Honduras! September 26, 2011

Well first day in Honduras went like this: we didn´t sleep at all the night before with all of the flying around. So when we arrived, I was dead tired. On both of the flights, there were these touch screen headsets that you could watch movies, play games and listen to music on. Talk about temptation! When we arrived in Tegucigalpa, the lady almost didn´t let me in because I didn´t have a solid place were I was living. But they let me in anyways. One of the AP´s and the Mission President came and picked us up. We went to the Mission Office and ate some pizza, drank banana flavored soda and wen´t through orientation. After orientation, we went to the Mission home and waited for the president for dinner. We ended up going to Applebee´s with the AP´s and the President´s family. He insisted that we get the bottomless ribs & fries, so of course we did. One of the AP´s kept on challenging us to eat more ribs with him. We ended up making it back and went to bed.

The next day we were introduced to our trainers that morning. The president bought us breakfast and we sorted out and went to Changes. I was able to see my friend Elder Trevor Casey! It was a great seeing him and talking about everything. We are in the Tegucigalpa Zone, Sagastume Area. We took a bus from the city a little ways out to the mountains. When we got out, I had to carry two 50lb suitcases up this huge hill up to our ´home´. I was a little bit surprised at how small the houses were. The people live in these small houses with maybe 2 rooms, but in every single home there is a huge sound system that they like to blast music on. I don´t know what it is about our house, but there are a ton of creatures that wander in. We´ve had multiple geckos and huge moths the size of my palm.

So I finally came to a conclusion; in the U.S, we like to trick out our cars & trucks. but in Honduras, they like to fix up their buses! We you get inside one, there is always a new stereo system inside. I was even in one that had a sub woofer in the middle of the bus, it was crazy! I met our branch president of the branch we´re in. His name is President Osorto. His wife cooks us lunch everyday. They have 2 kids; the daughter 19, and the son 14. When we went to church, I was shocked at how small the branch is here. We are an 'unofficial' branch because there isn't enough members to make it official yet. We had 26 in attendance yesterday; including 5 investigators. There is also 1 teacher, 2 priests. I also taught Sunday School yesterday! I was asked the night before to teach and I pulled it off and did it! I was teaching the youth but they were all older, around 16 yrs old, there was 8 in attendance. They would laugh when I made mispronunciations and when I didn´t understand what they were asking, but I got through the lesson and they understood it.

It´s strange being the biggest person in my zone, let alone the people that I teach. They always look at me when we walk up and contact them. We were in the middle of talking to this girl and in the middle of it she cut in and told me, 'que bonito oyos'. which translates into you have beautiful eyes. Everyone´s eyes here are dark and they are all fascinated when they see colored eyes. For example, we were talking to this elderly lady at her door and my companion was talking to here but she would stare at me in the eyes and talk to him while looking at me. It was really awkward!

Yeah Sagastume is awesome and i´m enjoying it here. As of today we have 4 baptisms scheduled for October 8th and 1 for the 22nd. Also we have 2 families waiting for their marriage papers so that they can be baptised, both with little kids. We´ve also got a couple investigators we´re working on. I'm staying busy! From our house we can see the statue of Jesus and Tegucigalpa. It starts to rain about 5 o'clock every day with lightning. You can always see this massive wall of rain slowly moving over Tegucigalpa. Laundry is done by wash board, showers are done by buckets of water in a small room, and the toilet has to be flushed manually by dumping a bucket of water down the bowl to force it down. I haven´t eaten anything out of the ordinary yet, usually rice, red beans and either chicken or fish. Well I´ll write back next week! we´re going to go play fútbol with the zone at the stake center. Oh also, we´re all excited for General Conference!

 

Love you all,

 

Elder Harding