Tuesday, July 30, 2013

July 29, 2013

This week we had changes (exchanges). My companion left, which was sad because we got along really well and were working hard together. My new companion is from Guatemala and has 6 months in the mission. He is the 3rd companion that I´ve had from Guatemala, and all 3 of them came to Honduras the same day, crazy right? I guess that I´m just always supposed to work with Guatemalans with 6 months less than me, haha. He is 18 years old and seems pretty chill. The elder who was branch president left, and now we have a new elder here in the area who´s from California, just barely starting out. So we have 3 gringos here and we´re going to teach my companion a lot of english, while we teach the new elder spanish. It´s been confusing trying to teach both of them, because the elder and I, who have been here for a few changes have been trying to teach them both how to do things in the branch and here in a new area, but we have to say it once in english and once in spanish and sometimes we get confused to switch between the two.
We had a wedding here in the church on Thursday for some members from a different part of honduras, and we had to help for preparations for that. We also had to explain to the new elders here how stuff works here in the branch. We visited a lot of members during this week. We´ve been working a lot more with the branch and we made visits to a lot of the less active members on Saturday to introduce the new ones and to invite them to come back to church.Yesterday we had the confirmation of the guy we baptized last week, which was cool.
That´s been my week, basically. This next week I hit my 1 year mark, crazy!!
Love you all!
Love,
Elder Ward

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

July 22, 2013

(I included part of my letter to him so you could understand his responses.)

Elder Ward,

What does the mission president ask you about in the interviews? Does he teach you things or does he just ask you questions?

Did you get your package yet?  Missionary Mall replaced your umbrella for free after I showed them the pictures you sent of the umbrella, so thank you!

I didn't realize your church/apartment wasn't in your area.

Thank you for the pictures! Are you still teaching Primary? If so, how is that going?

Love,
Mom


Mom,
The mission president mostly just asks a couple of questions for interviews.
I haven´t gotten my package yet, but they don´t normally send mail the last couple weeks before transfers. I´ll probably be able to pick it up during changes this wednesday.
Yes, I am still teaching primary. It´s going well, I´ve gotten better at it, but I have to prepare more than I was doing before. This week, I bought a lot of new crayons and colored pencils for the kids to draw. We had a whole bunch of broken and tiny crayons and colored pencils before. I also prepared a puzzle out of a picture of the savior as the good shepherd and we had a lesson about shepherds and sheep. It was good, and I showed the story on the whiteboard and let the kids draw sheep and put together the puzzle and stuff like that, so they seemed to like it.
My week hasn´t been super exciting, but it´s been busy. My weeks been kind of crazy, scrambled, all over the place. We have had to do a lot for the branch this week. But we had a baptism this week too! That was cool, but he didn´t come to church to get confirmed. :( But next week he will come. This next week we have transfers, and we will have some big changes here in the area. I´m pretty sure that my companion will be leaving, but we´ll see what happens.
So that´s what´s happening right now. Thank you for telling me about everything that´s been going on.
Love,

Elder Ward


Friday, July 19, 2013

July 15, 2013

Mom,
Thanks for wishing me a happy birthday, it was a good birthday, although nothing really exciting happened. Well, church was good. Our convert from a few weeks ago gave a talk in church about faith that she was nervous about, but we helped her prepare for it, and she did a really good job. We also had the confirmation for the son of the lady we've been teaching. They were both supposed to get baptized this week, but she didn´t pass the baptismal interview yet, but her son still wanted to get baptized this week. I imagine that she´ll get baptized later on in this month. The baptism went well though. We had interviews with the Mission President this week, which went well. Its rained a couple of times... Idk. That´s all the news that I have, its not that I don´t have time to email, life´s just pretty much the same all the time here. Yesterday we went house hunting for a family in the branch that had to leave their house (their landlord insisted they leave today), so we went and searched all over yuscaran for houses for this family. It was really hot this week. I don´t know what else to write. Nothing much happened.
I guess I´ll answer some questions:
We haven´t taught a ton this week, it´s been busy with other stuff, we´ve barely had time to visit the investigators and recent converts and members that we have to help right now that we haven´t had any time for a long time to look for new investigators. Our area is farther away from the church, we actually live in the other elders´ area and we have to walk like 10 minutes to get into our area, and another 10 minutes to visit the nearest member or investigator in our area. We walk quite a bit on this little dirt road all the time. For little stuff, we´ll buy from the little stores that people have in their houses called pulperias. If we need something like specific, we´ll go to tegus to a supermarket. I don´t think that there are any more festivals until independence day in september.
Here´s some pictures of the baptism. And a pic of me on a bridge in our area.







Friday, July 12, 2013

July 9, 2013

I don´t know if you have some of these or not, but here's some pictures from a while ago.




Monday, July 8, 2013

July 8, 2013

Mom,
Thanks for wishing me a happy birthday, it´s crazy that I´ve been away for such a long time!
And thank you sending a package, I´m sure it will get here relatively soon.
Well this Jehovah´s Witness lady and her son are getting baptized this saturday!!! (I hope). The whole family came to church this week, her and her 4 kids. We just need to finish teaching and have the interview.
I´m attaching some pictures of the umbrella right now. Thank you for sending another.
Well, I feel kind of boring this week, but nothing happened.
Love,

