Welcome to Santa Rita! Here's the couch!

Health Issues: So I've been sitting on a couch with my leg up for the last two days. My left foot swelled up. We think some bug bites on my foot got infected from the water or something and then hiking up a mountain here to just visit two families probably didn’t help. The sisters here in the ward tried some home remedies with hot water and lemon leaves which was really nice, but it didn't seem to help.  Sis. Klein had me get some sort of antibiotic so I'm taking those.

More challenges: I’ve cut my finger like 3 times in the mission so far, the latest is healing up pretty well but it totally scared me. I also lost the back of the magnet to one of my placas (nametags) while we were lugging our maletas across the flooded streets of Progreso in the rain, while people were calling out "¡Gringa!" last week!? 

I was asked to bear my testimony in the ward here on Sunday. Number One: I don’t like bearing my testimony when I’m not expecting it. But I did it anyways. Number 2: I don’t like talking to people if they’re not paying attention. I went to the front and started to share some of the things I know when I sort of stopped and realized that people weren’t listening or paying attention. I was so hurt and frustrated.

The lady whose house I’ve been staying at the past few days is really nice but it's like I can’t understand Spanish all over again!  I don't know what happened. I guess I just got used to how people talked in Ceiba....AHHHH Ceiba. I miss it. 

Something funny from Ceiba that I remember was that one time we went to go teach someone but she wasn’t home, we were yelling out "Buenas, buenas!" and no one was saying anything. We were about to leave when all the sudden we heard from inside the house, "Buenas!" and I was like, "Who the heck was that?" Yeah, turns out it was the parrot....crazy right?! So when the investigator isn’t there, usually the animals are a little bit more reliable, or just there for a good laugh ;)

Good stuff! We got to go to a conference in San Pedro this past week with some of the areas from our mission and the SPS mission"! We got to listen to our mission president, the other mission president, their wives, Brother and Sister Ochoa and then Brother and Sister Soares! It was really neat to think about the fact that he had just spoken in General Conference in November! He talked a ton about obedience and cleansing our lives, so it was a pretty "machete" talk but it was good and it was definitely inspired I think. It was neat to take a little trip and see some of the missionaries from our mission since not everyone goes to changes. And it was neat to be counseled!

Mi casa es su casa: The house here is gigantic and I feel like I’ve done my work out for the day by the time I’ve walked from my bed to the kitchen. We have to turn on a switch outside to have water run in the morning. The pila is too big and the water comes out of the spigot in the wall for the shower like a garden hose. It’s super hard to even just take a shower. I remember seeing a quote about missionaries and it was like "...nothing like a warm shower and a warm meal to soften the blow of a hard day’s work" or something like that and I was just like "Not sure I'm ever going to get that on my mission". It will just make the return that much sweeter!  So the cool things about the house here are that we have a lemon and a banana tree. It’s actually pretty sick ;)  The house was a total mess when we got there and there were dirty dishes all over and ants and no water and just junk. I’ve totally identified with “Milly” from the movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It’s crazy! But we deep cleaned the house and we'll get things taken care of! We'll get things organized, baptize some people and support and encourage everyone to come to church!

We don’t write for too long here since we have to take a bus here to Progreso for an hour just to buy food and write and then we go back. But it will be okay and I won’t be here forever. I’ve been pretty discouraged the entire weekend but being able to read conference talks in English for the past two days and sleep some extra time has really been a blessing I think. I hope you all are doing well.

LOVE,

Hermana Despain

Missing Miramar

So I'm writing you guys from a little shop in Santa Rita now! Alright, ready for this? I'm in a trio, opening an area, and I'll be comp mayor to a Nicaraguan with 3 months in 2 weeks when the one girl leaves for Olanchito. I’m SO nervous and anxious! I hate this feeling. I feel like I've been cast into the lone and dreary wilderness. It was so hard to leave the zone it wasn’t even funny. The worst part was that I was only 1 of about 3 people to have changes. I left with Z, N, and Z, finished his mission so he'll be in El Salvador tomorrow! He was a great district leader, and such a good friend. He bore his testimony and started crying a little bit and I found myself trying not to cry. It's amazing how quickly you get close to people in the mission but it's not surprising honestly. And oh my goodness, when President has the Spanish speakers bear their testimonies in English? It is the most powerful thing I’ve ever heard. Cuz you know they mean every single word and it is straight from their heart.

