wow!! thank you all for writing me! we have had a really great week...i can hardly believe i have been here for 4 months now...yesterday we had stake conference in las piedras, and m russel ballard and boyd k packer spoke to our area thru a special broadcast...it was way good! the church here really is still in its young stage, not a lot of stong wards have been formed yet, but i know that it is only going to continue to progress! haha before i forget, yesterday the funniest thing happened..i dont know if i have mentioned in other emails, but the dogs here are insane, there are like 50 dogs in the street for every person here...and they are everywhere...i have kinda gotten used to them, haha but i still hate them..so the other day we were contacting at this one house and this dog was in front of the door and i rubbed its belly with my shoe for like 1 second, and when we left the house it followed us like all day! it was ridiculous, and it was attracting tons of other dogs, it was horrible, everytime we passed by a pack of dogs they ran after the little dog that was following us and tried to attack it, so it ran towards us for protection and we were in the middle of a dog fight, it was horrible so we spent all afternoon trying to ditch the stupid thing....it followed us everywhere, we finally waited until it wasnt looking and we sprinted like 3 blocks to get away from it...ah...there are so many strange things that happen to us, haha we were laughing so hard after we had finally ditched it, and we were out of breath...gosh, what experiences we have had....
i got to do my first interchange with an american hermana...hermana kleinman...it was way fun! the first companion that i could speak english to, it was like we had been sisters all our lives and we only changed companions for one day!! i had forgotten how great it was to speak english and talk to someone who understands life back at home!! shes from orem....but yeah, i love my paraguayan companion!! she is teaching me soo much! when her family joined the church, all of the people in her neighborhood that had been close friends all her life stopped talkind to her family and now they dont associate with them because they are mormon....but she has the greatest testimony of the church! i have sent some pics...one with my comp and the other elders that are serving in our ward.....i cant wait for savannahs package, tell her that she can send videos if she wants i can find accesss to a dvd player..
love, gioia
