Being Christian in Honduras: Real-time Exchange Featuring Chuck Norris

[from June 17, 2017]

(Editor's Note: Christian wrote in the early afternoon in Honduras, at the exact moment the family was enjoying a late dinner in France. We were able to exchange some contemporaneous email messages.)

CHRISTIAN: I just got here so if somebody´s still awake and wants to shoot me a message right now that´d be pretty cool. -E´ Stoddard

DAD: we are out to dinner. it is 9:00pm here. cool that we are on at the same time a world apart.

CHRISTIAN: AWESOME. What are you eating? I just got some quesadillas from a Mexican place... put my companion a little bagui hahah. Mexican food here isn´t as good as it is in the US. :( Have you guys gotten the photos I sent during this last week?

DAD: yes we did get the pics. very cool. we are having hamburgers, chicken, and fish.

CHRISTIAN: delicious. you guys gotta soak up that good french food while you can though. who´s eating hamburgers and not croissants? Are you guys counting down the days until you reenter the USA?

DAD: you can get hamburgers almost anywhere here. and here even the burgers have a french twist and are really good. (me and the littles had the burgers.) we were bagui a while back, but now that it is so close we are kind of sad and nostalgic. we will miss it.

CHRISTIAN: you´re gonna really miss ukraine when you leave. Is it really far between france and ukraine, and do you guys think about going back quite a bit? the house in ukraines gonna be pretty big i´d imagine (and furnished and free i´d think?). There´s a hamburger place here we just found called matabritas. It´s really good. I always get one called the chuck norris. It looks like this:

and the best part is it´s less than 5 bucks for all of that. SOO good.

DAD: mom said "of course he gets the chuck norris." yeah, we will definitely have time to make ukraine feel like home. we do hope to travel around europe a bit while we are there. hopefully sometimes when you are with us. and food there is supposed to be good and ridiculously cheap (like matabritas).

CHRISTIAN: Yeah its a monster of a burger. I can´t believe they make money from that. Ukraine´s gonna be cool. I think the little´s are probably enjoying getting to travel so much (and allie too I´m sure!) Have you guys started trying to learn a little russian yet? I´ve started to a little, but it´s weird. Also I should probably learn spanish first huh? Haha

DAD: we are all surprised you have started learning russian. very cool. we have been mostly focused on french though. allie has started doing ukranian on duo lingo.

CHRISTIAN: Dang the catacomb pictures look cool! can´t believe those are real. where do they come from? how old are they?

DAD: overcrowding and disease, they dug 2,000,000 bodies up in the 1800s and moved them out of the way into unused tunnels under the city. some of them are crazy old. the public can only see a small part of what is down there.

CHRISTIAN: huh. well thats one way to deal with overcrowding. just get rid of all the cemeteries. does it smeel bad?

DAD: hahah smeel. nope. does not smell ... or smeel. but we have definitely been exposed to lots of bad smeels here.

(end of real-time exchange)

Hey Family!

That´s true about the travelling while writing me... You guys have written from Virginia, Texas, France, Germany, Switzerlan, and I think that´s it. Pretty cool.

You guys are gonna need to go see everything in France before you go. The skeletons and stuff looked cool in the picture. Were you scared at all?

Yeah you guys will have to bring me back to France some time. You gotta do all the fenchie things you can before you go back to the USA. That´s awesome you guys are gonna be in america on July 4th. I think we´re gonna do a barbecue here for July 4th. You gotta do something awesome for the 4th of July.  

My job in the office is cool. Most of the time it´s boring, but then something really big happens and it gets busy and stressful. That´s gonna be crazy when all those people leave. I´m gonna be so tired!

No there´s no replacement Ruta guy. I am the new ruta guy basically. Everybody calls me and asks for stuff. Pretty weird. Also I have to buy stuff for missionaries like beds and refrigerators and microwaves. Not too hard but it´s another thing I gotta do. I was kinda sad how he left mid change. And here in the mission everybody knows who the secretarys are and when one leaves everybody knows quick. I hope I can do a good job doing the two things. It honestly not too hard.  

Something else that´s cool is I called Guatemala (where the central america church headquarters is) because one of the computers here was broken. They´re gonna send us all new computers and president a new iphone 7 and the nurses new samsung galaxys. Pretty awesome. I just don´t know how that´s gonna go cause our computers are already way nice. Cool huh?

In this ward I´m in there are 4 sister missionaries and my companionship. It´s pretty weird, I´ve never had sister missionaries in my same ward, but they´re all pretty cool. I will be sure to keep pics coming.

Today I got a haircut and the guy cut my sideburns kinda weird.

Love you guys,  

Elder Stoddard

(Editor's Note: Below are the pictures Christian sent a few days earlier.)