Elder Ward



July 1, 2013

Mom,
This week has been good. Nothing too exciting, but here´s my update that I sent to dad:
Yeah, the baptism was good. We aren´t teaching her family, her mom always says that she´s busy, and her kids are toddlers. But she is helping us to find references to teach. We are teaching a 16 year old girl that lives next to her, which is perfect because we can reteach the lessons to her and teach the lessons for the first time to this teenage girl. This same girl also came to my english class this week. The english class was good. We only had one this week, because no one showed up the first class. The class that we did teach, we were actually on divisions, so my zone leader was here with me, and he´s a gringo too, so he helped teach the class. We had 4 people come this week, all of them were teenagers, but we´re going to advertise a little more to have more people come. It went alright though. We taught something simple. We´ll see how it goes and if we get a group to consistently come to the class.
We´re also teaching a lady who was a Jehovah´s Witness, until she met us, that is. She is pretty positive for baptism. She already has received a testimony that the church is true, but it is hard for her to believe that there is more than just the bible, or why we need revelation in these days. But we´ve been teaching and bit by bit she´s learning. It´s pretty cool. She didn´t come to church yesterday though. None of our investigators did. That was kind of a bummer. Especially when the other pair of Elders in our area brought 20 investigators to church... haha, we had 46 people come to church this last week, a new record. The other elders are visiting this village that´s like 3 hours away walking to visit some people. There´s a huge family there that they´re teaching, and they brought 20 people of that family to church this week by renting a bus to drive them all over here and back. So that was cool.
That´s about all that´s happened recently. Nothing too crazy going on. There´s been a ton of rain lately, and thunderstorms. We had to stay with some investigators in their house for a couple hours during a big rain storm this saturday. They live super far away from where we live, like almost half an hour walking, and we were visiting them at night before we went home, and it started to rain super hard, and of course the power goes out, because any time it starts to rain the power dies here. So we chilled with them for a little bit. Then we left and had to walk back in the drizzling rain with the flashlight that I always have to carry around. My nice umbrella broke too. It was spring loaded, so all you do is push a button to open it, but one day it got stuck, so I pushed the button repeatedly and the spring exploded and half the umbrella shot out of my hand. The spring is like 3 feet long, so there´s like no way that I can put it back in, so I´ll have to invent a new way to keep it open, we´ll see.
That´s about it for now. It was a good week though.
It sounds like you all are doing well!
Love,
Elder Ward


June 24, 2013

the pictures are first: our room, second: the office, and third: the primary room




these are of the church´s outside, and the sacrament meeting room



4 kids from a branch activity


A birthday party that we went to, and talked to some members and friends.




Hello Everyone,
This week has been good, my companion and I had our first baptism here in Yuscaran! This Saturday we went back up into the woods for another baptismal service in our favorite little pool that we dammed up on Friday in this little stream. I got to do the baptism, the water was pretty frigid, but it was a good experience. The lady is 24 years old and we´ve been teaching her for only about a month. She felt the spirit when we watched the Joseph Smith video together, but didn´t tell us until the next visit that she had been touched so much by the video. She progressed a ton, and stopped drinking coffee and made a lot of other sacrifices to join the church. She said that she had always been searching for a church that would help her to change to become a different, new person. She didn´t want to go to a church just to go, but to change. it´s been neat to see the changes that she´s been willing to make.
Things have been well in our little branch here. It´s been growing too. Before we only had like 25 people each week come to church. But last week we had 32 people, and yesterday we hit our new record, 39!! We´ve had a lot of investigators coming too, which has been great! I gave another talk this week in Sacrament Meeting that went well. In the branch we´ve been trying to reorganize a lot of the leadership in the church to help the members become more responsible and have opportunities to serve as leaders. So we called a new Relief Society Presidency and have been working with them to help them go out and do visits, and we are trying to work with the few priesthood holders that we have in the branch to form a better Elders Quorum Presidency.
We have a few investigators right now that seem positive. We have one couple that we are teaching, and we went Saturday morning to help this investigator clear out this field to plant beans there. That was a service project that I hadn´t ever done before.. We´re also teaching a Jehovah´s Witness member. That´s been a little interesting. But she said that it´s possible that Joseph Smith could have been called by God to be a prophet, but she wants to learn more. She came to church yesterday, so that´s a good sign.
One morning I decided to build a little obstacle course in the little church patio that we have out of blocks and rocks so that I could do some parkour jumps, precisions, and exercises. That was pretty fun. 
I think that we´re going to start teaching English classes this week, because so many investigators and members have requested it recently. We´ll see how that goes...
Well, that´s all that I can think of for the stuff that´s happened this week. Things are going well, and I´m always learning more and strengthening my testimony of the gospel. I know that this church is true and that it gives us happiness and helps us to become converted to Jesus Christ. We can only change through Him and His Atonement. There is only 1 path in this life that we should follow to gain the Eternal Life, and that path is through Him.
Love,
Elder Ward


June 18, 2013

[Sorry we had some problems posting to the blog, but we should be up and running again now--Tiauna.]


Mom,
Sorry that I couldn´t email yesterday. I didn´t have much time yesterday, I only had the chance to get on, write to the mission president, and read all of the letters that I had in my inbox, and then we had to go to a FHE with some members, so I had to go, and respond today...
Thank you for your prayers and all of your help and care for me.
That´s cool that you met Kate at Seagull Book. She´s been working there for a long time now... She was one of my friends in my high school group. She´s in quinn, tiffany, and brianna´s ward in Lindon. She also went to Timp Academy, but was a year younger than I.
We can´t read just any LDS author book. We can only read scriptures, PMG, Jesus the Christ, and some like church manuals and things like specifically from the church.
Nothing changed here in Yuscarán for changes. Everyone stayed the same.
Things are good here, and I think that we´ll have a baptism this next Saturday. We have this super cool investigator that´s all ready. We had 32 people come to sacrament meeting yesterday! New record! Before we only had like 27 people each week. But we had 6 of our investigators come for church on sunday, it was awesome! (well, technically only 4, and 2 kids, but still)...
Things are going good here.
I hope that everything´s good there.
Love,
Elder Ward