April 22, 2014

Sister Ward,

Your son is amazing!   I told him if he did what I told him to do … he would get over Dengue in 7 days and not 10 to 14 days.  He has been so good about listening and doing.  I am so impressed with him!   He is over the worst and will probably start back to missionary work by Wed. or Thurs.   The cure for  Dengue Fever …  is rest, lots of water and Tylenol.  They do completely recover.  It is not like "West Niles Disease".  Last season we had 22 missionaries get Dengue (out of 230 missionaries).  It is carried by mosquitos.  We encourage the missionaries to spray with "off" (deet) every day.  Your son has a light case.  The disease effects the platelets in the blood.  The platelets drop…. if they drop too far … it causes bleeding.   the normal platelet count it (150-450).  If they drop below 60 then they put the missionary in the hospital.  Elder Ward's platelets went to 100 and they are now going up.  Today they were up to 140!  He is feeling a lot better!  We will do another blood draw on Wed. to see if he is back to normal.   I will email you and let you know.  Feel free to remind me of my promise … with 250 missionaries it can get crazy.   

I know that Heavenly Father truly watches over His missionaries.  Your prayers will and are helping.  I see miracles everyday.  He is going to be just fine!

Sincerely,

Hna S
(she is the mission nurse)

April 21, 2014

Mom,

I have been sick this whole last week with Dengue fever. I´m not sure how that translates in English, but basically, since last monday I had been having a head ache. I´ve continued with more frequent headaches and then tuesday I had a bad fever. I rested in the mornings, but worked all I could in the afternoons for the first bit of the week, but then on Thursday, I was feeling pretty bad while we were working, so we came back and I called the mission nurse, and she told me to go to the hospital the next day to have an examination for dengue. So, the next day, friday, I went to the hospital, and everyone was on vacations for Semana Santa this week, so I had to go to emergency room and ask for the exam, and they did a urine and a blood exam and like an hour later, they came in and confirmed that I had dengue. So, once we found that out, I was told to stay in my house resting for the next 3 days straight and to take lots of liquids and gatorade and stuff, and we got some helpful medicine. So, the last few days, I´ve been trying to rest and chill so that I can get better, although saturday we had to go back to the hospital for a followup blood test, and we also had our baptism in the afternoon, so we had to go to that, and everything went well there, we had 2 baptisms this weekend, and they are super positive. Other than that, we´ve been hanging out at the house for most of the week. My companion has left me with a priesthood holder and left with another to go work a few times too, so that we keep getting our work done in our area, but it hasn´t been too fun to just stay home a lot right now. I don´t feel too sick or hurting or anything right now though, it´s only if I go out and work that I start feeling sick, and I also have to be careful because my body isn´t very strong to fight off infections and stuff right now. But hopefully I get better this week. But don´t worry, I´m doing fine.

Yes, today, actually, I got your easter package. Thank you, my companion and I will enjoy eating easter candy and making water balloons from the package of balloons to have a water fight on pday.

There´s not much to report other than that. Here´s pics of my new companion and I, and our baptisms this last saturday.

Love,

Elder Ward

April 14, 2014

Dad,

to respond to the questions really quick, things are great in the new area, there is more work to do here than in any of my other areas, and we are always busy with appointments, so we hardly ever contact. We had 2 baptisms this last saturday (I don´t have a memory to USB converter right now, or I would send pics) and we had 9 investigators from our side of the ward come to church this week, plus all their young kids. This should be the most fruitful area in my mission. No, I don´t think that I´ll leave before the end of my mission, which is fine with me. I think that my companion will be leaving next change, and then I´ll get a new companion for the last 2 changes. It´s weird being in my last area and thinking that the end is kind of close, but I´m happy that we will stay busy working hard here. There are 2 types of people here, super rich people that live in gated communities (we also live in a gated community) and the poorer class, which is a lot of people who´ve moved from the deep deep jungle parts of honduras called the Mesquitia, and they have their own tribal language that my companion and I are trying to learn. It would be hard, but we just need to find a dictionary or a bible in mesquita so that I can learn new vocab words. We´ll see if I can learn it at all.

That´s it for now. If you could share this email with mom, I don´t have a ton of time to write to everyone today..

Love,

Elder ward

April 7. 2014

This week, we had changes, and I left Porvenir, Choluteca, and came to Guaymuras, Tegucigalpa, so I´m back in the city again. I´m happy to be in the city again, it was getting way too hot in Choluteca anyways. It is a good area here. The ward seems to be really good, and we´ve already had a lot of help from the members in teaching some great lessons. Even though a lot of people are really rich here, a lot of them are still willing to listen to the gospel when they have time. I´m still here as ZL, and my new zone is a lot smaller than my other zone, we have 12 missionaries, all Elders. We are all really close to each other, so it´s easier in some things. We have a good hardworking Ward Mission Leader too, so we do weekly coorelation meetings and everything, which is something I haven´t really done since I was in the city last like a year ago. This area seems really nice, we always get food from members, including sometimes double lunches or dinners. We also get rides from members too sometimes, which is weird to have rich members who help us too. I think that this area will be nice and we should have a lot of success here. I want to focus on baptizing a family before the end of my mission, because I´ve never had a whole family baptized.

