Carson's Missionary Blog

Well I hope everyone is doing well back home. Things in Paraguay are going well. we have been doing a ton of contacting this week and talking to a lot of new people to try and rebuild our pool of investigators. Not too much exciting happened this week but it was good as always. The good news is that I am still doing super well and love it here in Santa Rosa. thanks for allthe support from back home. Well the pictures are of this dead rat I found with Elder Moser while we were doing exchanges and then the beuatiful Paraguayan scenery that I get to see while I am travelling Love, Elder Seibert

Well almsot 6 months of being in the interior of Paraguay and I still am not positive if that subject line is right. But its defintieyl close. I hope everyone had a good week this week. Here in Paraguay we had another pretty good week. Lots of visits and lots of work for us to do. We have 2 couples that we are teaching that want to get baptized but need to get married first. Also one of the couples smokes so we have that to work with as well. They have good desires though so we really dont want to lose them. Apart from them we have some other really good investigators, some part member families that we should be seeing some baptisms from as well. Lots of good things waiting for Santa Rosa, the problem is that things are slow in Paraguay. No one is ever in a rush here so it takes a lot of pushing from the missionaries to get anything done, ehether it is on the inside of the church or trying to bring people into the church. Not a big deal just part of my reality. The big news...

Hey All,  I hope everyone is doing well. I am still enjoying my time here in Santa Rosa del Aguaray. This area is super great and I really love the people here. The only problem is that sometimes I dont get to spend very much time here it seems. This last week on Monday I had to be in asuncion with another elder from Concepcion for a meeting. That meant leaving Santa Rosa on Sunday evening about 3 and getting to Concepcion around 7 that night. Then at 11 that same night Elder Porter and I headed off to Asuncion. We got to Asuncion at 6 am the next morning and a night on the bus did not leave time for a lot of sleep. Anyway at 9 we had our meeting for about 2 hours and then we spent the rest of the day wandering around Asuncion, We had to head back to Concepcion at 6 that night and got there around 1 in the morning. After Getting a little bit of sleep we started the day kind of normal before having to head back to Santa Rosa at 9 with my own companion. We got back to ou...

Hey Everyone, I actually have no time to write today, I have to get on a bus back to my area in just a couple minutes. I am in Asuncion for a meeting I had this morning so I got my PDay kind of chipped away. I have about 8 hours on the bus ahead o me, but its alright. Things are going well in my area. I am safe and still alive down here in Paraguay. The church is true, tell your friends! Love, Elder Seibert

Hey Everyone, I hope you all had a good week. This past week I got a new companion. His name is Elder Garcia, he is from Iquitos, Peru. He says its on the Amazon almost in Brazil. I havent looked at it on a map yet. It sounds like a cool place though. He says you cant get out of his city unless you get on an airplane or boat becasue it is surrounded by river. Things are going well here in Santa Rosa as always. It is a fairly new area I am not sure if I have written much about it. Only at the beginning of this year did it become an independent branch. Before that for about 5 years it was a group off of the Santanì branch about 2 hours away in bus. There are a lot of people that have never talked to missionaries before and many people who really dont know anything about the Mormons, a bit different than areas in Asuncion where almost everyone has taked to the missionaries at some point. The city of Santa Rosa is growing really fast right now too, it is fun to watch the town g...

Hey Everyone, It really is hard for me to remember what happened during each week but I will do my best to remeber. This week was a little strange becasue we were supossed to have a baptism but it fell through last minute. Hopefully we can get it done though in the next couple of weeks. Aside from that we have many investigators that have started to progress really well. I am excited to see what is coming up in Santa Rosa. We also got transfer news this week and I will be staying for 6 more weeks and my companion Elder Whipple will be leaving. The bus leaves tonight at about 1:30am so that should be fun. I will be waiting with some missionaries cmoing in from another area until my new comapanion arrives. Should be a good change coming up.  Love, Elder Seibert Old pics but its all I have

Hey Everyone, Well I guess this last week I officially completed one year as a missionary. To be honest it kind of snuck up on me. I knew it was coming up but the day it came I didnt realize until the day was almost over. Time is a strange thing as a missionary. It seems like we are constantly up against the clock to get visits in each day, to get people baptized as soon as possible, and to get as much done as possible in 2 years before the time to be a full time missionary is up. A year seems like a long time to be in a foreign country but I really still do I feel like I am just starting. I have a lot to learn still. That being said. We had a good week this week. Despite eating something and getting sicker than I have ever been before in my life (at least to my memory), we got some good work done. Unfortunately, for fault of my stomach, we missed the whole work day Satuday, which as missionaries know is the most important day of the week. But our buddy Andres is getting ready ...

Hey Everyone, Well it has been a other good week in Paraguay. A couple cool days this week which is always a blessing. We had Zone Conference this week and we got a homework assignment from President Evans. He said that he wants us to wite papers of everything we know about the Plan of Salvation and and gave us some questions to think about while we do it. Things like, "What makes Law, law?" and "Why is Agency a necesary part of the plan?" he said he does not want anything like "My seminary teacher oncce said..." either. It all has to be backed up with either scripture or anything from the misionary library or General Conference talks as well. Going to be a pretty intense assignment and he said he is going to read them all. Other than that, we had a pretty normal missinary week. Lots of lessons and some great experiences. Our friends Jorge and Teresa continue to want to listen to our message and they are very excited to continue on learning. They l...

