May 6, 2013

Well folks, it happened... I left my first area Reparto! 5 changes (7 months) was a long time there, and towards the end was a little tough, but I learned a lot there and feel like I have had a good influence on some people´s lives..

On Wednesday I was reassigned to the area of Yuscarán, Honduras, about 1 1-2 hours in bus below Tegus. It´s not a very big place, and there are definitely not as many members as my other area. We have a branch here, with 4 Elders serving in the branch, and one of them is the Branch President. There has almost always been Elders as the Branch President here in the Branch, because there is hardly any worthy priesthood holders. We had 30 people come to church yesterday in our meetinghouse. The other 2 Elders had left to bring people to church in the morning, so my companion and I started the Sacrament Meeting by ourselves without the President. It was interesting, as he presided and conducted, I led the music, he blessed, and I passed the sacrament, and we had a fast and testimony meeting with everyone there. Not very many people went up to bear their testimony, so all of the missionaries went up and bore their testimonies. After that, I went to teach Primary, with five kids, 11, 10, and 6 years old, and two toddlers under 2... That was interesting. I hadn´t expected to have to do that all by myself without any instruction, but I figured that it might be better than teaching a Sunday School class to a bunch of people. It was a little difficult. I was trying to read the manual for Primary while all the kids gathered around the table to color and draw their pictures. I taught a lesson to the kids for a few minutes and asked them questions to keep them involved, but with the different age groups it was a little tough. :P After a little while I let them color and played them some music from a CD and talked to them about what they were coloring and stuff. So it was alright I guess. I still have to improve my ability to teach kids in spanish because I assume that some of the vocabulary that I have in Spanish is more sophisticated than what the kids can understand. It´s very different being in a branch instead of a ward. We have to do a lot as missionaries here in this area. We don´t have leaders really pushing us along telling us what to do. We´re just 4 missionaries out in this little city away from everything else trying to lead the church properly. You have to know a ton about the order of the church to be able to lead the branch. We are reading manuals of the leadership of the church to know how to do everything right. We also have to set up a lot of the programs and activities of the church, Like we have mutual every week that we run, we do any activities during the week, like for mothers day we are going to do a Relief Society activity for the moms. We have started to do an early morning seminary at 5 in the morning, which means that I and my companion have to get up at 4:30 to go and get ready for that. Fun fun... Nobody came this morning though, so I don´t know how successful it will be, we only have like 7 or 8 youth in our branch.

My companion and I live in the church. We have a little room in the church building where we eat, sleep, and study. At first I saw the room and thought to myself ¨man, this is tiny, one little room to ourselves...¨ But then I realized that we have to whole church to ourselves. The church building used to be a hotel, so it has like 8 rooms (4 guest rooms), each with its own bathroom, so in the morning, I can choose from using any of our 6 bathrooms. We have 8 rooms, plus the chappel. The church is all private, we have a giant double wooden front door to enter in to the yard and then to each individual room. So we have the kitchen upstairs, our room downstairs, the office, a whole bunch of empty rooms, one that is perfect for me to work out in. I´m going to breakdance, and put up a pullup bar, and I can jump and have space to do stuff without making noise to annoy the neighbors. So it´s a nice little setup we have. And the best part of our house is that we have a water heater!!!!! That was the most exciting part of moving in to the new place. I showered for the first time in 7 months, with warm water straight out of the tap. It was undescribably beautiful. I almost cried. Every day now, I have so much apreciation for a shower that I don´t have to wait half an hour to warm up water and then pour water over myself from a bucket. I was very excited about that. What comes in second place for things that I am grateful for is that the other Elders, that live less than a block away from us, have a washer and a dryer! That is absolutely unheard of in Honduras, and I don´t know how they did it. Their house is huge, and super nice. They even have a couch and a table just for eating. All of their furniture came with their house, including the washer and dryer. So I don´t have to wash clothes by hand for hours and hours each week anymore either! And for the first time in 7 months, my clothes will become reaquanted with a dryer, instead of just leaving them outside in the sun to dry. I´m excited about that.

