A Little Bit of Everything

(EDITOR'S NOTE: The rest of the family being overseas has thrown a wrench into the blog-updating-machine. Stay tuned for rapid-fire updates over the next couple of weeks.)

[from 31 January 2017]

Me & Elder Santillana

I am way happy to be here in Montecristo with Elder Santillana.  Honestly things are going awesome. I think we´re gonna do really well here.  My área is super gorgeous, we´ve got a Little bit of everything, beach mountain jungle city.  It´s pretty cool.  And having Elder Santillana as my companion is a huge bonus.  


Fish is awesome, to tel you the truth it´s awesome to be done eating so much fried chicken!  We can see the ocean from our house and we´re about four blocks away.  

Maria & Family

The old lady in the picture (maria) was a less active convert when we arrived and we´d visit the family every week and read the scriptures to her.  She started coming back to church and her kids started attending too, we´ll see if there´s any success there. 

Baptizing in Borrowed Pants

I think those won´t be the last baptisms we´ll be having here.  And no not the same pants, I left mine in Palermo on accident.  I´m not sure if I´ll ever see them again to be honest.  I´m wearing Elder Santillana´s pants in the picture.

It was super cool having those two baptisms.  Brayan changed a whole ton in his life before he got baptised.  Alex was way into it and worked really quickly.  He´d already been to church a couple times when we contacted him.  Sorry it´s really hard to write a whole ton in these 30 minutes about people.

It is really cool that we´re all children of god with limitless potential.  That´s one of my favorite lessons to teach is the plan of salvation cause I think everybody wants to know what´s gonna happen when I die, why am I here, and where did I come from.  Like Dad, God is a lovingfather who wants good things for us and wants to help us to be happy.  

It´s weird I don´t think I´m that much taller, but being a White guy really makes me stand out, and a lot of people stare at me or Yell stuff in English.  Usually it´s something like ¨ei gringo!¨ and I always respond ¨ei latino!"

Um hottest it´s been here is 44 or 45 degrees celcius or about 110 degrees ferenheit.  AND ITS WINTER.  Coldest i don´t know... sometimes when it rains it gets a Little cold. 

Sometimes as a missionary we have to sleep in weird places sometimes in the houses of other missionaries waiting for a meeting in the morning.  It´s always tough to sleep in places you don´t know.

There´s so much weird stuff that I see but honestly when it gets to be Monday and I get to be on the computers I forget everything agghh.  It was super good to be able to get the money figured out.  I was way short on cash because of all the trips I had to take.  I had to travel to La Ceiba and then back to San Pedro for a meeting and then back to La Ceiba.  And we´re gonna have to travel to San Pedro this week too for another meeting.  What the heck?  

So yeah, and also therés a family that we´re trying to help get married so I used a Little bit of my money to help them, (that´s a crazy story we bribed a transgender garífuna in the Honduran DMV to speed up the process long story but it´s gonna have to wait).  

Love,

Elder Stoddard

A Blackout, Some Rain, and a Transfer

The power here was crazy for a while. We went almost a week straight without power and it rained super hard this time it got almost knee deep.

A Little Rain

So I bought some Honduran rainboots for less than 7 bucks. I don´t know why didn´t buy them sooner, I thought they´d be more expensive. 

Sorry I didn´t get to write last week. I wrote a tiny little note on the computers in Sarrosa during our district reunion. 

Remeber how you asked last week if there were any changes coming my way? Well, usually missionaries are in their first areas for 6 months here as a general rule, but I got a phone call last night and I´m headed to Montecristo in La Ceiba. I´m pretty excited, because the zone Ceiba is where everybody wants to go. From what I´ve heard our house is within one block of the beach. So we´ll have to see how things are next time we talk. 

I meet a lot of people who´ve been to America, seems like everybody here who´s super drunk knows how to speak a little bit of English. I think that Alcohol gives the gift of tongues. I was talking to one guy who got deported a month ago for the third time and he´s headed back in the next week. Pretty crazy huh? 

Nothing super exciting has happened this week. I was a super happy guy when the power came back for good, and I was pretty happy to hear I´m going to La Ceiba. That´s about all the news I´ve got right now. 

Love You guys,

Elder Stoddard

Mixing in the Fun

Hey family, I don´t have a ton of time, but I think the camera will make up for that. (See below.)

I miss you tons. It was cool seeing you when we were on skype.

Yeah my week has been a little uneventful. You know how I said missionaries buy ridiculous crap? My companion bought a drone for 1500 lempiras or 75 bucks. So this week I´ll probably send some pictures\ videos of us playing with that. 

When Missionaries Find a Park

A lot of missionaries here mave a hard time balancing between how much they´re focused on fun and how much they´re focused on the work. That´s been a problem for me too here. Because if you don´t have fun you´re going to hate everything and the work will kill you, but there´s also some times when having too much fun can lead to being disobedient.

My Spanish is way better. There´s a couple things I say that people don´t understand, like yesterday I said in Spanish ¨kick the bucket¨ in Spanish, and everybody looked at me weird.

I am glad you guys get to go to Paris and I hope you guys have a great week.

Love you all. Have an awesome week. I will do my best to send stuff in this next week.

-Elder Stoddard

Taught a Little English Class This Morning