Hey everyone, Well this week was super good. I mean most weeks are pretty good as a missionary but this week was a little better. We met some new investigators that are definitely going to progress and already have pieces of a testimony. Also, Jorge and Teresa, the Brazilian woman I talked about last week, said they want to keep following what we are teaching. It is going to be a process though because we have to get them married (basically no one in Paraguay is married), and they both smoke a lot and drink as well. But I have faith and I know they do too. Keep them in your prayers. Also on Sunday I had a busy Sunday. At church I play the keyboard every week for sacrament meeting, I also had to give a talk and teach the youth during second hour. Then after church we had a baptism for Carolina! It was a super cool experience despite it kind of being a super busy and stressful day. She asked me to do the baptism which was probably the coolest think I could have asked for for my b...

Hey Everyone, Well this week was super cool. we had a ton of success and found some really awesome new investigators. One of the families that we found is an older couple Jorge and Teresa. They live with there young married daughter and her family. The interesting thing about them is that Jorge is Paraguayan but his wife is Brazilian and really only speaks Portuguese, but she does understand Spanish almost perfectly. Jorge speaks spanish Guarani and Portuguese and as a family is seems that they all just speak Portuguese in the house. The daughter who has lived in Paraguay her whole life doesnt really even speak guarani which is really unusual.  Anyway, during our lessons with them, we talk all in Spanish and jorge talks with us, but his wife just speaks Portuguese at us and I can pretty much understand 80 percent of what she says, only occassionally do we have to ask for clarification. Anyway, she seems super interested and told us she beleived that what happened to Joseph ...

Hey everyone, Well, things continue to go well here in Santa Rosa, we continue to find great investigators and have people to teach. It seems that this week we walked a bit more than usual. I didnt really notice it other than being alittle more tired than usual when we get home at night. But my new companion Elder Whipple was talking on the phone with our Zone Leaders and he was saying how he couldnt believe how spread out our area was and how much we were having to walk. He is almost done with his mission but weirdly enough he has alwasy had a bike in his areas. There is only one companionship or area with bikes in the mission, he started there in Yby Yau (yall can guess how to pronounce that) then he went out to the chaco, but when he got changed out there they also changed the bike out there. he had a couple different areas out there and sent over a year there and just now has left and this is really his first big area that he has to walk in. But hes a great guy, has never compl...

Hey Everyone, I hope everyone is doing well! Changes are this week and I am staying in Santa Rosa. Becasue my companion Elder Taylor is finishing his mission we actually already had our changes. I will be with Elder Whipple now. He is from Arizona and is a great guy. I know him pretty well already and I think we are going to get along really well. The thing that was weird is that becasue we are so far away from Asuncion we had changes last night and Elder whipple got off the bus and Elder Taylor got on at 2 am. It was kind of a strange experience just sitting on the side of the road at 2 in the morning waiting to change my companion. I went to bed at the normal time and had an alarm set to get up at 1 and then Elder Taylor and I waited for a few minutes, he got on, and then I went back inside with my new companion and just went to bed like normal. The rest of the mission has their changes tomorrow so we are just a little ahead of schedule. Other than that it is work here as...

Hey everyone, I hope everyone has had a good week. Here in Paraguay I have been having a ton of fun. We had a baptism this week.  We baptized this great woman named Blasida. She was a huge miracle for us and we had a ton of fun teaching her. Other than that this week wasnt too exciting. We are just continuing on in the work. This week I actually pictures! Love, Elder Seibert​

Hey Everyone, I hope everyone had a good week. I guess the big news is that my big brother Josh got back from his mission on Friday. Super proud of him! Here in Paraguay, despite the normal bumps of misionary work, we have been having a blast. This weekend we should be having a baptism. Her name is Blasida and told us she wanted to get baptized in our church before she had even come. He had given her a few lessons and we were a little worried that she wasnt as interested as we had hoped and right when we were thinking about slowing down the visits she told us she knew she needed to get baptized. So we explained that all she really needed then was to astart coming to church (just a small detail really). But after we expalineda little more detail she began attending and now has a crazy strong testimony and has started bringing her whole family. We are super excited and loved watching her progress. The other big news of the week is that although our area is about 4 and a half ...

Hey Everyone, Well to start out I should let you know you will not be seing pictures this week. I dont have my camera with me. But this week was fun and very uplifting although we did not get to spend as much time in our area as we would have liked. We got to go up to Concepcion on Friday mroning for our zone conference the next day (It is a 4 hour bus ride to get up there). The Elders in Concepcion are super fun though and it is always fun to get together in a group and have a mission sleep over. In the conference we talked  lot about how references are basically anyone gets baptisms. We need to talk to peoples friends if we want to have any success in Paraguay. I have definitely seen those trends here and we have always made a continual effort to ask people for friends that would be interested. In other news I am now in Santani, and area about 2 hours bus drive away, we are spending pday here and then will be doing splits tomorrow. I really love my area of Santa Rosa. We ...

