!Qué Bonitos Son Sus Ojos!...Gracias, puede orar ahora?

So I hope you guys had a great week, things are just going swimmingly here in Santa Rita ;) Things are going well, and they’re improving.

Challenges:
We've got some challenges at church. It's the weirdest feeling. I talked with the Bishop a bit on Sunday after I tried to sandwich some "criticism" I thanked him for getting someone to find the numbers for the hymns and I brought up the fact that the ward missionary leader tried to get me and my comp to clean one of the rooms on Sunday after Gospel Principles class. I understand like putting chairs back but as soon as they started talking about sweeping and doing heavy cleaning things get a little sketchy. Apparently we're still working on learning what "día de reposo" means.

Observations:

Every 6 weeks we have the opportunity for transfers which are assigned by the mission president. I realized these meetings are sort of like Harry Potter IV where the delegations from the different schools arrive. We have missionaries coming in from as far as Olanchito which is like 8 hrs away. Missionaries show up at random times of the morning and it's sort of cool cuz it's like, "Is Miramar here yet? Progresso has been here all morning, y Olanchito?" Kind of like how in Harry Potter IV when they all get announced and come flowing in with butterflies and stuff or cool staffs that spew fire. Here we just bring perfume and mosquitos I think haha :)

So I’ve switched from my Croc shoes to my most rustic shoes that I thought I would never use here! They’ve saved my life cuz I could feel the rocks through my Crocs they were so worn down cuz I wore them everyday in Ceiba!

We ate lunch at the house of an investigator this Tuesday and us four sisters were chatting when all of a sudden, another woman who lives there came out and was like " who was talking, which gringa? habla muy bien el español, con su acento" and I sort of squeaked out a little, "¿yo?" as the latinas pointed at me haha. It's really nice to get compliments when I feel like I'm a total failure still with my Spanish! A really nice compliment!

Compañeras:

So I’ve become like total besties with the Latinas now :) It's so cute to hear them be like "ayy ese gringa..." We laugh and laugh and talk and talk and it's just the best. I love stopping and realizing that I’ve gotten to the point where I can carry on hours of conversation with them and laugh and understand them and I never thought I would be able to get to that point! It’s the best. It's so much fun and they really are the best. Sometimes they still drive me nuts with their mopping with a broom, but hey, we’re all a little weird yeah? :)

Something a little funny our landlord "Don Mariano" is this old guy that lives across the street and we've been working to get our pila cleaned and bleached and the tank cleaned as well cuz there was a leak apparently. (Oh the joys of not always having water! It's been INSANE. but you learn from it :) So it's been funny cuz like bright and early in the morning he'll come over and yell to us in his deep voice..."Hermanas?????" And one day he literally did it I think 12 times in one morning. So my comp started messing with me and started doing the same thing and it totally scared me one time cuz I thought it was actually him :) I love my comp! She is so great - my little Nicaraguan ;) She is super shy still and doesn’t talk too much so I really do feel like comp mayor most of the time, taking control of things, but sometimes I stay quiet so that she learns to take more initiative and everything. So yeah she doesn’t talk much, but when she does, my goodness it is so funny. She just has a talent to say funny little things. So it's nice :) If I could describe our companionship in one word, I'd say "tranquilo". It’s the best!

I played with a Husky puppy the other day while we were waiting for our dinner. Be jealous it was the most adorable thing.

Testimony Builders:

We've been working with a less-active Hermana R. who really struggles with a testimony. She’s really really dramatic. One of my biggest pet peeves I’ve found with visiting with people in general here is when they seem to try and impress us. It's like as missionaries they try and convince us that they’re saved and that everything is peachy keen. I understand them though. So she started freaking out the other night when we asked her how her scripture reading went and she started getting super dramatic and covering her face with her hands and shaking telling us that she felt a super bad spirit and that she started to doubt so I shared what happened with Joseph Smith when he first started to pray and then oh suddenly she was healed and she asked me my shoe size. My shoe size?!?!? So I was like "great she’s not paying attention" then she brought out a bag filled with brand new shoes and I was like "you’ve got to be kidding me she’s trying to sell us stuff" but she ended up giving us these shoes and telling us that we help her a lot and that she’s thankful for all the support :) So there are always surprises around every corner, sometimes good and sometimes bad. Like how she didn’t come to church on Sunday. It just makes me that much more grateful for the testimony I have of this gospel, that I know that life doesn’t have to be as complicated as people think it is. That really, we are blessed when we're obedient and that Heavenly Father loves us. So now I can walk around (idk where ... the shoes are really cute and these streets are not made for flats) in my little light pink flats with little gold detail on the toes and think about the scripture in Isaiah 52  "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tiding of good, that publisheth salvation; that said unto Zion, Thy God Reigneth!"