The bus ride here was too fast and I was trying to soak everything up and enjoy it the best I could but how do you smile when all you want to do is cry and go back to your area? I was convinced we should just head for hills, or in our case, Pico Bonito. Haha I was so ready to run away, not even joking. Packing was an awful mess. I have too much stuff. I only got about an hour of sleep so that probably doesn’t help with the stress at all. The changes meeting was really good but everything felt so unreal. My two comps really only talk to each other and kind of ignore me so that’s definitely fun.

So this area is pretty much like a pueblo with dirt roads and little motor taxis that are actually really cute but we about fell over when we loaded all our luggage onto them. We walked for idk how many blocks with our luggage. And it was raining and I had no idea what we were doing or where we were going. I wanted to die! It was just like, ok, thanks I can go back to Ceiba now...sometimes I’ve found myself thinking, how awful is a mission, that we're put in an area for sometimes just 6 weeks at a time to give our whole hearts to people and our zones and then de repente you're transferred and needed elsewhere and you have your heart ripped out. Really I just feel like crying. I'm trying to do things like not think about things too much, unpack all the way, and just smile but I'm scared to go to sleep tonight and wake up and not see my Ceiban mountains.

And on top of all of this, we got totally attacked by mosquitosin La Vascula. They ripped our legs apart within like 10 minutes. The bites got infected and now I’ve got this disgustingly hideous like bubble of junk on my ankle and my legs are just a mess. I talked to Hermana Klein though so I'm thinking everything will be ok once I get the medication she suggested for me. Freaks me out though.
I'll be okay though, this will pass.  I just hate feeling so sad. These things make us stronger though, yeah? I just hate the trial part. I just want to dream that I'm back in Ceiba with the Zona Miramar and never wake up.

But tomorrow we're headed for San Pedro again, wohoo...we're going to the conference with the two missions! That should actually be really cool, but man I'm having a tough time. Prayers would be more than appreciated. Thank you for your love and support. I love you guys. The church is true and somehow Heavenly Father trusts me with this responsibility. It's all so intimidating though, learning new names, new faces, new problems, new areas, new companions. My poor heart has just been taking a beating I feel like, but I'll be all right :) All this shall be for my good right?

love,

Hermana Despain

Another Dead Cat, San Pedro, Golden Investigators, And Oh Did I Mention I'm Being Transferred?! #AHHH

So yes, I have transfers and I'm pretty much stressing out but I've had a few days to think about it and we've started to say goodbye to people and everything. We had interviews with President Klein on Wednesday and he gave me a little heads-up. The hermanas said that they are really close to no changes between the hermanas of the mission this time around because there won't be any new sisters until May! MAY you guys! So we're off the hook as far as training goes until then. But yeah that means everything will change between all of us from now until then but I'm doing okay. I'm super nervous cuz I’ve never really transferred before and literally everything changes, but it will all work out. It will just feel like starting over again :/ but it’s true that "a change is as good as a break" as my parents tell me!

We saw another dead cat on the way back from church yesterday. So super gross but I guess that’s life yeah? Hermana U. was just like "ew gross" and I was like "What? OH!" Fun times :)

Some of the challenges we're experiencing are like the fact that we don’t have Books of Mormon. I mean copies of the Book of Mormon ;) but really though! idk what happened, but they just aren’t distributing them through the ruta! So here we're trying to tell people about this restored gospel without Books of MORMON! We're in citas and it's like "um tiene un amigo que tiene un libro de Mormon?" but we work around it. We're just struggling a little bit there is all.

Also everyone feels the need to travel around this time of year cuz the school year here is from February to like November...but the attendance in church is like skyrocketing to a whopping 104! Crazy right? We were having our missionary coordination meeting with our ward mission leader last week and we were talking about our investigators and he was telling us how people are listening to us, but not for the right reasons and it was totally heartbreaking. And finally I just looked at the ground and was like "es que no hay nadie más..." It was so frustrating!!

