Wheelchair Interviews in Paraguay

Bonnie and I were able to spend January 19-23 in Asunción Paraguay. Over the past year, without a humanitarian missionary couple focusing on Paraguay, things have gotten behind in doing wheelchair interviews. We're trying to help catch up. We're supposed to talk to 10% of the recipients at some point; and between the Argentina and Paraguay projects, we are currently due to complete 253 interviews in the coming year. Can't complain, really; we love doing the interviews.

The purpose of the interview is to 1) evaluate the donation process of our partners, making sure they are following the right procedures in sharing the chairs with recipients; and 2) evaluate the satisfaction level of the chair user, making sure the chair is working well and functioning as it should. As we do these one-on-one interviews, we have the fascinating opportunity to spend a few minutes learning about the life of some pretty courageous and impressive people, and often to receive their expressions of appreciation on behalf of the Church.

A New Year Hymn

One of the fun things about being in a different country is noticing and learning about similarities and differences, even within familiar settings. Attending Church meetings is a very familiar setting, and so much is the same—including all the hymns. Or at least, most of the hymns.

Today we sang a hymn I'd never heard before. The title was Otro año ha pasado—"Another year has passed." It's clearly a "New Year" hymn really only appropriate for the beginning of the year. I researched it a bit and found it's not in the current English hymn book, but was in the Deseret Sunday School Songbook back in the 1890s. I don't think it ever has been in the normal English hymnbook. No idea how it got translated and put into the Spanish hymn book. But we all enjoyed singing it!