Baptism of Young Woman I helped teach!!

We got to go to Progresso to listen to Elder Amado, a member of the Seventy, speak to us! It was such a neat experience because he taught us and constantly reminded us that the Spirit was really the one that was teaching us. So true! He would stop and ask us "are you still praying?" to remind us to always have a prayer in our hearts. At one point he started to kind of single people out and be like "Hermana so and so...." and then say something inspired like as an example of something the Spirit could tell us that Heavenly Father wants us to know. Then he stopped in front of me and was like "Hermana Despain...solo mire a mi" I was like WHOAAAA!!!. Just know that it was really powerful and we got invited by President to eat with him and Elder Amado at their table. That was cool to eat rice with a member of the Seventy :) It's neat to listen to people who you know are seriously called of God because you know that their words are straight from heaven. They are so inspired and there is no question as to if what they’re saying is true. It's all true. That’s all there is to it :)

So I'm still here eating salads. climbing mountains, laughing about my Spanish, sweating my brains out and I'm still loving the mission! I needed this experience....that’s what I’ve decided. It's the best decision that I’ve ever made in my life and it's saved my life.

love,

Hermana Despain

¡LOS MILAGROS EXISTEN!

Learning the Language:
I learned some new words this week from the dictionary that I LOVE!!
mañear:  to manage craftily, act with cunning
frescales:  forward kind of person
bienaventuranza:  eternal bliss
escarchar:  to put frosting on
escarcha:  glitter

So me and my comp actually made a language study plan. Six months later and I decided to make a language study plan! Haha!  It’s the best though. I’m sort of a crazy gringa when it comes to my comps learning English. If they are native Spanish speakers it’s one of their responsibilities. I just figure, if as North Americans we're expected to learn Spanish and speak it like 24/7, I think they can study English for an hour a day. I’m working on patience though, that’s my weakness...

Churchy Stuff: 
We had correlation rescheduled because of Valentine’s Day. Everything started out great and I was trying to be more patient and accepting when things started heating up and one of the sisters who will remain unnamed, starting arguing. We just sort of sat there as they started arguing about how there are no leaders at the correlation because there are no refreshments and I’m just there like "we're talking about saving almas (souls) here and the leaders won’t come to meetings because there are no treats?" So that’s a challenge here - the strength of the barrio. Sometimes I just have to force myself to smile and laugh at all the craziness that goes on here ;) But we'll get it worked out. Little funny story, in all the craziness of Sociedad de Socorro (Relief Society) this week, I looked back to see two sisters sharing a baleada in the middle of the class....goodness haha! At the end the president was pushing her baby in a stroller and yelled out "who wants to teach the class next month?!"


I slipped and fell down the mountain one afternoon as we were coming down from visiting the Familia G. in Pueblo Nuevo. My head hurt after and my hand was scratched. The little kids were laughing and the investigator we were going to visit right after was watching from his doorway. The worst part? He won’t even come to church haha. and I’m here like "Man, I’m falling down mountains for you, can you just come to church?"

I gave a talk on the Restoration this week in church that ended up being about missionary work. I assigned myself to use the talk from Elder Ballard about Trusting in the Lord. It turned out great and I prepared it in like 30 minutes! I even took my little watch up to the stand to use since it needed to be 8 minutes and the clock in the chapel doesn’t work ;)

My Valentine's day was uneventful. #missionarylife I went on divisions with the sister training leaders in Piñeda in Porvenir. It was good and I learned a lot but it was nice to get back to my area and my comp :)

Random Experiences:
We were sitting in a cita this week with a member and a less active Sister R. who lives in Bella Vista  when we heard like the typical "voice on an intercom coming from a car". Usually they're selling something like "guineos..." but this time I was super surprised to find out that they actually go around announcing deaths like that. So someone else died. Apparently down the street a little girl killed her grandma. Talk about scary?!

As we were walking past a place where they sell licuados this week I saw this guy drinking one and his fingernails were the longest I’ve ever seen in my life! We're talking like Guinness Book of World Records long! Hermana O. just laughed and laughed.

They burn sugar cane here so that’s sort of annoying when you wear a white shirt and have like black snow fall throughout the day. Lots of smoke though so that’s not too fun.

The water here comes out super nasty, like it looks clear but it smells like yellowstone, aka sulfur and iron or something but you just deal with it and hope the shampoo and soap gets rid of the smell...Everytime we go to the bathroom here we have to pour water from the pila into a big white bucket and lug it to the bathroom to pour into the toilet. It’s a fun life.

