Week #58 - How to Train Your Greenie (Seis de Mayo)

Hola familia y todos!

Well another great hot week in Honduras, and this week was pretty interesting. So, since we knew that Elder Porter was leaving we ended up saying good bye a lot on Monday and Tuesday, teaching at the same time but also saying goodbye. On Wednesday we had changes and we walk in and I started talking to everybody and there was a rumor going around that I would be training. Elder Ellett, one of the APs, asked me if I was excited and I said yes and he said “you should be!” bah  Elder Ellett is stinking awesome! We were in Colon Zone together and I love that guy to death. He played baseball for Harvard and is really humble.

I was super nervous the entire time and there were only 8 new elders that came in this month, so the meeting goes through and all the newbies get their comps except for one. We got some awesome elders in our zone with these changes. Elder Hafen, a friend of mine from Fesi, is the new ZL here and he is so awesome! Anyways, so we get near the end and Pres. asks if that was it. I knew he did it to mess with me, cause the next change he said was Elder Ward was coming with me and that I was training! Everyone was excited and afterwards everyone was congratulating me, but Elder Elison was ecstatic. I got to meet his dad and I sent my extra suit and my broken camera with him and he said he would call tomorrow. Before we left the three of us took a pic as a mission “family” (ie. grandfather, father & son) it was awesome!

Elder Ward is from Spokane Washington. He’s got a twin brother in Guatemala and he is super excited to work. He’s having a hard time with Spanish, but he wants to work, which is great. He wants to be exact with everything we do, but we can be obedient and also have fun at the same time. Obviously he is still adjusting, but I feel like he needs to loosen up a little bit, so we´ll see what happens. Well they got rid of zone meetings and now we are starting zone conferences, and we are doing ours with Fesitranh! I’ll get to see Elder Anderson again so that will be fun. We’ll have interviews this change as well so that should be good.

Regarding my stomach issues, some days are fine and others aren’t. The cooks have been using oil instead of lard, but the only thing is I just get an upset stomach where I can’t finish the food like I really want to but whatevs, I’m losing weight! Right now we have a few investigators that are progressing but only 4 went to church this week. We were expecting more but we couldn’t really do anything about it. A lot of people are scared of going to church because the chapel is in a “dangerous” part of the area, but I haven’t seen anything happen around there yet. This week is general conference and we are super excited! We want to take a whole bunch of people so hopefully we can get our investigators to go. I hope everything is great back home and that everyone is having a great time,

Nos Vemos!

Elder Neher

Week #57 - Folklore Fun (Seis de Mayo)

Hola familia y amigos!

So this week was better, my stomach was iffy at the beginning of the week and I just didn’t want to eat any of the food, but I made pasta and stuff at home that we found at a supermarket, which held up fine. Lately my stomach has felt fine but I am almost positive that it is all the shortening/lard that they use to cook that is killing me. Hopefully I am cured of whatever I had. This week was another ho hum week, some days my stomach was fine, then it would turn for the worse and react to something and I wouldn’t want to walk as much as I had. This week went by really fast so a lot of the details are mixed up in my head haha! 

So we have been trying to find new people to teach and we have found a couple new families to teach, which should be awesome.They seem really excited and are waiting for us every time we show up. We mentioned General Conference because its coming up soon (I’m SO EXCITED!) and they want to go and asked us when and all the details. I’m so stoked for conference! 

This week we haven’t been able to find one of our investigators that seemed really pumped at first, so I hope this week we can find him again. We have one investigator, Carmen, who goes to church every week and she says that this is the only church that she will go to, and she wants to get baptized, however her husband doesn’t want to get married, which stinks! We want to talk to him but he is never home and they don’t even live together, but he passes by every day and we never see him. Hopefully we can change it cause Carmen is super pilas as well. 

Well this week the stake had a huge folklore festival and everyone but our ward knew about it and had 2 months to prepare and we only had 3 days (lame) but it was AWESOME. Each ward had a different department (state) of Honduras and they had to prepare a dance from that state and food. They made us missionaries to be the judges of the food and they gave us SO MUCH! It was really cool to see everything, but the best part of the activity was seeing the typical dances of Honduras. I got clips of all of them and they were really cool. There were dances from the Garifunas (the native balck people of Honduras) from the little pueblos, it was so cool, I really enjoyed it. We spent the entire day at that activity and when we got home we found out that someone had been killed, nowhere near any of us. Later we found out it was the husband of one of our investigators that hasn’t been progressing that great. It’s a really sad situation, but we hope to teach her about the plan of salvation and that it will help her. 

One thing we were able to get this week was that a lot of inactives went to the activity and then to church this last week, which was awesome because some of them have been inactive for a while. This week is changes, and Elder Porter will be leaving. For some reason I feel like I’ll be training, which should be interesting haha, I just hope I can do a good job! This next change I hope to be able to work a lot here and to get some work done! 

You know something I realized? Getting baggy (trunky) is dumb and elders get baggy for the dumbest reasons, like seeing a couple kissing in the street, hearing a song or hearing news of something back home, like sports. But I think it’s all dumb. It just shows where your mind is. Granted, sometimes I think of things from back home too, but I don’t dwell on it and I don’t make a fuss about it all the time. I just think the concept is dumb. I’ll be home sooner or later and then I will be able to catch up on everything. I just think missionaries should stay focused on the work. Well I hope everyone has a great week and that all goes well with everything!

Con amor,

Elder Neher

Week #56 - Nasty Nance (Seis de Mayo)

Hola familia y amigos!