We´ve had some weird work days here recently, well just hours that I´m not used to working, like before we hardly ever went to work in the mornings, but now, we work more in the mornings and study when we have time in the afternoon, or if the power goes off at night. The power goes out all the time here in this area. Maybe it was from a big rain storm that we just had, but for the time that I´ve been here, we´ve had the power out more than it´s been on. But my flashlights been getting some good use (thanks mom for buying me a nice one). If we do anything at night I have to bring my flashlight in case the power dies. Also, this week I saw my first firefly! That was pretty exciting actually. They´re super cool. One night, when the power was out, we were walking down this street with my flashlight. We saw a couple of fireflies in front of us, so I turned off my flashlight. In the field to our side, there were like 20-30 fireflies shining their little lights all over, it was crazy cool, I had never seen that before. On Saturday, we were going to have a baptism for the other Elders. We don´t have a baptismal font in the church, so we went out in the woods to a spot that they knew of. We went to this little stream with a shovel to dig up part of a pool that had already formed in this little stream. We started building a dam under the pool, and I went upstream to unclog some of the rocks and gunk that was clogging up each pool of water in the stream. I felt very avatarish, for those of you that get that reference. But it was super relaxing to go up and work in this stream in Pday clothes and sandals to get it ready for the baptism (we ended up not having the baptism though..)

The area is pretty good. It´s big and we walk a lot. We have some investigators right now, which is good. We haven´t even gone out just to contact yet. One day this week, we went out at like 8 in the morning to walk to this little village way out in our area with the other companionship, and we left and walked for a long time to get to this little village, like 8 km away. (I don´t know how much that is in miles, I was just told that it´s 8 km and that it takes a long long time walking there) It was a nice little nature walk and we saw frogs and turtles and lizards and cool stuff on the way, probably because it had just rained really hard. We got to this village in the morning, and talked to this really old guy, who the other elders had met earlier when he randomly showed up to church. So we went to visit him and his family. His family is HUGE, and they all live in the houses (they´re more of little huts, we´ll be honest) round about his house. So we went with one of his kids to go and introduce ourselves to all of his family and to invite them to church this sunday. We met a ton of his family. He had like 8 kids, 30 grandkids and a ton of greatgrandkids that we visited. We invited them to church, and we arranged for a bus to come to pick them up on sunday morning and to take them back after church. The bus cost WAY too much, we ended up paying over $100 for only 6 people from the family to come to church. But we´re going to keep working with them to invite them to church more.

My companion is super chill, we get along great so far, a ton better than my last companion and I. We´ve been working hard together, and we´re learning a lot together. He is from Guatemala and he has 3 months in the mission, he just finished with his training in this same area. He is a convert too, so he has a super strong testimony about the gospel. We had a super good companionship study the other day, and we´re going to work on teaching him English. He is a little more willing than my last companion to learn, so we´ll practice more with that.

Well, that´s the new update for now. I am liking the area so far, and it is super chill. It is not dangerous at all, so I am taking my camera with me for all of our adventures. I´ve taken some pretty cool pictures, I dont have my camera cord to upload, so I´ll send some later for y´all.

Hope that everyone´s doing super good. Everyone remember to be grateful for hot water to shower with! I know that I am!!

Love,

Elder Ward

April 29, 2013 Pictures

Cooking party‏

Well, I don´t actually know if it counts as a party if I was the only one there. I offered to make chimichangas for my companion, but he refused them! I was a little bit offended, not going to lie...

But that left more for me!

Chimichanga party!!

I finally gathered all of the ingredients and made them. Here´s some pictures.

The first one is a picture of boiling cheese. I don´t think that you have seen or made boiling cheese before, but I boiled my cheese in manteca (basically just buttery goop - vegetable shortening) and then added the cheese to my bean mixture to add to the tortilla and meat. It ended up pretty good. I´m getting a lot better at cooking now. :)

 Heres a couple of photos. I don´t know if you got the one with me on the rock last week or not, the email was a little weird last week.

The other picture is when I went on divisions this last week with an Elder from Guatemala.










Food, glorious food!

I don´t know if I already sent this first picture.

