A few more adventures

Hola!

Well we've been having a few more adventures and we want to share some things real quick. And due to numero uno here, I don't have pictures right now...

1) Compy number two took a turn for the worse. And by worse I mean death. Well, near death. It appears to my untrained eye to be the same problem as lappy number one... some sort of serious hard drive error. I reinstalled Ubuntu, thus reformatting the HD and the problem seems to be temprarily fixed, although at least one diagnostic application tells me that I quote "have no hard drive" so... we'll see. NOTE: I am currently using said reformatted lappy number two in the cabana with no problems... yet...

2) Funds. I'll make this one quick- we needed 9 thousand, we have so far recieved over 11 thousand. We now have the emense task of decided how your money is best spend here in Paraguay, since we will be unable to spend it all while we're here. We're thinking about a few different projects, but we haven't talked to Christian about it much. Any ideas are welcome!

3) We had a trip planned to Bolivia next week, and spent three quarters of a day trying to jump through all 9 fairly small hoops they gave us at the bolivian embassy. I felt like I was on road rules or the amazing race or something. Anyway, after having accomplished tasks one through six (or thereabouts) we learned that Bolivia is currently experiancing some "civil unrest" and has closed it's boarders with Paraguay, thus canceling our trip. And our need of a visa. Oh well.

4) We went to Brazil. Illegally. It was a lot of fun. So much in fact that it warents it's own post, which I will not be doing tonight because of a combination of numbers 1 and 5. I will say this: we ate at a brazilian grill type restaurant IN BRAZIL and I had 7 different animals in one meal. more later.

5)We currently have a group of "Mavericks," which is like a work and witness team for people who's churches don't have a work and witness team. They're from several different churches in the US and they're quite an interesting group. More on that later too, I'm sure.

6) Bugs. We got 'em. And I understand that as it gets warmer we'll get more of them. Most of my bites are gone, but we still find them everywhere. Infact I am somewhat suspicious that ants caused at least one of my computer problems, since the day it crashed was also the day I found TWELVE ants crawling out of it!!

7) As I mentioned, it's getting warmer. However, when it rains the temperature comes crashing back down. Today it got up to 35, but after it rains tomorrow it will probably be around 15. I don't know what that is in Farenheight excatly, I've found it's much easier just to learn what the celcius temperatures feel like than to try to convert the numbers to F and then think of what THAT feels like.

8) Sarah's birthday was monday. Operation give-her-something-she-really-wants was a huge success, and I think the final tally was 49 PEOPLE who emailed her for her birthday! She has had a blast looking at pictures, watching videos, reading stories from all kinds of people who we love and miss. So to everyone who participated, thank you! We also had a dulce de leche chocolate cake, which was pretty fabulous.

9) We're still a little unsure about the rest of our plans here, but as we learn more we'll keep you posted. We do know that we're supposed to be spending some time working with each church in the district, which we're really looking forward to getting started. We also know that for thankgiving we're going to have a big American get-together, my brother Kris is flying down, and at least some of us are going to try to spend a day in Argentina at that side of the falls.

OK so things are busy but at least we feel useful. In the next few days we HOPE to have some great pictures posted, both from the trip to the falls and from our work with the group.

thanks! love you!

peace
ted and sarah