Hello from Paraguay!!!

Haupei todos!!

(Sorry this is on a Tuesday, yesterday was pretty hectic and we ran out of data while I was typing this email haha)

wow what a week. The rumors are true, I'm finally in Paraguay and it is a beautiful bean of a country. I already love it with all my heart. I'm sorry if this email gets pretty hefty, there is just a lot that happened. 

So the 31st of January I woke up at 3:30 am and said goodbye to my dear friends in Dallas and hopped on a plane at 8 am alone to Atlanta Georgia. I then had a pretty hefty layover where I met all the other missionaries in my group heading to Paraguay. After this layover, we had a 6 hour flight to Bogota Colombia and had another little layover until about 10 o'clock that night where we boarded 25 missionaries on a dinky little plane to Asuncion, Paraguay for 8 hours. The flight was pretty cramped and the flight attendants kept bumping into me which was pretty annoying. I didn't sleep at all. We finally arrived at 6 am the next morning and it was super great finally getting to paraguay. 

My first few days here were spent in the temple hostel where we had a lot of training and caught up on some sleep that was lacking. Around Tuesday night we were having another training when President Millett told us that we were getting our areas, I got the Pedro Juan Caballero area!! The only downside about hearing this was that I had to get on an 8 hour bus ride that night to my area. It was a long night. 

After a few hours of catching up on some sleep, I got to work here in good ole PJC. It's a funny area. I'm on the border of Brazil up on the northeastern little tip of paraguay, So as you can imagine, lots of drug trafficking haha, it's epic. 

With being up near the border of brazil and paraguay, I have to learn 3 different languages! Portugeuse, Castellanos (spanish), and also Guarani (which is the dialect they speak here in paraguay, it doesn't sound anything like spanish, or look like it for that matter. If you have time, you should go look up what it sounds like, it's nuts). 

It's been a real adventure down here though, Paraguayos are super friendly, tranquilo pa (chill) and sit on their porches all day drinking maté so it's super easy to snag them for a lesson or two. They're also super welcoming to the gospel which is great. The spanish is a little crazy but I've been able to take pretty big strides this week so I'm happy with myself in that regard. We also walk around 10 miles a day which can be really tiring but it's all worth it.

I'm not gonna lie though, it's been a little bit of a hard adjustment. It's real hard work down here in sudamerica, time to time I wonder how I even got myself down here in the middle of nowhere. One quote that's been getting me through the week is by Neal A Maxwell, which simply says, "it takes meekness to learn from suffering". There's always a lesson to be learned from each trial, we just gotta be meek and find out what that is god is trying to tell us.

Love you all, I'd love to hear from you and sorry if I wasn't able to respond to your email yesterday, like I said, muito louco.

con muchísimo amor,

 y Jajotopa

 

Elder Fuell (or Fwell because nobody can pronounce it right here but I love them anyways)