Contact info

He can get mail through dearelder.com.  You need to select the Honduras, Tegucigalpa Mission (there are no codes).  You need to send your email to him through dearelder.com by midnight Sunday night/Monday morning to go out in that week's pouch. 

You can also write directly to SLC to have something go in the pouch:

Pouch instructions:

Pouch leaves Church Headquarters each Friday.  Only postcards or one-page correspondences (no envelopes) written on one side of the page may be sent through he pouch.  Notebook or other lightweight paper will not process through the USPS machines.  Photographs are not acceptable. 

Letter folding instructions:  Lay the letter blank side down.  Fold the bottom of the letter about one-third of the way up the page and crease.  Fold the top of the letter to the bottom of the first fold and crease.  Secure the long side with two pieces of tape about one inch in from each end, but do not seal the ends.  In the top left corner write your name and complete return address.  Affix first class postage in the top right corner.  In the middle write the missionary address as follows:

Elder Matthew Bradon Ward
Honduras Tegucigalpa Mission
POB 30150
Salt Lake City UT 84130-0150

Here is his mission home address:

Elder Matthew Bradon Ward
Honduras Tegucigalpa Mission
Colonia Florencia Norte, Contiguo a SEAR
Entre boulevar Suyapa y PriceSmart
Edificio Plaza America, 3er Piso


(In Matt's mission packet, they didn't include this, but I wonder if you need to put this line on too:  Tegucigalpa M.D.C. HONDURAS C.A.)

Here is the address for packages:

Elder Matthew Bradon Ward
Honduras Tegucigalpa Mission
Colonia Florencia Norte, Contiguo a SEARS
Entre boulevar Suyapa y PriceSmart
Edificio Plaza America, 3er Piso
Tegucigalpa M.D.C. HONDURAS C.A.

Oct. 8, 2012

Well, alright. I´m in Honduras now. The first 2 days, we stayed in the mission president´s home. Now, my companion, Elder Evans and I have gone to our apartment in the city Teguz (Tegucigalpa) which is pretty nice. We have running water and electricity. We don´t have warm water, so we boil water for our showers. I explained the laundry in my pictures that I have sent to Averi today. The apartment is fairly nice, for Honduras. The houses here are very simple. They have either cement walls, or poorer with like wood. The roofs are almost always tin, sometimes they are nicer, like in our apartment. We have windows, but not like actual panes, most everybody just has screens, or just open windows. Although we don´t have bugs in this part of Honduras very bad. I haven´t seen any mosquitos yet, and have only seen like ants and stuff. I did see a spider today too, but it was tiny. I hear that the city really isn´t too bad for heat, bugs, and having nice houses and stuff like that.. The south part of the mission, or more to the east I´m sure will be worse. The weather here is pretty nice, I thought it would be worse. I have lost my sense of telling exactly what temperature it is, but most days it´s pretty nice. We are in rainy season right now, and it rained really hard one day, and a little bit another day. It is hot here, but not awful. There is humidity, but not really bad. Sometimes I get back at night covered in sweat from walking up the hill in the heat and stuff, but not always. Again, I have it pretty easy because I am in the city. My companion is from Utah, and has been here about 7 months, so he is pretty new too, which is good for me, because I can understand most of his Spanish, it´s not too complicated yet. He´s a good guy, he did parkour too before his mission and stuff. General conference was good, we all went to the church, and all of the english missionaries (about 8 of us) were in a little room with a TV in English. It was a good session of conference. It was crazy the announcement about the different ages for missionaries. That will make things so weird, not only here in the mission, knowing that I might train an 18 year old, but also for the differences in stuff after I get home, everything will be different in school and stuff, the new social change that that will make is crazy. But it is good. I´m sure that that will have a huge effect on who/when people are going to college/getting married/going on missions up there. Other than that, things are pretty good here, just teaching investigators and stuff. The investigators and members feed us a lot here, so I have been trying new foods. It is very offensive to turn down any food, so much so that my companion and I broke our fasts to avoid offending our investigators, but we fasted the next day to make up for it. The food is mostly pretty good. It´s mostly tortillas, rice, beans, and eggs. It´s normally pretty good, although sometimes you just have to choke something down to be polite. We can´t drink anything from the tap, so we buy big containers of clean water to drink, but when we visit members or investigators, they like giving us either some type of juice or soda. I hate when I have to drink soda, but it is like their best drinks, so they give that to us, which I´d rather just always drink water. The soda is going to kill my body. I hate soda, just in general. So, for food, all we really buy is breakfast, and the rest of the time we either buy some type of food while we are out any about, or get stuff from the people we teach. In the stores, about half of the things have just been exported down here, so all of the labels and stuff are in english for half of the items in the store, which is a little weird. I can buy most of anything that I could before here. They have name brand stuff too, like Cap´n Crunch or 5Gum or stuff like that I can buy here... My Spanish is okay, I don´t know what´s going on most of the time, but I´m getting there. It´s hard to explain how it´s progressing, but eventually I´ll get the language down. I have only been here a week, but I feel like I know a lot about Honduras already, and it feels pretty normal now, it´s exciting to do something new in my life, to have all of the customs, styles, and people be different than before. I´m sure it would have been even crazier if I had gone to one of the little village missions in the south, with a native companion, like most of the Elders from my group did, the mission president likes to put the new Elders with native speakers, so I´m one of the few with an English companion. That´s about all that I can think of about how it´s going here. It´s good though, it´s definently different than I expected a mission to be. Idk how to describe it well. Anyways yup, that´s life here.

I did get your Dear Elder (letter) this week (I, Tiauna, submitted it on Sunday, Sept. 30). I think that that might be the best way to talk to me. Mail and Dear Elders, after they get to the mission office, are just given to the zone leaders and eventually sometime in the week, at like church or P-day zone activities, or in zone meetings they will hand out the mail they got. I don´t know how long actual mail will take to get here though. This ldsmail email is supposed to be only for my immediate family, so my friends can either use dear elder, or snail mail to talk to me, and then I would use snail mail to reply back to them. 

I´ll talk to you all later,

Love,

Elder Ward

Note from Tiauna:  He called us from the SLC airport, but it was really hard to hear him, he couldn't hear us, and he seemed to be in a hurry, so it was frustrating.  But he called us the next day from Honduras, and it was wonderful to talk to him!  We could all hear each other!  He said it is really green there and the houses have been spray painted in bright colors.  He said there are McDonald's, Little Caesar's Pizza, Burger King, etc. in Tegucigalpa.  He told us the mission home is really nice, and he likes his mission president.  He flew out with 6 elders I think he said.  It was great to hear his voice!  He sounded really good!