Highlights from email sent to Arissa

Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2013

Arissa,

I have been good, doing missionary stuffs, like reading the scriptures, studying, going out and talking to people and sharing the gospel, all in spanish.

I do like it here. It´s a fun change from my life before, its a lot different here, but at the same time, it´s pretty much all the same.

The environment is a lot different, and the culture and the people are different than in the US, but what people want, and things that people do are almost always the same. Everyone has the same needs and wants everywhere in the world, but in different places people will do different things to get what they want and need. Like people here in Honduras will do things differently than people in the states, but everyone wants the same things in life.

So it´s definitely interesting to see how that works and to know that I can help people by teaching the gospel, and to see how going to church and reading the scriptures, and praying and all of those things will change how people see themselves and they will change their lives because of the gospel. So that´s cool. That´s been my favorite part of my mission.

Enjoy school while you have it!

Love,

Elder Ward

Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2013

Arissa,

I miss a lot of things about home, namely:

-Running water

-Soft carpet

-Couches that aren´t broken and falling apart

-Jumping on trampolines

-Running

-Watching movies

-Hanging out with friends

-Being able to go out and be alone

-Grass

-Family

-Friends

-Captain Crunch

-Dairy products like cheese and milk that actually taste normal

-Music

-Scuba diving (not really, that one´s a joke)

Yep, that´s my list for now. Hope that you enjoyed it.

I miss you too,

Love,

Elder Ward

Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2013

Arissa,

I do missionary stuff here. I talk to people in spanish and teach lessons, and try not to get hit by crazy car drivers :)

I have a lot of cool experiences. One simple one is that yesterday we were having a lesson with an investigator whose wife is a member, and were teaching him about the plan of salvation and that his family could be eternal if he follows our Heavenly Father´s plan for him in his life. Then, his wife bore her testimony about how she knew that this was what they needed to do, both of them. She talked about how she had a point in her life when she knew that they would be ready to go to the temple and be sealed together to be together forever, and the spirit was super strong and the spirit bore witness to me that I was changing people´s lives, and that the temple is the key to everything, all of the blessings that these people want and need in their lives. So that was a cool experience. I really think that this investigator is going to get baptized, so I´m excited about that.

I love you too,

Love,

Elder Ward

Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2013

Arissa,

I have not personally baptized anyone yet. My first companion baptized one of our investigators, but that´s the only baptism that we´ve had so far.

Hmm, what else have I done?? This week we made baleadas with another group of elders, that went well, and now I know how to make my own tortillas. We also have been talking to our ward mission leader about how to divide our ward boundaries and the areas that we´re working in. This next week, they are going to add more missionaries to where we are serving. The area where I am serving now will have 6 missionaries in a week, instead of just the 2 that we have now. Also our zone is going to get split up into 2 zones with all of the new missionaries coming in. The next changes we will have more sister missionaries coming into the mission than elders coming in, which is a little bit crazy.

That´s about all of my news.

Yes, I´m having a pretty good time. I am tired, we´ve been walking a lot recently.

Love,

Elder Ward

March 11, 2013

(this email is answers to a bunch of questions)

Mom,

The spanish word for Elder is anciano, but we always use the english word elder in spanish in the LDS church. That´s the word that the BofM uses and the ¨quorum de los elderes¨ in church.

I haven´t found my ranch yet, but I need to go to the other supermarket that would probably have it.

I make rice with salt and butter and a complete seasoning that i bought that has like onion, garlic, salt, and some other spices. I have a pretty good spice set now, and I started using the toaster that´s been buried in our kitchen for awhile to make garlic bread and toast with cinnamon sugar.

Also this week, we made baleadas with some of the other elders, and we made the tortillas from scratch, which turned out well. I learned how to fry platanos, and we made some good baleadas.

Also we learned how to make dough soup from a member this week, but I´m not sure if I could duplicate it all.

A lot of people from our mission too say that they´ve already been baptized. Then we have to explain about the priesthood and stuff, but most people don´t like the thought of having to be baptized again.

You can buy meats here, but they are a lot more expensive. I hardly eat meat here. We do get fresh foods though.

I hope everythings going well.

Love,

Elder Ward

Dad,

Yeah I know, I´m super excited for the dedication. It will be awesome.

Platanos, yeah you can probably fry them twice, they only fry them once here, after slicing them into thin little pieces, but I think that in other cultures they might mash them up and fry them again.

This week (yesterday) we had a soup with one of the members of the stake presidency, just my companion and I. We went up to the rich neighborhood in our area where he lives and had a seafood soup with a big old crab sitting there in the middle of my soup. I had no idea how to eat it, so I just ate everything else in the soup and left it. They didn´t seem to mind that my companion and I didn´t eat our crabs.