I´m getting better at making food. The picture at my desk is fried rice that I made with carrots and chicken. It was delicious, but a little greasy. Most of the time I don´t cook this fancy, but occasionally...

April 29, 2013

Mom,

What Dominican Republic Mission is Michelle going to? I have a friend from my ward here that just got his call there, and I wonder if they´ll be in the same mission...

I haven´t made any of the food mixes yet. And you can´t really buy them at the stores. There are a few soup mixes here that I´ve used, but not other types of mixes. For the last couple of weeks I haven´t bought much food from the store because I´ve been trying to eat all of the food that has been collecting up in my house to get rid of it all before changes this week so that I don´t have to haul all of that food to my new area..

I do like the alfredo sauce mix though, I made that the last time you sent me them and me and my companion both liked that a lot.

We have a few investigators right now.. But not a ton.

The kid that we baptized and his dad invited us over to watch a church movie on saturday, and they ordered pizza for us, which was super tasty.  When his dad found out that I am leaving he invited us over again tonight to have donuts and a FHE. So that should be good. I like that family. I have also visited a few other member families that know that I´m going to leave, and they all are super nice and have said how much they´ve apreciated me helping them. It´s kind of interesting to see how I´ve helped some of the people in the ward, and that they´re grateful for our visits and friendships.

I´m pretty sure that I´m going to leave this wednesday, so that should be good. I´ll let you know about all of the changes next week...

I hope that all is going well there,

Love,

Elder Ward

April 22, 2013

Arissa,

My favorite part of the mission is sleeping. Jk, when people understand the importance of what we are teaching.

Everyone´s reaction to the gospel is different. Some people let us in just to talk, some don´t want to reject ´the good word´. Some people have already talked to missionaries before.

Some people say that they don´t want to talk to us, but you can´t really slam a Honduran door, it would just break in half. That´s a joke, some honduran doors are sturdy.

The food is good. I like whatever type of food now here, and my stomach normally gets along with me now.

We normally have beans, rice, platano, eggs, tortilla, cheese, and maybe a tomatoe or avocado or something like that if the person is feeling fancy. That´s if we eat with someone like members or something like that. If we eat at home, I will cook myself something simple. A sandwich, ramen, soup, veggetables, spaghetti, baleadas, eggs, or something like that.

I don´t know what´s hard or easy. And I don´t really know my least favorite part. Sometimes its hard to work with a companion and having to figure everything out with someone else. Especially if your companion has attitude or has other stuff that he wants to do.

Well, it wasn´t my machete, I just borrowed it from a neighbor, but basically everyone has one here. I don´t think that I could bring one home in my suitcase, so I probably won´t buy myself one..

And it would be too hard to try to mail.

I didn´t see any bugs in this jungle. Just little lizards. But I didn´t kill any.

I just have to remind you of silly things that you need to avoid doing in your life, like toasting popcorn.

How´s Reggie?

Love,

Elder Ward

Mom,

Yeah, the water for our baptism was gross. We still don´t have any water at our church building, so the other elders had their baptism at a different church building.

I hadn´t heard about the change in the rule letting the missionaries email other people. I´m not really sure of what the rule is. I have only emailed my immediate family my whole mission. I would imagine that now it would be okay for me to email anyone too, but I don´t really have much time to email people.

This week we did divisions (companion exchanges) with our ZL´s. I went up with the ZL that I´ve somehow had all 5 changes of my mission, which is rare to have the same ZL that long. We went up to his area, which is the new area that opened up that used to be a part of my area. So I already knew a lot of the area, and got to show him a couple of the parts that I knew, and some of the people I had visited when I had worked there in the past. It was a pretty good day of working. (I also got the little white package from you with the candies and food mixes, thank you ;) ) When I got back, I found out that the other ZL, that I hardly know, had seen my old beat up shoes with a huge hole in one, and took the initiative to do me a service and repair them and clean and shine them while I was gone. I definitely didn´t expect that when I got home, and I thought a lot about his service, and why he wanted to help me out, even though I barely know him that well. I was definitely grateful and told him thank you.

So I can work with these shoes again. They´re not in perfect condition, but they look and work a ton better now.