But we found a boy named F. yesterday who lives near our other investigator, N!! He is 12 and lives with his 16 year old sister. We don’t know where the dad is but the mom is in New Jersey. So they live alone and he is a super good kid. When we visited him yesterday, he had to run out to buy a pill for his sister. He is so sweet. So yeah when we met him the other day just after contacting his house, we talked to him for a bit and got to know him and I challenged him to be baptized right there and he accepted #miracleshappen and we invited him to come to church the next day but we weren’t expecting him to come since we only talked to him for a few minutes. BUT NO! We passed by for him and he comes running out in his jeans and converse and I was expecting him to be like "la verdad es que..." and give some excuse... but he came to church!!! We passed by for N. too and he came! We ended up having 7 investigators in church which is pretty good for here. They really enjoyed church but I think N. had sort of a tough time when the Bishop gave me a minute to say goodbye to the ward during sacrament meeting. It was s a little awkward I have to say, but I just told everyone that I had changes and that I was grateful for their help and their examples and that if Christ is our rock, everything will be okay.

We went to the Centro with a member to take out money for my comp and we took the member to lunch afterwards and she picked this place by the beach. It was crazy cuz it was like "Here I am in Honduras on a regular day, just eating pupusas and drinking horchata on the beach having an experience people would pay thousands of dollars for...no big deal!" That’s why I love my mission. For all the frustrating and less than positive things that go on here spiritually and physically, there are so many neat experiences I would have never had anywhere else. And of course pupusas are ridiculously yummy, Who wouldn’t want to eat fried pork, cheese and tortillas? But afterwards we were on our way back and we drove past this cow that was just spewing blood all over the street. We don’t know what happened but this guy was trying to control the poor thing with a long rope. Crazy, sad things happen all the time here :(

MONDAY night we got a call from our zone leader and he was like "we have two pieces of news for you guys, you guys will need to go to the mission office in San Pedro tomorrow...you have emergency transfers". If there is one way to stress a poor missionary out, just tell them they need to take a 4 hr bus ride to one of the most dangerous cities in the world at 5 a.m. with practically no money! The whole "emergency changes" turned out to be a joke!  NOT FUNNY! If a robbery is experienced sometimes they take the sisters out of the area immediately, so it totally could have been true. But it was fine and the next morning we were on our way to San Pedro to immigration to get our pictures taken so we could be official residents of Honduras ;) Super cool yeah? We did a lot of waiting and I got to see some missionaries from the México CCM that were there from the other mission. San Pedro is HOT!! The car ride to immigration was the most fun I’ve had in months. Let's just say that haha!  After all the immigration stuff we went to the terminal to head back to Ceiba. The whole time we felt like we were going to cambios and me and U. just hated that feeling but looks like we'll have to have that wonderful experience again this Wednesday! Que nos vaya bien :/ On our way back to Ceiba we were on a cheaper bus and we had to listen to these women talk in Garífona for a straight 4hrs. not even joking and they don’t talk, they YELL! It’s a crazy language. But other than all the citas we couldn’t go to -the trip was fun! :)

So it's going to be super hard to leave Hermana U. She is the best! We've gotten really close these past 12 weeks :) I feel good about the work I've done here in Las Colinas. I'm sad to leave the people because they really are like my family and we have some baptisms scheduled that I think might actually happen! I don't have any regrets and I have loved my time here. Everyone says it's super hard to leave your first área and it is so ridiculously true, but I'll go where the Lord wants me to go! When we sing "I'll Go Where You Want Me to Go" as a zone, the part where it says "a las montañas o islas del mar," everyone replaces "islas del mar" with “Roatan”, so that’s just a little something funny :) We'll see where I'm sent and I'll probably feel really down and stressed all over again, but it will pass, cuz it always does! The other day I just looked at Hermana U. and was like "I can’t leave this zone..." with "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" playing in the background. Honestly,  this zone has been lo mejor and I will miss it like crazy. Nothing will ever be the same but it's part of serving a mission and it’s the best. I love you guys a ton!
The church is true! :)