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!

April 1, 2013

Mom,

I´ve used a lot of time with pictures, so I´ll just be able to paste a little of what I wrote to mishelae:

We were using internet in a cyber café last monday when the power died because of the crazy rain/lightning storm we had. First the internet went out and I was trying to get the email that I wrote to averi to send, but it wouldn´t let me. Then the whole room with all of the computers just went dark because the power went out. We had this crazy and unexpected rainstorm hit. Everyone in Centro (the main shopping place) was hiding in all of the buildings because the rain was coming down really hard, and the streets were all flooding too. We still left in this crazy rain storm, and everyone looked at us really weird when we told them that we were going to go out in the storm. But we just covered all of the stuff in our backpacks (we always carry extra plastic bags, just in case) and ran out through the empty streets of Centro just around the corner to the grocery store where we were going to buy food. There was a wall of people lined up at the doors, and the store was packed with people escaping the rain, so we didn´t end up going shopping then. We already got drenched just running around the corner, so we just gave up and continued running through the streets for like 15 minutes before we found an empty taxi. So that was a little adventurous. The power outage was a lot of the city, including our area, so we couldn´t work when we got back to our area monday night, because there weren´t any street lamps on, so everywhere becomes a lot more dangerous. So we went home and studied in the candlelight. The power didn´t come back until after we went to bed, so it lasted for over 6 hours I think. Normally in the city that doesn´t happen. In the south, that will probably happen like every other day. But it was kind of fun to use candles to study that night, and look over the city in almost complete darkness.

So that was kind of fun.

We are getting ready for general conference this next week, I still have to finish the BofM in spanish before this weekend for my goal. We might have another baptism soon.

Love,

Elder Ward

March 25, 2013

Mom,

avocados are my favorite now, because they taste super good. There´s no better reason than that, right?

My area just got split up into 3 areas this week. I´ll share an excerpt from the email that I sent to dad:

Transfers are every 6 week, and always on a wednesday. I didn´t leave this change. I thought that I might. I´ve already been here for almost 6 months, but I guess that I´ll be here a little bit longer. We have an area right next to ours that´s called Hibueras that just opened up again, but the elders coming in didn´t have a house to go to to live. So they had to come live in our house for a little while while they tried to find a place to live in their area. So we brought them back, and showed them around their area and introduced them to a couple of the members that we knew there. We also had to give up one of our most positive investigators that lives there in Hibueras. But they lived in our house for like 4 days. they found a place and left saturday. It was super crowded in our house for a little while. We had all of the stuff that they were going to have from the mission there too, so we put down their new mattresses on our main room floor for them to sleep. It was a little annoying for a little bit not having any space, and the worst part was trying to plan showering with 4 people when we have to boil water for each one, but we got it figured out. But that was our adventure for this week. We are also starting out with a new zone and a few new areas have opened up in this zone, so we have a few new people, but a lot of the elders here are still the same.

Other than that, nothing too new or exciting is going on. We´re just continuing working, like always.

I thought that it was weird that Ben used to have to wear suit coats all the time. That would be awful here in Honduras. These last few weeks have been super hot. This week that´s starting will be the hottest week of the year here in Honduras. It is called the ¨Semana Santa¨ or the Holy Week, in English. But almost everyone will have work off this week, and can go and visit family or whatever. But it has been super hot recently, and my body just loves sweating and sweating and sweating, all day every day. But it´s alright. I´m used to it by now.

That´s about all that I can think of for this week. I hope that you´re all doing well!

Love,

Elder Ward

March 18, 2013

Dear everybody,

Today I think that I´ll just copy my thoughts and impressions from yesterday´s temple dedication with you all, directly from my journal entry because it will be easier than trying to write it all again, so here we go:

Today was the dedication of the Honduras Tegucigalpa Temple. I woke up early today and got ready to go. My companion and I stayed for all 3 of the dedicatory sessions. They were all good, and I enjoyed the spirit that there was for each one, but particularly I enjoyed the third session, where Elder Holland and President Uchtdorf both gave super good talks. Elder Holland spoke of the importance of temples and family history work. He spoke about how temples are important because first we do ordinances and make covenants for ourselves, and then afterwards, we do this work for those in the past that can´t do it for themselves. He talked about how we need to go to the temple even if we don´t want to, or if we don´t feel like it because we need to feel the peace from the temple and its comfort. A lot of the things he said I already knew the concept of, but still, the advice is just as necessary for me being a missionary as it is for the rest of the people here in Honduras listening to this message. Even though I knew a lot of the things that he was saying, he said things in a way that was more clear and made a lot of sense to me of how temples work and why temples are so important and how much it helps us to go. He said that we will feel the calm, peace, and spirit that we need when we go to the temple and explained that we develop Christlike attributes when we go to the temple and help others that can´t progress and need our help. He said something about us becoming in a small way other people´s saviors. He talked about the joy that we will find as we find our ancestor´s names and do their temple work, and then he said something that I liked a lot: ¨Welcome to the thrill of becoming saviors¨. At that point, it made sense to me how we are saving people by going to the temple, and that´s how we become more like the Savior. How if we want to become like Christ, we should go to the temple. So that was a cool quote. Then as he continued his talk, at one point, he stopped using the translator to talk to the people. He paused... Then a silence came over the room that I don´t know how to describe, but the spirit was there as Elder Holland started bearing his testimony in Spanish, with as much power and confidence as he ever would have in English, he spoke to the audience directly in their own language. It was simple, it was slow and enunciated and not all of it was pronounced exactly proper in Spanish, but it had such power and caught me off guard that my heart like skipped a beat or something weird. That sounds like a weird way to describe it, but I can´t really think of a better way, it sounds a little weird, but now I understand why a missionary can have such power just bearing a simple testimony with what little they know of a foreign language. So that was a good experience.