Hey Everyone, Well this week was fun. We had spplits with our Zone leaders and with the Elders from San Pedro. It was tons of fun. Having splits out here is cool becasue it means sleepovers and weird hours. WE also got to go to Concepcion yesterday for a few hours after church for a priesthood training meeting. On the way back I was in this bus that we rented and met this guy from another branch who actually spoke English. He learned on hs mission becasue he worked in the mission office in Argentina with 5 white guys. He was a pretty cool guy. We have a super good teaching pool and a TON of investigators who come to church with some regularity. The problem lately has been getting them to commit to baptism. We are doing eveything we can, and I think we will see the fruuits of all of our work soon, but maybe not as soon as we would lke. Everyone has their own time. Something funny that happend this week was that we were eating some hamburgers with some members and my comp fou...

Hey Everyone, I hope everyone had a good week. This week I felt some thing for the first time since I have been here. I actually wanted to put on a sweater last night. Granted I was still in a short sleeve shirt and doing alright it would have been nice to have an extra layer. This week we continued in our never ending endevour to teach our increasing number of indegenous investigators. They are coming to church and progressing. It is just difficult to get memebers with us all the time and teaching through a translator to relatively uneducated people is a little more time consuming. In other newss we watched a family of three on a motorcycle get hit by a car on our way to our Branch Presidents house. Fortunately it was a pretyty low speed crash and no one seemed really hurt but the kid didnt look older then 2 years old so it was pretty sad and they all got taken to the hospital. I cant recommend driving a motorcycle in Paraguay. Evferyone on the road doesnt think the rules ...

Hey Everyone, I hope everyone had a good week this week and a Happy Mothers day to all the moms. Here in Santa Rosa we had plenty of work to do. Missionary work is a little different out here. We live in a little city that is about 8 blocks big and to get to any houses where we will have success we have to either walk out about 2 hours in either direction, or we have to get a ride with one of the couple members that have cars. But the other thing is that most of the people that are actually interested in the church only speak Guarani. While I have made it a goal to learn the language, it is rather diffcult becasue it was never actually a written language until Europeans came in a tried to record it. Well as a result there are not really a ton of books to even learn it and no one really reads Guarani. So it makes it a little difficult to figure it out. But we keep on doing our best. I just feel bad trying to communicate with some of the truly indigenous people here. This week we...

Hey everyone, I hope everyone had a good week. A little disappointing for us this week. Our one super good investigator that was going to get baptized in a couple weeks moved way far away, and although we gave his reference to the other missionaries things are definitely more complicated for him now. He is going to live pretty far away from any chapel so he may not go to church again for a very long time. Definitely something that we deal with more than you would think here. Other than that though we did have some sucess and somew really good visits. Not much really news worthy though. Love, Elder Seibert​

Hey Everyone, Well this week was a little out of the norm. Beacuse we are out in the middle of nowhere, whenever we have a meeting with other missionaries we lose a lot of time travelling. So on Wednesday about midday we had to go to San Pedro for a baptismal interview. Well it can be up to a 3 hour trip so when we go we have to spend the night with them. Then on Thursday we had to go from San Pedro to Concepcion which means 2 busses and about 7 hours of travel time. So we got up and got on the bus around 9 in the morning and got to Santa Rosa (my area) around lunch time with the San Pedro Elders. We got lunch and then went to the bus station to try to get our bus for the 4 hour trip to Concepcion. We found out the bus wasnt for a couple hours so we went back to the house and got some more stuff ready becasue we would be staying in Concepcion over nigfht to get to Zone conference the next day. Well, after those couple houtrs passed and we got some things taken care of we went back ...

Hey Everyone, This week was really good. We had a baptism for our miracle investigator, Griselda. She just showed up to church 3 weeks ago and got baptized yesterday. She had a dream about the Book of Mormon being true and said she knew she needed to get baptized. So Elder Taylor and I were very excited that everything worked out and came together quickly. Other than that, a pretty normal week here. the sun keeps on shining bien fuerte and we are trying to walk as much as we can in our area. Somedays we set aside 2 hours to just walk to some of the neighborhoods that are a liitle far away. Usually they are productive visits though. We try not to do it unless we know we will have some success Love, Elder Seibert​

Hey everyone, I hope everyone has had a good week. This week I had changes and I am now in Santa Rosa. I am about 4 and a half hours from Asuncion and in the middle of nowhere. I am in a branch of about 50 people and it is super cool here. My area is huge and I can drive for about 2 hours in any direction and still be in my area. But we definitely dont have a car so it means lots of walking or getting rides from the few members that have cars and are willing or have time to take us out. But we can usually get help when we neede it. Our branch president is actually kind of rich and always comes with us to do visits so that is nice. Anyway, the area is strange and people speak a lot more Guarani, but almost everyone speaks or at least understands spanish so that is good. I am starting to understand some Guarani as well and my companion too so we can get by at least. The weirdest thing though is that I am actually close to some German Mennonte colonies. Now I dont know that very m...