We´ve met a few new people this week that we´re going to keep teaching. That´s good too because we haven´t had many investigators recently.

I made chimichangas this week for the first time in my mission (finally). They turned out well. I fried the meat one day, and then bought tortillas, and cheese, and refried beans a couple days later to make them. They turned out well. I have pictures too that I could send of them.

We went to Picacho today, a tourist attraction that people go to here, and I took some pretty cool pictures that I´ll send too.

That´s about it for now.

Love,

Elder Ward

 Pictures of me over the valley of Tegucigalpa.

This is a famous statue that you can see from almost anywhere in Tegucigalpa. The Christ of Picacho. It´s pretty big.

The giant Coca Cola sign on our hill. It´s taking a long time to upload the pictures. Maybe I´ll send more next week...

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...

April 8, 2013

(He is answering questions, which are written below.)

Mom,

I´m not going to throw the shoes away. I´m still wearing them. They still work, they just look a little weird. It´s not as dramatic as the picture makes it look. I took a picture in black and white because the flash bounced off the tape, making the color picture really weird. I can probably repair the shoe here, I just have to find someone. They are the Belvedere shoes if that helps, but both were belvederes. I do have 3 pairs of shoes and the boots, but I still want to make each pair of shoes last awhile. I don´t want to come home from my mission and have to buy new shoes again right after. I won´t sell the boots until the end of my mission to see if I get sent somewhere that I need them.

The Semana Santa wasn´t very hot this year. It was actually a lot colder and rained a couple of days. It was a little different just because everyone didn´t have work, but everyone who had money left to go swimming at the beaches or to visit family. It was harder to work that week.

The natives do sweat, but they don´t walk all over the place all day, so they normally don´t sweat as much as us missionaries.

It was raining pretty heavily that one day. But it always depends. Some days it just sprinkles, but sometimes it comes down hard.

Yes, I finished reading the BofM in spanish this week. I also finished Jesus the Christ, which was a super good book. I learned a ton from it. I´ll probably have to read it again on my mission. I think that I´m going to start the New Testament in Spanish, but I may have to read side by side with my english scriptures because the wording is more confusing.

I liked General Conference this week. (Elder Cardon of the Seventy gave the talk on forgiveness and repentance) I liked Elder Hollands talks too, he has a lot of power, but teaches very simply. You can´t really misunderstand him. He´s very direct. Another Elder joked that they should just have all of the General Authorties write all of their talks, and have Elder Holland read them so that nobody falls asleep and everyone gets motivated to be better. Of course, each of the speakers has their own power with how they teach, but I do especially like Elder Holland too.

I was holding up 12 bills of Lps. 500, so that would be 6,000 Lempira, or about $300. I wanted to wait until I could get a way to have 10,000 Lempiras, but I didn´t have that much money, but 6,000 is still pretty good. :)

The mission bought microwaves for each area in the mission. I´m not really sure why, but we have them now. And now I can´t really think of a good use for it. We´ve cooked popcorn and heated up leftovers, but that´s about it.

My camera is pretty good. It doesn´t seem like it has amazing resolution in some of the photos though. Idk how much it is worth for the price, but it´s been a good camera. I want to get a camera that my other companion had that has this feature that is called burst mode, where it can take like 20 pictures in a second, so you can take cool movement photos for like parkour and stuff. I took a picture of him doing a backflip and it caught each little piece of the backflip. That camera also had really good video resolution. I don´t remember what type of camera it was though now.

We´re still going to have the baptism this week for the 9 year old. We were going to have another baptism, but now we have to wait another week because he didn´t come to general conference and he needs to go to a certain number of church meetings before he can get baptized.

That´s about all that I´ve got this week. Just answers to your questions. I don´t have much time.

Love,

Elder Ward

On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 7:26 PM, Tiauna Ward <tiaunaw@hotmail.com> wrote:

Which shoes are the shoes with the 5 inch hole? Please do not throw them away yet. I think the store might replace them. Are they from Men's Wearhouse?  I will call them this week and bring in the picture you sent.  (Men's Wearhouse said they would replace them at no cost to us!  Yay!  --update:  They replaced them with even nicer Dockers!)