We also had to walk back to our house from that appointment yesterday, which is from the farthest part of our area, and we didn´t have money for a bus, because it was sunday, so we walked about an hour and a half to get back. That was a long walk.

Love,

Elder Ward

March 4, 2013

Mom,

Well, still nothing super exciting has happened this week. Today we went to an art museum with another couple of elders and we took some pictures there. It wasn´t huge, but it had a little tour and stuff. That´s about as new and exciting as it gets. Here´s a little bit of what I told dad today in his email:

No the new mission hasn´t been created yet, I haven´t heard much more about it recently. I have no idea how it will be decided in the end. I found on the church website a list of the new missions that will be added soon, and the Honduras San Pedro Sula West mission will open up here I guess. I didn´t know that until today. So, it might not affect me as much as I thought, since the san pedro mission is up at the top of honduras. We´ll have to wait and see.

We went one more time to the temple with one of our investigators. We went in his car because he didn't want to take the bus, and had to give a ride to one of his friends on the way... I don´t really know if he liked it or not, he didn´t act super impressed and didn´t comment on it when we asked him about it. We haven´t been able to talk to him since, so we´ll see.

The dedication is the 17th of March. We are excited about that. We´ll probably watch it in our stake center, we already have the little card to get in to see it. And I think that the monday afterwards, we are going to have a special missionary meeting with Pres. Uchtdorf and Elder Holland, so that will be cool.

We have investigators right now, but not many are progressing, so we´re going to focus on finding new people to teach. We are supposed to be getting some references to contact from the people who have filled out a little survey after going through the temple that have said that they wanted to be visited, so we´ll see if we get a lot of references there.

Things with my companion are good. We´re still working hard, but it´s kind of tough being senior companion. It´s hard to plan what to do all day every day, and to keep both of us motivated to work hard and not take unneccesary breaks.

But things are good right now. We´re trying to learn how to cook new things now. So we bought a whole bunch of new foods last week to try to cook. I bought some new spices, and a bunch of vegetables. Veggies here are actually super cheap, I didn´t think they would be. For example: I bought an avocado for 11 lempira, a cucumber for 4, an onion for 5, a whole carrot for 3, a banana for 2, (20 lempiras is $1) so things are pretty cheap to buy. I made a salad last night, and it was pretty good, except the lettuce here is a little weird. I just bought a whole head of lettuce and pealed off the leaves, but I think I´ll have to see if they have prepackaged good lettuce to use. I also am going to try to go to a different store to find some ranch dressing, cuz plain salad is kind of bland. And I finally learned how to make rice right, with flavoring and stuff, because before i just made white rice and water, and cooked it. But now I learned to make good rice. This week I think that we´re going to try to make baleadas, a Honduras specialty, as well as fry platanos, which are shaped like bananas, but taste more like potatoes, but sweeter.

Things have been good here. I hope everyone´s healthy and happy there!

Love,

Elder Ward

Feb. 25, 2013

Mom,

My week wasn´t exciting last week, and I didn´t have a lot of time to write. This week hasn´t been all that exciting either. We had zone conference this week, and my companion and I brought investigators to the temple twice this week. There were supposed to be buses from the stake center, but both times that we went, there weren´t buses so we had to pay for taxis, it was pretty expensive, but I´ll get it reimbursed by the mission later. Saturday it was super crowded at the temple, the line was huge, there were like 50 buses that arrived that morning for field trips from high school aged students. So we stood in line to go through the temple for over an hour, and my face got sunburnt just from standing in line outside of the temple waiting. Not much else has happened. We only have one week left for people to come to the open house, so we´re going to be inviting and going with more people to the temple before it closes.

That´s all that´s happened.

Love,

Elder Ward


(we were online at the same time)

Elder Ward,

How do you like your companion?

Do high school kids go to school on Saturday?

Have you eaten any interesting foods lately?

How was church?  How is it different from our church?

Are you happy?  Do you like being a missionary?

Are bad things happening, so that is why you don't say much?

I love you!  I want to hear more!

Love,
Mom


Mom,

My new companion is good. It is hard to be senior companion, but I am learning a lot from having to take charge, and make sure that we are following all of the rules and being effective in our work.

I don´t know why the school buses came on saturday, it was weird to me too. Maybe only their field trips are on Saturdays.

I haven´t eaten weird foods lately, we almost always eat in the house, 3 meals a day, 7 days a week. This week we ate lunch with a member-rice with vegetables and chicken stirred in, and we also had 2 members give us dinner on saturday, so we had double dinner that day. We also got fed lunch for the zone conference. Other than that, we always ate at home every day, but that´s okay, I like cup of soups.

Church is... Idk, its church. It´s different, but basically the same. I don´t know how to describe it very well.