Then President Uchtdorf spoke to us about sitting in the cockpit with the pilots as they flew in to Honduras, and as they landed the airplane on the airport runway here in Tegucigalpa which is a little sketchy apparently (supposedly it´s the 2nd most dangerous airport in the world, but idk, I didn´t notice when I landed here), but he said something like ¨I´m glad that I didn´t have to land the plane on that landing¨, and talked about the pilots he met as he flew in to the city. Even in Honduras he will still add in airplane comments to his talk. ;) He continued to talk to us about how pilots will lead us to our destination and about the symbolism of the temple and that we should focus on the symbolism of the ordinances and not the architecture of the building. He also talked about how there are 2 types of sins, and this was something that I had never thought of before, there are sins against God, and there are sins against our fellow men. Then he quoted the scripture of the 2 greatest commandments that the Savior listed in the bible: to love God, and to love our neighbors. So if we love God we won´t sin against Him, and the same for our neighbors in life. So if we truly love God and everyone else, we won´t have any desire to sin. So the dedication was super good, and I am glad that I went to all 3 sessions.

So that was my journal entry for yesterday´s dedication. It was super good and I learned a ton there! We also went to the cultural night broadcast at our stake center, and we watched all of the dances of the youth from all of the stakes from all over Honduras, and that was pretty good.  We apparently are not going to have a meeting with President Uchtdorf or Elder Holland like we thought we would. Originally they said that we would, and for a lot of the dedications they do have a special missionary meeting, but I guess that they weren´t able to this time or something. That´s too bad. We woke up this morning and thought that we were going to get to see them today, because we got a text that said that we had to dress up in our suits and come to the big church in the middle of Teguz where we normally have all of our meetings, but it turned out that we just listened to a psychiatrist missionary couple that are over all of Central America, they were probably here for the dedication yesterday, so they would be in Honduras to meet with us and teach us. It was a little disappointing to get up early and go to this meeting and find out that we weren´t going to be able to hear from the general authorities, and to have a meeting on P-day too. Looks like I get to wash my clothes by hand tomorrow morning instead of today...

That´s about all that happened this week that was exciting. But now we have a dedicated temple 45 minutes away from my area. Hopefully we get to go a few times and do some sessions. This next week we have changes (missionary transfers), and I don´t know if I´ll stay or leave. I have 4 changes already in the same area, and normally missionaries don´t have longer than 4, but at the same time I am training a new missionary, which is normally for 2 changes. But my companion already started his training in Guatemala before he came to this mission, so I´m not sure what will happen. Either way is fine with me, we´ll just have to wait and see.

Well, I hope that you are all doing awesome!

Love,

Elder Ward

Mom,

Yes, my missionary tag says ´Elder Ward´.

Baleadas are a honduran food that has tortillas, mantequilla (a creamy butter), beans, and eggs. That´s just for a basic baleada. If you want you can add fried platanos (banana things that you fry), avacado (my favorite vegetable now), and meats.

Dough soup is like soup with balls of fried dough in it. It wasn´t bad, but I liked the fried balls of dough plain better. We also this week went with a member and learned how to make spaghetti better, the sauce is sweeter how they make it here in honduras, and we made scrambled eggs with sliced up onions, tomatoes, and chili peppers.
We have a few investigators right now, but we are going to lose a couple of them when we get 4 new missionaries in our area to open up different areas. Right now our area has 3 basic areas: reparto, el hatillo, and hibueras, which they closed in like november because it was too dangerous for missionaries, so it was added to our area, but we hardly worked there because Í don´t like going there and having everyone beg me for money because I´m the only gringo they´ve seen in a long time because only latin missionaries were assigned there before. But they are going to reopen Hibueras, with latin missionaries I´m sure, they´ll also be the ZL´s of the new zone that´s opening up as our zone splits because it´s gotten too big. Then the super rich part of our area, El Hatillo, will open up with a couple of missionaries starting there, so our area right now is really big, but after this next week with the missionary changes, our area will be pretty small.

Well, this week really hasn´t been all that exciting, aside from the dedication which I already wrote about.

Love,

Elder Ward