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!

Sept. 27

I am glad that James has his papers in now, and that he gets his call soon! I want to know as soon as he finds out where he is going! You'll have to make sure that he writes me when he knows, because I want to hear from him where he is going.

I have not seen Nate at the MTC, because he flew straight out to the MTC in I think it's in Uraguay.

 I got my travel plans last week, and I am indeed leaving this Sunday, the 30th. I will leave at 8:30 from the MTC, and then my flight to Atlanta from Salt Lake is at like 12:55 I think, then, I fly directly from Atlanta to Tegucigalpa, and I should be arriving a little before noon on the 1st of October. I don't know for sure how my luggage will all work out right now, I am flying with Delta Airlines, so I get two 50 pound suitcases, and a 40 pound carry on, and maybe also a small travel bag too, but I'm not sure how I will fit it all, especially with the weight requirements. I have plenty of books that I got here at the MTC too that I have to pack, and so I don't know if I will be able to take everything, I might have to drop off some of my stuff, and send it back home to you guys. That's my project for today, a good way to spend my P Day, instead of being able to catch up on some sleep. We'll see how it goes, and I'll let you know if I need to send stuff back to you. I don't really know how it works, if I need to send it back through the mail, or if I can just leave it here for you to pick up somehow.

 The MTC is still about the same, although something really exciting did happen this week, and maybe you've already heard about it, I don't know, but yesterday, I was assigned to help with directing the traffic of the cars bringing in the new missionaries, so I was helping out showing cars where to go, and where to park, when a little, old maroon Honda Civic pulls up, and I think to myself "Hey that looks just like Ben's car..", then the car came forward, and it was Ben! He came to drop off his friend to the MTC, so I got to see him, and gave him a hug through his car window, and say hi to him before I had to usher him on, because there was still a line of cars behind him, but it was crazy to see him again, like what are the chances that I would be doing traffic the day that he comes, so that was good. He'll probably tell you about it when he sees you next.

Everything in the gospel is simple, unless you try to make it complicated. In Preach My Gospel, it has a quote from John Taylor on page 182 that says

“It is true intelligence for a man

to take a subject that is

mysterious and great in itself,

and to unfold and simplify it so

that a child can understand it.”

I have tried to apply this recently in my teaching (especially since I don't know complex words or how to explain well in Spanish) with my investigators about the gospel. Because the gospel is mysterious and great, it needs to be taught well, but the best way to teach it is with simplicity. This is something that has helped me a lot, to just focus on how to make my lessons flow more logically and make sense in a natural simple way.

Well, I need to go now, I guess, unless you reply to me with a Dear Elder before like tomorrow at noon or whenever they stop the same day delivery for tomorrow, you will be able to reply to me through my mission home address in Honduras! I am pretty excited to go, it will be crazy out there, I was watching some mormon messages about Honduras on lds.org last sunday, and it looks awesome!

I hope that all of you are doing great!

Love,

Elder Ward

Sept 20

(We asked him what a District Leader does.)

So, District Leader isn't all that exciting, I get the mail, and I also conduct meetings, run some of the things that we do as a district, and attend zone meetings on Sundays and Tuesdays. It has been good though, not too exciting, but I think that it has helped me to try and step up and be an example, as well as helped me with being better at public speaking and talking in front of people, and taking the responsibility of making choices for the group.

Also, I have seen Elder Walker Johnson here a couple of times. Yesterday we hosted, so we helped give a tour to the new missionaries coming in, and showed them where to go and stuff, and that was good. Also we are supposed to be getting our travel plans tonight, to find out all of the details of when we leave, and all of the information, so that's exciting. I should be leaving around the 2nd of October. My estimated date right now is on the 30th of September, but that's on a Sunday, and I don't really think that they would send missionaries on Sundays.

I can't really think of anything else to exciting happening here..

Hope that you all are doing well!

Love,

Elder Ward

Sept 13

Dear Family,

I'm sorry that I didn't have much time to write last week, but there really wasn't even much to write about.

This week has been a little bit more eventful. Every Sunday, we all are supposed to prepare a talk to give in Sacrament Meeting, just a short 3-5 minute talk, but in Spanish. Anyways, everyone writes a talk, and then in Sacrament, they will randomly call someone to speak. Anyways, this week I was called up to speak (there were 2 called from the about 50 people there). It went pretty well, even though I didn't feel as prepared as I might have if I had known that I would be speaking, but I feel that I did well. I filled up the whole 5 minutes (and probably went a little over), and I thought it went pretty good. Afterwards, the 2nd counselor, who had called me to talk told me that I had done a very good job, and that he was very impresed with my Spanish. Well, maybe I should have prepared less for the talk, because he was so impressed by my talk, that on Tuesday night, he called my companion and I into another room, and asked if I would be the district leader! Well, it probably wasn't just because of the talk, but I am now the district leader, over the 9 Elders in our district. So that's new in my life. Other than those things, life is about the same here. We just study all the time, which is good. Nothing too much exciting happening. We did have one of the elders in our district get his visa and fly out to the Spain MTC this week, so that's exciting I guess.

I hope that you are all doing well!

Love,

Elder Ward

Sept 10

This is part of a letter Elder Ward sent to his sister Averianne.

I really hope that soon when I get to Honduras, I will have a native Spanish speaking companion, so that I will have an example and be forced to quickly learn Spanish better.  I enjoy always having something to do with my life right now, and being super busy learning, teaching, and preparing here at the MTC. I enjoy feeling useful and productive. It's good. I am enjoying learning more from the scriptures and Preach My Gospel. There is so much to learn! The gospel is so deep, but still so simple it is crazy! You can never be bored going through and learning from the scriptures or other books. Right now I am reading Jesus the Christ by James E Talmage, which is basically an 800+ page book about Jesus Christ, and it is my favorite thing to read right now. I wish that I could just sit down and read it all day instead of learning Spanish... Also True to the Faith is a good book for topics or for specific gospel questions. I recommend both books, they are awesome! I know that I might sound like a typical missionary brother right now, but I want to remind you how important studying about/reading/progressing in the gospel is. I know that I didn't always have that as the focus in my life when I was your age, but it is super important! God will help you as you take time to give to him. I know that it's worth the sacrifice of time. Anyways, I will stop preaching now, I just felt like I should remind you of it.
   Love,
      Elder Ward

Entering the MTC