Saturday, September 24, 2016

First Impressions of 'Ondura'

Hey family, 

it´s been super long since I had the opportunity to email you guys. I thought that we didn´t have any time to email in the CCM (1 hour), but now here in the feild we have even less (30 minutes)! 

The field´s great, I´m serving in an area called Palermo. A week ago we woke up at 2 in the morning in the Guatemala CCM and drove to the airport where we flew to El Salvafor and then to the San Pedro Sula airport. It was sad saying goodbye to the guys from the CCM, but I was also so excited to get to the mission. 

I got my new companion (Elder Marquezada from Peru). He´s a great teacher and I´m glad I have somebody who doesn´t speak english so I can feel a little more pressure to learn spanish. He speaks english, but only a couple words, so I have to use the dictionary a lot. I was speaking spanish to him on the van ride to our area and I was feeling really good and then we got out and started talking to people and I understood about 5%! 

Hondurand do have an accent, they´ll drop the s sound in a lot of words so ¨nosotros¨ becomes ¨¨nohotros¨¨ änd the way they say honduras is ondura. 

Power´s pretty reliable here. In the time that I´ve been here it´s only gone out twice. The first night I was here, it went out about 6 and didn´t come back on until early morning, so that first night was way hot. The apartment had a fan in it for me and when it turned on I had the experience you told me about dad, where I rolled over and smiled. 

It is unreal how hot it is here. Never have I sweated so much in my life. It´s rainy season here and every day at about 2 or 3 like clockwork it´l start raining really really hard, and it´s weird because most of the time the sun´s still shining so the rain does very little to cool things down. 

The people here are great. We´re teaching one guy named Wilmer who wants to be baptized, but the last time we talked with him he said he didn´t know that the book of Mormon was true so we read the introduction and I bore my testimony about the power of prayer. It´s a completely different thing to bear your testimony to somebody who isn´t one of your teachers in the CCM. 

I so happy to be in the field. When I got the call, this is what I was excited for. The CCM was cool and I learned a lot, but being here is exactly what I was looking for. 

the food here is delicious, baleadas are way good. 

Contacting is fun. Instead of knocking on doors here they yell buenas in a really loud voice. 

Yesterday the bishop asked me to introduce myself to the ward and I made my second ever joke. ¨Yo quisé hacer un chiste pero mi español es un chiste.¨ [Dad Translation: "I wanted to tell a joke, but my Spanish is a joke."]  They got a kick out of that, probably because that was bad spanish too. 

Yo quiero dejar ustedes con mi testimonio. Este iglesia es verdad. Yo he sentido el espiritu demasiado fuert demasiado veces. Por el poder del espiritu santo podemos sentir el amor de dios para nosotros. Yo espero que yo podía ver ustedes, pero yo daré 2 años con mi familia eterna entonces alguin puede vive con su familia eterna para siempre. Me ama ustedes. [Dad translation: I want to leave you with my testimony.  This church is true.  I have felt the Spirit too strong, too many times.  By the power of the Holy Ghost, we can feel the love of God for us.  I wish I could see you, but I will give two years with my eternal family, then someone else can live with his eternal family for forever.  I love you guys.]

-Elder Stoddard

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