actually the spanish word for "reindeer".  Who woulda thought?).  The people here are much more closed off and indifferent.  They are not nearly as kind as the people from the campo.  Everybody had always told me that people are much nicer in the campo - it´s true.  Obviously there´s a lot of good people here as well, we have some good investigators and a few people with baptism dates, but in terms of talking to people on the street and finding new people it´s definitely a lot harder.  The good thing is that we have some excellent members here too.  They´re exceptional.  I gave a talk on Sunday about missionary work to kind of see how they responded and everything, and it went well.  We had branch council meeting Sunday night and it was great.  We should have some great success here.

Just Part of the Ride

Well, today is a horribly sad day for me.  I got special changed out of Guarambaré.

There was a companionship in another area that had some kind of problem and they chose me to replace one of them.  They just called me today, I didn´t have time to say goodbye to anybody at all.  I had just left a leadership meeting with the zone leaders and another district leader in a different area and they called me and said come to the office as soon as possible.  So I went home, packed, got a taxi, and left.  I cried the whole morning.  I don´t think I´ve been so sad in my whole mission.  I had plans to say goodbye to everybody and leave them letters and everything, and I couldn´t visit even one of them.  It´s no coincidence that I felt the need to bear my testimony yesterday for the last time in Guarambaré.  I knew I was going to be leaving, but during regular changes next week, so it would be the last time to talk to everybody as a group and bear my testimony.  I think I bore my most heartfelt testimony I ever have, and I felt especially inspired to thank them for all they´ve done for me here and that I love them all.  And today I´m gone.  The Lord really blessed me though, He knew how I feel, because while we were sitting at the taxi stop waiting for it to arrive, 3 members passed by and saw me crying, so I at least got to talk to 3 and say goodbye to them.  You really get so accustomed to these people that it´s so hard to leave - especially without saying goodbye.  It´s been a really rough day for me.

Mansions of our Father

As of tomorrow, I´ll have only 10 months to go until I´m home from one of the greatest places I´ve ever been, doing one of the greatest things I´ve ever done.  I cannot believe how fast time is going now (as if I thought it was going fast before, hah...WRONG).  A year ago today, I was in my last day at the MTC anxiously anticipating travelling to Paraguay the next day.  It´s really strange how fast this is going to end.  Even more sad is that if I get changed these transfers, I only have 2 more Sundays in Guarambaré.  It makes me want to cry.  I have grown SO much here, by far more here than in any of my other areas.  And the people...oh, I am going to miss the heck out of these people.  I don´t know what I´m going to do.  But that´s the mission I guess, it has to come sooner or later.  We just keep on keeping on I guess, and keep doing the Lord´s work wherever He needs us.

The family of Juani who passed away recently is doing well.  The 4 boys are adjusting, and their sister is goin back to Spain at the end of the month.  They will be staying in the house they live in right now, and every day one of the many family members they have living on the block will be coming over to wash clothes, cook, clean, and do all that kind of stuff.  Kind of an interesting situation considering that the oldest is only 15 or 16, but that´s what they´ve decided.  They´re adjusting well and we´re still visiting them.  Hoping to baptize the 9 year old this month.  I´ll keep everyone updated.

Another Rat in My Room!!

Hello everyone!  Good week this week, the work is progressing along.  We´re actually finding new investigators every day and some of them have good hopes of progressing, so we´re excited for that.  We´ve been working our missionary tails off this week, so we are definitely grateful for P-day today hah.  We´ve found a new place for the church building, so we should be moving there in 2 or 3 weeks.  Kinda nervous for that and how the transition will go - we´ll try to make it as smooth as possible.  I want to turn it into a big public event with announcements and everything, make it an open-house sort of deal.  "Come see the new site of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" kind of thing with pamphlets and information and stuff like that.  Maybe have every quorum and organization give a brief presentation about what they do and then Elder Faas and I can handle the rest.  We´ll run it by the branch president tomorrow in branch council.  He isn´t one for executing plans, so we´ll have to push it pretty strong and do a lot of following up, but if we plan it well and execute, it will turn out as a great event for the branch here in Guarambaré.  I´ll keep you posted.

Passing of Juani - I Dedicated the Gravesite

Well, it was an interesting week last week.  There is this less active lady in our branch named Juani.  She 3 of her kids are members too, but they´re all inactive.  She had lung cancer and was battling it for 2 months.  We had started teaching her daughter Leti who came from Spain to take care of her, and also her sister Mirta who lives close and was taking care of her as well.  She had been taking chimotherapy every 2 weeks, and it wasn´t a strong treatment and she wasn´t losing her hair, but it was strong enough to affect her mobility and keep her in her bed most days.  We started visiting them about a month ago, maybe less.  Last Sunday, we visited them all like normal and shared something and Juani was still tired but was sitting up and talking and eating normally.  Tuesday we didn´t visit her, but the family said she stayed in bed all day, though able to eat and function somewhat normally.  Wednesday we went over there, and she just looked awful.  One side of her face couldn´t move, she was bed-ridden, and when she spoke it was all mumbled and we couldn´t understand her.  We taught her kids and family, and at the end we gave her a blessing.  A strange thing happened in that blessing.  Usually in blessing the sick I tell them that they will be healed according to the faith because that´s what I feel.  That blessing, I felt specifically not to bless her to be healed, but instead to bless her with spiritual strength and comfort to get through her trials and to know that Heavenly Father is very aware of her and has