My new companion has been with me since the beginning. He was in my MTC district, but we hadn´t really seen each other for a while on the mission, but now we´re companions, which is awesome because we´re good friends and he is a very hard worker and stays motivated. It´s weird to think that this will proabably be my last area and my second to last companion on my mission, but there´s still plenty of work to do here, so I´m happy that I´ll be able to stay occupied.

Thank you all for all of your support and testimonies. All of you have been great examples to me and have supported me to be here helping others.

Love,

Elder Ward

March 31, 2014

Hey!

This week was pretty good, a missionary from our zone had to go home, which was sad because he was really cool. But my companion went up to Tegus for a couple of days to drop him off so he could come back with his companion, so I stayed with some Elders in my zone, actually I kind of just jumped around from area to area helping wherever I could and doing interviews for people. It was alright though. Other than that, the week was just normal.

This pday we went to the beach. We played volleyball, ran around the beach, and because the tide had washed away a lot of old houses there were lots of old cement structures left all across the beach. Needless to say, I didn´t play volleyball this morning, but I started doing parkour and some flips. For the first time in my mission I did a flip today, and it was great! I just went crazy doing a bunch of old parkour moves like front flips, superman rolls, front handsprings, cartwheels, and I may have jumped off of the 13 foot structure that you´ll see in the last picture. It was super fun though, a friend of mine in my zone also did an arial off of something like 6 ft high. It was fun and we got super sandy. I love the first picture of my front flip that looks like I´m doing a gainer.

I´ll try to send as many pictures as I can right now. I like a lot of the ones we took, I also learned how to climb a coconut tree today, but it´s pretty hard. I was surprized to find that it´s harder to climb down than it is to climb up... so I didn´t go to the top of the tree, I just climbed like 10 feet up to take a good picture. i´ll send the other pics in the next email. It was a fun pday though, but don´t worry, I´ll be careful, I won´t go out on the streets and start doing flips all over, it´s just cuz we were on the beach. I still know how to flip/tuck/land perfectly, in case any of you thought that I forgot how...

Well, that sums up this week, things went well. Next week we will not have much time to work in our area. Tomorrow, we have appointments booked from 10 in the morning til 8 at night, we´re so popular, haha. I don´t know how we ended up with so many appointments already. Wednesday we have changes, and my companion and I have to go up to Tegus and back to help out there. I also may have changes and may leave my area, or I could stay. It´s a 50/50 right now. Either way is fine, I like where I am, but we haven´t had much success recently in our area. Thursday we have to go back to tegus to get ready for our mission leadership meeting that will probably take all of friday. Then saturday and sunday we will have General Conference, which should be awesome, and we should have plenty of investigators that haven´t been able to come to church meetings on sundays be able to come for at least one of the sessions, so that should be good.

Well, that´s my week, with a sneak preview of my next week (in case anyone cares or is too anxious to wait until next week´s episode of the Great Honduran Jungle Adventure;)

Love you all!

Elder Ward

March 24, 2014

Mom,

Actually, sleeping in a hammock gets more and more comfortable the more you do it, the first time I slept on a hammock, it was a little uncomfortable, but now, it´s the only way to stay cool at night. It´s getting hot out here, in 2 weeks it will be the hottest week of the year here. I´m not too excited for that.

Well, next week we may switch houses. We found a house right next to where we´re living right now that looks nice, and we want to move there and let the other missionaries move right into our current house so that they can live in their area, and we can both have nicer houses. We´ll see how it goes though. Tomorrow morning we will go look at the new house, but if we like it we´ll probably move as soon as possible.

Right now we don´t have a ton of positive investigators, we will have to get looking for new ones. We´re getting a little bit more help from the members that live in our area, so hopefully we can find new investigators with their help.

Well, that´s all the news I have for this week.

Love,

Elder Ward

March 17, 2014

Well, this week was a little bit interesting I guess, haha I have stuff to write.

This week we stayed busy. I went on divisions with all 3 of our DLs in our zone. We also had stake conference this week, and the night before they told my companion and I that we had to speak for the adult session on saturday, and then saturday they explained what we should talk about. We gave talks about member missionary work and how the members could help out, so we talked in front of everyone, there were a lot of people there, but I think it went alright. I talked for like 10 minutes, and I think it went alright, but it was a little crazy to talk there.

Then for the sunday session we had a transmition from Utah from Richard G. Scott and Dallin H. Oaks, which was good. Richard G. Scott talked in perfect spanish, and at first I didn´t even recognize that he was speaking spanish, because he had such a good accent.

Also this week, we had our baptism for our 19 year old investigator that came to church because a friend invited him to church and he went like 3 times before we could even find him at his house to teach him. He was positive and says that he has a goal of going on a mission. So, I had my first baptism from a reference in all my mission. The other baptisms that I´ve had were from contacting, haha.

Well, that´s what happened this week with me. It was a good week though, but it was kind of crazy.

It's getting even hotter here now, but I figured out that sleeping outside in our back yard on my hammock, with the fan blowing on me feels really good and I even get to cold to use the fan like half way through the night. I´m probably going to keep sleeping outside from now on.

I hope that you all are doing well and staying strong in the faith. I know that this church is true and that Jesus Christ is our Savior.

Love,

Elder Ward