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

March 10, 2014

Mom,

My life really isn´t all that exciting and there´s not much to say.. We do the same thing all day every day, except for when we have to go to meetings or go with other missionaries to do interviews or divisions. But  I'm happy, well, and safe, no worries. I am enjoying being a missionary, and of course I´m glad that I´m here. I am learning plenty and working hard. It´s just hard expressing what happens typing and I´m not the most talkative person either. Idk... :p 

Well, this week has been pretty good, another trip to Tegus for another meeting that took up a couple of days of our week. We finally got a hold of an investigator that has been to church 3 times by himself, just because a friend invited him and so we`ve been over to try to teach many times buy he was never there until this week when we found him this week and we taught him and he said he wanted to be baptized. So we have a baptismal date for him this saturday, we just need to make sure that we can find him during the week to teach him everything he needs to know. That´s pretty cool though. We also have a few other positive references from some members, so we´re starting to work a lot more with them now.

Other than that, we´ve been doing about the same, things are good here, but there´s not much to report. Today for Pday we played dodgeball with our zone and another one. It was fun, but not everyone wanted to play, so we also put on wreck it ralph, which was a good movie to watch. I liked it. That´s basically what we did this week.

Hope that everything is going well for everyone. I love you all!

Love,

Elder Ward

Arissa,

The biggest holiday here is a weeklong holiday during the hottest time of the year, the holy week (la semana santa in español). It´s like the first week of april, where its super hot and everyone has work off, and everyone goes to the beach to cool down. Everyone eats mangos and is happy. Except for the missionaries, who regardless have to keep working even though everyone´s gone visiting family or at the beach, and the missionaries hang out walking around in the streets in the over 100 degree weather wishing they were dead. That´s one big holiday here.

Have you been wasting all your time playing blob wars now? I kind of miss wasting time, it sounds fun to just sit down and play videogames or watch movies. I kind of miss that. But it´s good to be useful and stay working too.

No, I don´t really go to the temple often, I´ve only been 3 times in my mission, plus the few times I went for the open house.

Love,

Elder ward

March 3, 2014

Mom,

Yeah, the smores was fun, no nobody had tried them before. We had chocolate left over too, so we made milk shakes with milk, bananas, chocolate bar pieces, peanut butter, and oreos. it was pretty delicious, and since we brought all the ingredients, they charged us just for the basic milk shake. Actually less, because they are members and always give us discounts when we buy stuff there. That was pretty cool.

We had zone conference this week and it was pretty good. other than that nothing much happened this last week. Tomorrow we go back up to tegus for another meeting, and we may make a chocolate cake with some members in our ward later this week too. Stay tuned. ;p

It sounds like you and dad had a good time with your hiking trip.

I guess that´s it for this week.

Love,
Elder Ward

Dad,

Things are good, nothing much new, we had a zone conference this week, and president came down south to talk to us, and it went pretty good. We got locked in the church the next day when we had a meeting with the zone and I just asked some secretaries to let us into the building(i didn´t have the keys because our bishop lent them to someone else), but then later during our meeting the secretaries left and locked us in the church and we all just sat there confused for a bit. We had to call another bishop from a different ward to come help us escape, so that was a little interesting. (yes, I was considering jumping the 15 foot wall, but I only climbed to the top of it, but it has spikes on the top.

That´s cool that you and mom could get away for a little bit and go on some hikes and stuff.

What´s up with the alternator, why does it keep dying and dying all the time? Do I get the taurus when I get home??? please? haha, that´s my favorite little car ever, don´t sell it or get rid of it before I get home..

Well, that´s it for this week.

Love,

Elder Ward

February 24, 2014

Mom,

This week we hmmm, we had a marshmallow toast for a s´more activity with investigators and members. It was a good activity, so we´ll probably have to do it again. I`ll include pics of the fire jumping activities we did before a really good testimony meeting. Also, I have a picture of me messing with a laser pointer that I bought from a random kid off the street, I set my camera at a 5 second shutter speed so that I could write stuff with the laser.

We had changes, so I had to go up unnecessarilly to Tegus again, but the bus driver went pretty fast so it only took like 3 hours instead of 4. Our zone had a few changes and now we have another area, so our zone has 20 missionaries again, so the zone`s pretty big now. We all played dodgeball this morning and watched a disney movie at church and it was pretty fun.

Other than that, I don`t really know. We didn`t do much else this week.

But, life`s still good here. We stay plenty busy taking care of the zone, and they`re having plenty of baptisms right now, even if my companion and I aren`t really. Hopefully our work picks up soon though.

Love,

Elder Ward