Yeah, I´m happy, I´m tired right now. I spent all morning scrubbing laundry, so I´m not jumping up and down bubbly, and there really isn´t all that much new happening to write about.

No, bad things aren´t happening. Things are good, my companion and I are working hard, and the days/weeks are flying by. But things are good.

Love,

Elder Ward

Feb. 18, 2013

Dear Mom,

The temple´s dedication is on March 17th. All of this month is the open house, and we´ve been inviting everyone to go. We went again this saturday for the second time through the tour, with an investigator. So that was good.

The references that we got were from the members. Each of the members in all of the wards in Teguz were asked to give references to get invitations to go to the temple. But it´s been really tough to try to find the directions.

There is no celebration of Valentine´s day here.

Nothing else super exciting has happened.

Love,

Elder Ward

Feb. 11, 2013 Pictures

                          Our recent convert, who we baptized in November, and his niece.

     This picture is of me under a huge tree with this one branch that leaned over like 30 feet straight.

                 This is of our bus ride to the temple, with a lot of members from the stake.

        Pictures of the temple that we took Saturday, when we went through for the open house.

I took a few pictures at the temple. It doesn´t seem like my camera took super good quality pictures here to me though, idk. But here´s what I got.

Feb. 11, 2013

Dear everyone,

Well, this week has been a little bit crazy, but it has been good!

Monday we had a family home evening with some members and their nonmember friends, and we dedicated the house that they had just finished. So that was cool, and I had never done anything like that before, but it went well, and we taught a good lesson about families, and talked about ´The Family: A Proclamation to the World´ with all of them. Also this week, we had changes, and Elder Evans left to go to an area further south in the mission and he is training 2 new missionaries now. And I am also training now!!! Wednesday morning we went to the church that all of the Elders go to that have changes. We met with all of the Elders who were told that they would train, and all of the new Elders that flew in on Monday. There was a big group that came in this time, with like 25 latins, and only 1 gringo that came in. We had a little meeting with the President and his wife speaking to us, and afterwards the mission president assigned us to our new companions. I am now working with Elder Jaurez, from Guatemala. He is 18 years old, and spent 2 weeks in the Guatemala MTC, and then he served for about a month in Guatemala before he came to Honduras. I don´t have a picture with him yet, I know, I´m a slacker... But it has been interesting to work with a latin companion. I have had to learn a lot of Spanish in the last few days to be able to communicate with him well and explain everything to him. It has been a good change, and I am learning a ton of new stuff, now that I am the senion companion, and have to make all of the decisions and plan everything that we do together. I have had to step it up a little bit with taking charge and talking to everybody, all of our investigators, and the members, and that´s been a big responsibility on me. But it has been good. This week has been super hard, but I have learned a lot already, and I really do feel like my Spanish has gotten a lot better this week, since I don´t speak English to anyone anymore, and since I have to talk a lot of Spanish with my companion, with members, and investigators. My companion is good, he is willing and ready to work hard, which is good. We´ve been focusing on companionship study a lot, and we are trying to do the new missionary training program called the first 12 weeks, which is a bunch of training activities that they do in the mission, instead of teaching it all in the MTC. I am also working on helping my companion learn English. He wants to learn, and it is something that the latin Elders are supposed to focus on during their missions. So for language study, every day we´ve been working on helping him learn more English. It has been interesting to try to teach it, but it´s been good. He already knows a pretty good amount of the basics. So this week we have been working on inviting a lot of the people to go to the temple for the open house. This is the focus of missionary work in the city areas of our mission. We received a list of over 300 people in our area that we can contact who are less active members or just a bunch of random people. We are trying to visit these people and invite them to the temple, and also try to get references and find people to teach, because most of these people are part member families, so we are working to do that right now. It is hard to find any of these people, because almost all of the addresses that we have are just complete garbage, so it is difficult to find them with just general locations written. On Saturday, the temple opened to the public, to go in and see it for the open house, so we went with the stake to go see it. It is super nice their, like all temples, they did a really good job. I just barely finished sending mom a bunch of the pictures of the outside of the temple that we took. We went through the tour, and we got to help some people go through who were in wheelchairs, so it was good to help them, and talk to them a little bit.

This morning we had to wash clothes again by hand, because the lady in our ward who used to wash our clothes said that she couldn´t do it for us anymore. I think that she just stopped because Elder Evans was leaving... But Idk. We´re trying to find somebody else to help us, so that we don´t have to waste half of our P-days to go out back and wash all of our clothes. Hopefully we can find someone.

That´s about it for this week. Things are good here, and we are working hard. I am super tired now, but that´s okay. That´s how missionary work should be.

Love you all!

Love,

Elder Ward