I thought you had three pairs of shoes, besides the boots. Why do you have to continue to wear the one with holes?

I don't think you should sell the boots until the end of your mission because you may still need them.


How was the ¨Semana Santa¨? Was it as hot as you expected? Did it change what you did that week? Do the natives sweat all of the time too or have their bodies acclimatized?


Does it rain really heavily there? That is good you were prepared with candles.


Did you finish the Book of Mormon in Spanish? How did you like General Conference. I really liked the talk on forgiveness yesterday (was his name Conrad?) and Elder Holland's talk today. I love it when he bears his testimony. It really affects me—it strengthens me. It's like when I sit in the sun, and I feel like it is somehow feeding me.


How much money were you holding in that picture?


I didn't know you were an origami wizard. Your Ninja stars look really good!


I'm impressed with how professionally shaped your tortillas are. Your baleadas look tasty. The mangoes do not look like the mangoes I've seen here in the store. I thought it was a flower at first.


Why did you get a microwave? Did the mission pay for it? I thought you said you didn't need a microwave. Have you been using it a lot?


I'm glad you found some Ranch. :)


How do you like your camera? Do you wish you had something different? Our camera is having problems (I dropped it). I've wondered about getting one like yours.


What happened with the potential baptism? What experiences have you had with teaching lately?

Pictures 4-1-13

 

The first is my shoe right now. I had to wrap it in duct tape and then color it black with a sharpie to fix it. It had a big old 5 inch hole where it came apart from the stitching. Maybe I can find someone who fixes shoes to fix it for real, but until then... This is my shoe! I wear nice ones to church and special meetings... (I can´t switch into wearing my nicer pairs of shoes yet, I only have 6 months (6 months exactly today! 8 months total in the mission) in Honduras with them.)

The second picture is of me with a lot of money. I´m just a high rollin´ gringo rolling around in my money in the middle of honduras... Or that´s what all the kids think as they beg me for ¨un peso¨ or ¨un lempira¨ as I walk through the streets. This money is a collection of money just to take this picture, I don´t actually own all of that money.

 

The third picture is a picture I took out the window driving down the road. I think that it´s of the Colonia grocery store. It´s one of the nicer places in town.

 The first picture is of a statue thing at the art museum that we went to a few weeks ago.

 

The next 2 are of a ninja star that I made out of lempiras. You use 5 lempiras to make one, and 1 lempira is worth like 5 cents, so this is probably the coolest thing that I know how to make out of one quarters worth of money.

This was the day that we made baleadas. We had the Elders from the area right next to ours come over to help teach us how to make everything. We made the tortillas from scratch and cooked everything else all nice and fancy-like. So now you know what baleadas are.

 

This first picture is of a mango. The mangos are super good when they´re this yellow color on the inside. People also eat green mangos, but I don´t like them until they´re ripe. They taste good, but have little hair things that get stuck in your teeth.

 

The next is a picture that I took of the culture night. It probably didn´t turn out super well, because I just took a picture of the projector screen.

 

The last picture is a plate of veggies that I made for dinner one night. Fried platanos, cucumbers, and avocados. Sounds like a good dinner to me. Especially when I remind myself that the whole meal cost less than 50 cents. :P

 

This first picture is our new microwave! Haha! Now we can make popcorn, and I can have leftover rice and beans if I accidentally make too much rice (which happens a lot). I was excited when we got the microwave, before I realized that they don´t sell anything here in Honduras that needs a microwave. They have some american microwaveable stuff, but it´s ridiculously expensive.

 

The next 2 pictures are of when we had the 2 extra elders living with us, with all of their stuff in our house. We were super cramped for a few days.

 

The first 2 pictures are of my power outage adventure last monday.

 

The other one is of cup of noodles with vegetables. I don´t like the freeze dried vegetables that they include in the package, so I dumped them out and ate real vegetables with my noodles. Also, you might notice that I have ranch on my plate. I completed my quest for ranch to put on my veggies! Yay! That was exciting. It seemed a little expensive - $5 for the bottle. But I don´t know if that´s too ridiculous.

I think that´s the end of my pictures that I needed to post. Hope you enjoyed!