Well, quite honestly, this had to have been the worst week of my mission thus far, but before I go into the details of this week some news. Elder Anderson told me today that Jose, from Jose and Yadira (super pilas family) doesn’t want to go to church at all and is set on it. It’s because they went to a stake activity for couples and there was a dance and some other things. I think someone got to him and influenced him (one thing about the evangelic churches here is that a lot of them disapprove dancing, which is absolutely dumb and I don’t understand why). So I have been a little worried about him and how his wife is taking it. I was planning on writing them a letter soon but now there is a bigger urgency to do so.

On another note, this week we had a baptism! Elvin, a 19 year old black guy we contacted got baptized and he is super pilas. I don’t remember if I mentioned it last week, but he has basically been convinced ever since we read Moroni 7:45 on charity with him. We went to his house this past week and he said that he would love to be able to teach like we do. He wasn’t sure if we had planned that lesson or not and I told him that it wasn’t and that we just went by the Spirit. He took his mom to the baptism and she really enjoyed it and I noticed that Elvin was crying, it was a really neat experience.  Not a lot of people went but those that were there commented on how pilas he is, so we were really excited for this baptism. 

Baptism of Elvin

Alright, now for what happened to me this week, it all started last Saturday before fast Sunday so at lunch I ate and drank all I could. What they gave us to drink was Nance juice (it’s a tiny little yellow fruit that is pretty good) and because it was fast Sunday I drank a bunch of it. Later that day I felt kind of weird and didn’t eat that much at dinner. Monday I felt a little worse. We got home after a long day and I puked up everything. Tuesday was really hard because my stomach had been hurting the entire day. I couldn’t eat or drink anything and Wed. we didn’t leave to work at all because I felt absolutely terrible and Thursday was kind of the same. The entire week I would walk a little bit and have to stop because my stomach would tie itself in a knot and it would hurt to drink water. Another terrible thing is that all the members are buying me pills and medicine and I don’t know what to do with it! I still feel iffy eating certain foods and drinks so I’m trying to be really careful with what I eat, but my stomach just doesn’t want anything. It has been a really hard week and I hope I can get over it. I already asked for a blessing and have talked to the nurse. She said I might have a bacteria or infection, because Nance is apparently very dangerous to eat because if it isn’t cleaned well it can get people really sick. So I’m having fun with an upset stomach! haha I hope this week can be better with everything.

Oh one thing I forgot about is that I got a letter from Chase and Elder Maza on Tuesday, and I was super happy! It was kind of funny to see Chase write in Spanish, especially Catracho haha! It’s weird to think he is learning all the same slang and stuff that I am. Hopefully this week will be better and that I can work better, since last week we barely worked due to my condition. Fun stuff! Hope everything at home is great, I can honestly think of no questions right now, hmm, no new engagements I don’t know about? Haha!

Paz y amor!

Elder Neher

View of SPS from the Coca Cola sign

My new bus!

Week #55 - El Calor Que Nunca Deja de Ser (Seis de Mayo)

Hola familia y amigos!

Well this week has been interesting. For one I have been getting sick from the food or something. I think my lunch cook isn’t cooking with purified water or something, but my stomach just doesn’t want to take anything, so we´ll see what happens this week. So on Tuesday Elder Elison came to divisions in my area and it was awesome to be with him again, even if it was for a day haha! We went to some citas we had that day, he met Elvin and some other investigators we have.  The craziest thing happened that night though. We had an appointment and in the middle of the appointment it started pouring, so we couldn’t finish the lesson and we left. The next cita was on the opposite side of the area and we got soaked. I have never been so wet in my life! We were so soaked! We got there but the rain was so loud we left the cita to come back another day. We get home early cause there was nothing else we could do and we were soaked head to toe. It was awesome, just like my first day in the mission when we got wet haha!

The only problem that I have right now is how hot it is here, it is terrible! In the night it will rain and during the day it will get super hot. Sometimes after five it gets better, but not all the time. We have been finding a lot lately, many inactives from here or different areas. We actually found one guy that is a convert from somewhere in our zone when he lived in another area. It’s been crazy how many people we have found. Well this week we stopped by with Elvin one day planned on teaching him the law of chastity and word of wisdom. We get in the house and he says how bad he has felt with himself and his family, especially one of his nephews. He said how bad it has been in the house with him yelling at his nephew and that he hasn’t felt well at all. So we just decided to read different scriptures from the Book of Mormon, and one that really impacted him was Moroni 7:45. I could tell it impacted him in how he read it. Well we put a cita to go back and asked him if he wanted us to pick him up for church  but he said that he could make it on his own. Sunday comes and we were really worried none of our investigators were going to show up and he walks in the door! We were so happy! We had to teach Gospel Principles because the teacher doesn’t want to come to church anymore, so we taught about the scriptures.  The next class, which is priesthood, always has a tendency to go off topic, was about seeing the good in everything, and at the end he came up to me and said he was really grateful that he went.  He felt like he had changed and he is getting baptized this week! We are super excited and he feels like he is in the true church. The last time we checked he was in 2 Nephi 4, and still reading! We also have been teaching Darwin, someone we contacted at the beginning of the change who had been to church before we found him, and he is so cool! He still wants to wait about baptism, but every morning he says he reads the BoM, even if it’s only one verse. He said that he never wanted to read the Bible, but now he says he can’t put down the BoM, so hopefully we can get him baptized too!

Today we hiked up a mountain to see the famous Coca Cola sign here in SPS. It’s a giant sign you can see from the entire valley, about half way up a mountain. I was so exhausted when we got there.  It was all paved, but super steep and it took forever, after turning one corner you'd find the street still going, but it was really cool to see all of SPS from up there. 

View of the Coca Cola sign from San Pedro Sula

I’m glad to hear abuela is fine, it just makes me sad to see how fragile she looks! Send my love to her for me! I hope everything keeps going well and that Higley wins this year!

Con amor,

Elder Neher