Dear Mom,
I dont have much time, I ended up sending a big long email to Mishelae, so you can blame her, or something...
My shoes arent bad, just sunday/formal shoes in general, worn all
day everyday, especially in an area like I am in in Honduras, is going
to not feel great, especially if your socks arent good. And I am glad
that you liked my speech about socks..
So, I was too impatient last week to wait for James´ letter,
especially because he hadnt even sent it (everyone gets scared to write
or send my letters when they see my address..), so I read it in
Mishelae´s Dear Elder last Monday.. That´s crazy that he´s going to
Alabama. But I am excited for him. I´ll tell him more when I get his letter, and can reply to that.
Thank you for the sheet music and the talk. The talk is the right one,
and i will have to print them both out next week, because today we are
in an internet cafe instead of the normal church building that we use.
I do have a bank account with the mission, and a mission debit card
for while I am here that I can take money out of for the month. I could
use my American debit card too, from home, if I need to, but I will try
to avoid it for a while as much as I can. I did run out of money
already for this month, but we get more tomorrow, which is too bad,
because I would have liked to get groceries today, because it is pday,
but oh well..
I have not heard anything about a hurricane sandy... but Im so far inland that I doubt that I would.
My shoulderbag does have a camelback, but I want a nice backpack too, eventually..
A scripture that I like, that I forgot to give to Matthew Nuttal
before I left (for the mission plaque), is Mormon 9:31. Or I had also thought about Mormon 9:22,
because its more mission like, but I dont know exactly.
I probably like the Thorlos Golf socks better. And by the way,
thank you for the package that you sent, I think that I forgot to say
thanks last week.
Sorry that this email is only full of random weird replies in an
order that probably doesnt make much sense, but I am doing good, and
learning a lot!
I hope that everything is good there, and maybe gets a little bit less hectic soon.
Love,
Elder Ward
Dear Mishelae,
First
of all, don´t you DARE say that cereal isn´t filling. Cereal is the
source of LIFE! Cereal is the most important invention ever. One of the
rules that they had here in the mission that they taught us the first
day, is that we need to eat healthy foods, and the 3 examples it gave
were: fruits, vegetables, and cereals. So I´ve been following that
religiously. Mostly, only the cereal part... because it´s food that my
stomach can actually handle well, although it is outrageously expensive
here. It´s about 70-80 Limpiras for a small box of cereal, I saw one
last time I went for 275 Limpira, which is almost $15.. 80 Limps is
about $4, and $1 equals 20 Limpira.
Anyways, now that you know those fun
facts, and probably skipped over them, just like everyone skips over
chapter 11´s information on money. (Yes, I did just quote a scripture in
my email to try to prove that I´m a somewhat good missionary, are you
impressed yet?) ;p
So
anyways, after both of those tangents.. I just had to make sure that
you understand the value of cereal, and of the money here I guess too,
idk why.. I suppose that I can continue on in replying to you in a
normal, sequencial manner starting from the beginning of your letter and
replying in order... Here we go...
That
is good that you got to go talk to the bishop, but bad that he didn´t
send the papers yet. My bishop sent them in like 3 days from when he got
them, and I had an appointment within the same week.
Yeah,
the change with the missionary ages will be weird, but good. That is
crazy how many papers got sent in this week! The first presidency and
quorem of the twelve will be crazy busy these next few weeks after
conference, but its good. Maybe China is opening up soon, and they will
send them to a new Chinese MTC thats secretly being built right now...
How do you feel about learning Chinese, Mishelae? Haha, that would be
entertaining, but I dont think that 18 months is long enough to learn
chinese. 1/2 of your mission would be in the MTC, like the russians, and
japanese missionaries in Provo, haha. Yes, I am still planning on going
to USU after the mission, and hanging out with all of the cool people
there. Are you going to try to make it back from your mission in time
for fall semester at USU when you get back? What are your after mission
plans? Okay, I will admit, my sentence did not make any sense... You win
the grammar correction game today. Arissa didn´t though, in her last
email. She tried to correct my grammar, and told me that my brain was
deteriorating into only Spanish mode, and that I couldn´t use English
grammar right anymore, but I was right, and proved it to her in my last
email.. I´m still an English genius, although my spelling skills are a
little bit lacking, especially without spell check being in English and
having every word that I type be marked in red as I type. And these
ridiculous Spanish keyboards with different symbols and thrown in ñ´s
and crazy stuff like that. But other than that, its all good. Wow, this
email reply is taking up all of my internet time... Thanks a lot..
Except for that its my fault, because I´m just rambling now... I´m in an
internet cafe... It´s exciting... or something like that...
Now back to your email reply...
Anyways,
umm... We have a few investigators, but they are not progressing very
well, or following up on commitments. We had 2 people and 3 families
that said that they would come to church yesterday, but none of them
showed up or were there when we tried to go get them to walk with them
before church. So that was disappointing.. So we´ve been deciding
whether to drop a few of our investigators that we have right now, and
spend our time finding other people who would be better to teach and
progress, but it is always hard to decide whether or not to drop an
investigator. But we´ve been focusing on finding the last couple of
days, and have found some people who seem positive about hearing our
message, so we´ll see how that goes... We don´t really contact all that
much. We never ever go door to door knocking, because every person would
let us in and be willing to listen to a lesson for an hour or two, but
they wouldn´t keep commitments or want to hear more, they would just be
polite, and listen for an hour and take up time feeding us and stuff. So
with contacting new people, sometimes we talk to people on the street,
just go up and talk to people for a few minutes, because there are
plenty enough people on the street in my mission, but we try to just get
references as a way to get new people, which is a ton more effective.
So that is all going well, I think..
So
with the rule about being dressed up on Pdays, it is always best to go
out dressed up, and keep your formal appearance, but there are times
when you obviously can´t. I am typing this email in my missionary
attire, but this morning when I woke up to go play soccer, I walked over
to the field dressed down to play, so it just kind of depends. You
should dress up as much as you can though. But with like service
projects and things like that, that you would get dirty for, even during
the week, we´ve dressed down to help out with it.
Well,
now that I´ve spent all my time talking with you.... haha, it was a
good stress relieving, positive pday activity... I probably should go...
But I want to hear a formal
apology about you saying that cereal is not that filling. That is
disrespectful.
Anyways, don´t step on cracks, because they break your mother´s back(s).
Yeah, that´s my cheezy advice for the week.
Love,
Elder Ward
