Feb. 11, 2013

Dear everyone,

Well, this week has been a little bit crazy, but it has been good!

Monday we had a family home evening with some members and their nonmember friends, and we dedicated the house that they had just finished. So that was cool, and I had never done anything like that before, but it went well, and we taught a good lesson about families, and talked about ´The Family: A Proclamation to the World´ with all of them. Also this week, we had changes, and Elder Evans left to go to an area further south in the mission and he is training 2 new missionaries now. And I am also training now!!! Wednesday morning we went to the church that all of the Elders go to that have changes. We met with all of the Elders who were told that they would train, and all of the new Elders that flew in on Monday. There was a big group that came in this time, with like 25 latins, and only 1 gringo that came in. We had a little meeting with the President and his wife speaking to us, and afterwards the mission president assigned us to our new companions. I am now working with Elder Jaurez, from Guatemala. He is 18 years old, and spent 2 weeks in the Guatemala MTC, and then he served for about a month in Guatemala before he came to Honduras. I don´t have a picture with him yet, I know, I´m a slacker... But it has been interesting to work with a latin companion. I have had to learn a lot of Spanish in the last few days to be able to communicate with him well and explain everything to him. It has been a good change, and I am learning a ton of new stuff, now that I am the senion companion, and have to make all of the decisions and plan everything that we do together. I have had to step it up a little bit with taking charge and talking to everybody, all of our investigators, and the members, and that´s been a big responsibility on me. But it has been good. This week has been super hard, but I have learned a lot already, and I really do feel like my Spanish has gotten a lot better this week, since I don´t speak English to anyone anymore, and since I have to talk a lot of Spanish with my companion, with members, and investigators. My companion is good, he is willing and ready to work hard, which is good. We´ve been focusing on companionship study a lot, and we are trying to do the new missionary training program called the first 12 weeks, which is a bunch of training activities that they do in the mission, instead of teaching it all in the MTC. I am also working on helping my companion learn English. He wants to learn, and it is something that the latin Elders are supposed to focus on during their missions. So for language study, every day we´ve been working on helping him learn more English. It has been interesting to try to teach it, but it´s been good. He already knows a pretty good amount of the basics. So this week we have been working on inviting a lot of the people to go to the temple for the open house. This is the focus of missionary work in the city areas of our mission. We received a list of over 300 people in our area that we can contact who are less active members or just a bunch of random people. We are trying to visit these people and invite them to the temple, and also try to get references and find people to teach, because most of these people are part member families, so we are working to do that right now. It is hard to find any of these people, because almost all of the addresses that we have are just complete garbage, so it is difficult to find them with just general locations written. On Saturday, the temple opened to the public, to go in and see it for the open house, so we went with the stake to go see it. It is super nice their, like all temples, they did a really good job. I just barely finished sending mom a bunch of the pictures of the outside of the temple that we took. We went through the tour, and we got to help some people go through who were in wheelchairs, so it was good to help them, and talk to them a little bit.

This morning we had to wash clothes again by hand, because the lady in our ward who used to wash our clothes said that she couldn´t do it for us anymore. I think that she just stopped because Elder Evans was leaving... But Idk. We´re trying to find somebody else to help us, so that we don´t have to waste half of our P-days to go out back and wash all of our clothes. Hopefully we can find someone.

That´s about it for this week. Things are good here, and we are working hard. I am super tired now, but that´s okay. That´s how missionary work should be.

Love you all!

Love,

Elder Ward