April 15, 2013

Mom,

Here´s a random adventure that I had:

Last week I ran through a honduran jungle with a machete, chopping away through the vines and stuff, but it only lasted like 15 minutes. It was still pretty fun, and I felt like Willy wonka for a couple minutes while climbing through a dried up river with my machete in hand. We were doing a service project up in an area that´s right on the border of a pine forest, but in this little part there was a dried up river that we hiked to find a fresh water source that the member in charge of the service was telling us about. So that was pretty fun.

My companion was sick this week, so a couple of days we weren´t able to go out and work. Saturday we didn´t even leave the house. It was awful being locked up all day and not going outside at all.

We had our baptism this week, and I´ll have to write a separate email about that to send to everyone, but I´m going to use a different computer to be able to upload photos.

That`s about all that´s happened.

Love,

Elder Ward

This week, we had the District Leader come with me to my area to do the baptismal interview for the 9 year old kid that we´ve been teaching. He passed, and we planned the baptism for sunday at 8:00 so that his dad could be there for the baptism and have the confirmation right after the baptism during the sacrament meeting at 9. The dad worked out of town all this last week, and came back saturday night, and that was why we didn´t have the baptism on saturday. My companion got sick on friday, so we didn´t get to work all of friday afternoon or any of saturday. So we didn´t get to fill up the baptismal font or visit him on Saturday. We told the secratary to fill up the font on saturday, and reminded the ward mission leader to double check before we got to the church sunday morning. So we thought that things would turn out fine for the baptism.

But, we live in Honduras, so things are never that simple...

We got to the church Sunday morning right before 8, expecting to have the font filled up and the boy to be there with his family, and the ZL´s to be there with his baptismal clothes. We came, and the font wasn´t filled up yesterday, the WML came in that morning and started to fill up the font, but there wasn´t any water. Here in the part of the city where we live, we get running water about every other day, or maybe 2 out of 3 days. But sunday the water didn´t come. So we had about 20 gallons in the font, and the rest of the water never came. Also the boy wasn´t there. So we walked over to the other side of our area to his house, to find that he, and his family, had forgotten about the baptism. We waited for them to get all ready, and then we left to the church. We got there at like 8:45 and the ZL´s were there (they assist at our church) filling up the font from the reserve water supply that the church had, but the water was absolutely filthy. It was just pure mud. We still didn´t have very much water from there too. We got dressed to have the baptism, but had to change back into church clothes because we had to start the sacrament meeting. After sacrament, we couldn´t have our regular sunday school class, because we use the baptismal font room and we were trying to filter out the leaves floating on the water. My companion and I went to our house and asked the owner of our house if he could help us bring water from our water supply, because he has a truck, so we missed part of church to fill up the water in a container into his truck to bring to the church. We still didn´t have much water, but we had the baptism after church anyways. I attached pictures of him and his family, him and the missionaries, and of the water. You could barely see the next step. To give you an idea of how little water there was, I´ll tell you that I didn´t even have to change my garment bottoms after I baptized him, that´s how low the water was. He basically just layed down in the muddy water to be baptized. We had to do the submersion twice, because the first time he didn´t go all the way under. But in the end, he was baptized, and he felt the spirit. He bore his testimony afterwards, and it was cool to see that he wasn´t disanimated by the muddyness of the water. So that´s my baptism story.

Love,

Elder Ward

I´m attaching some pictures that I took of my flag. I´ve been trying to get it back, but it´s a little hard. I´m going to need a lot more practice to be able to hold it again. But these pictures make it look like I´m holding it for a long time. Also, notice the coolest part about the picture is that my shadow looks just like the angel moroni statue! Haha, beat that, I didn´t even plan that as I was doing it, it just happened. I laughed for a while after I saw that...