Something I’m still having to work on here is my patience with the physical and verbal abuse. The parents just sit there and yell at their kids or threaten them and you’re sitting there trying to talk to them about charity or Jesus Christ and the spirit just isn’t there. I’ve tried to slip in some "Jesus Christ never hit anyone, never yelled..." but it just doesn’t work. So I’ve made the decision that I will never yell at my kids. No matter how angry or frustrated I am. It messes up the family completely.

BAPTISM!

So looking back on these 6 months I realized I only had like 1 baptism...and I didn’t even feel like I helped at all because I wasn’t there from the beginning. I got really sad this week when I remembered that N. is getting baptized along with C. in La Ceiba. I really loved teaching N. and  I was there from the beginning. But it’s more about the fact that he'll be baptized, it would have just been nice to be there. I would rather help the less actives my whole mission though, than baptize someone to then have them turn into a less active in two weeks. So if I was sent on my mission to mainly focus on less actives, then I’ll do it! It’s just hard when you want to have a baptism. I feel like Elder whatshisface in The District when he talked about him and his comp praying and being like "Heavenly Father, can we please just have a baptism?"

Courtesy of CMJosue

P-DAY!!
We went fishing at the river Ulúa today with our district leader, his comp and the zls and the other sisters! It was a lot of fun and it was soo relaxing. We should go fishing every p-day. We obviously didn’t have poles, #wereinhonduras so we used fishing line on empty bottles and some others used chunks of tree branches. It was soo cool! And it worked alright :) It was neat to fish and just sit and relax. 4 hours of silence is pretty much golden. The river was really pretty and we were right under a bridge that was actually blown up with a bomb pretty recently by some people that wanted a different president? Things are never too quiet here in Honduras ;) It was really neat though to be there today because a family of members lives near the river so I took a bunch of pictures. They’re like National Geographic worthy :) It’s so neat to be around the little kids here. They’re usually either nuts or really really quiet and you just look into their big brown eyes and try to imagine how different their lives are from yours. We're all children of God no matter how much money we have, where we're from, what language we speak. It’s one of my favorite things about serving here - the little kids :) They’re little quiet examples of peace.

Sharing Talents:
Based on what I’ve learned from my comps, I think Hermana Despain is described as "crazy, happy, fun, likes things her way and you better believe you'll learn English with her" and “she doesn’t like to talk in the morning...”

So me and Hermana H. have been working on a piano duet in all our spare time which has involved lugging the piano from the church to the house around the corner every weekend. It actually looks pretty hilarious. But it’s been totally worth it! We got asked to play at the multizona this Wednesday in Progresso! And guess what!! Elder Amado is going to be there! I’m nervous since it’s a duet, so if both don’t know their parts really well...its just a disaster. Please pray for us :) We're playing My Heavenly Father Loves Me by Sally Deford. We’ll also play it at changes! I’m so excited!

Los Milagros:
We brought two less active sisters, 11 and 9 years old -  who hadn’t been to church in two years because their dad is divorced and their step mom always asks a ton when they go to church so to not be a problem, the two sisters decided to stop going to church. What poor little girls! So we picked them up and brought them and sat them in between us. Me and O. called them “our girls” :) We picked them up from primary and took them home. They are super pilas, really smart and great little girls. They are such a blessing for us.

Courtesy of WolfPape - The little red vehicle is a mototaxi!

Our last cita for the week was going to be with a less active but when we started we heard voices coming from inside so I felt like we should ask if she wanted to invite the people inside to come out. Two minutes later we found ourselves with 6 references and 6 nuevos. We taught the first lesson and they had great questions! Simple, but great. One asked, "what’s the prayer we're going to give?" We explained about how we would invite them to pray to know if what we taught was true. So he was just clarifying! Then another asked what the word iglesia means for us. I swear I get some really interesting questions here. Nothing like the questions we prepared for in the CCM or in Young Women or anything. The spirit was so strong though and then the sister who is less active told us that we "dar animo a ella" (bring joy/excitement to her) and that she wants to go back to church. She said all that in front of everyone there! Turns out one of the guys that was there was a guy we helped lug a gigantic bag of corn to his house! How cool is that?! Everything was perfect! They were respectful. The spirit was there. We ended the night strong and then her son took us back to our house in his moto taxi :) I LOVE THOSE THINGS. I laugh the whole time we ride in them cuz they are so much fun. We were on cloud nine! It was the best thing :) So let me tell you, milagros are real! You go expecting one thing and end up getting more because the Lord loves us and he watches over his missionaries and everyone else too :)

Love you guys a hundred baleadas ;)

Hermana Despain

I do it cuz that’s what I signed on for!!

The challenges:
I forgot to talk about how we went to San Pedro to get my foot checked out! As a missionary having a doctor feeling my neck? SO AWKWARD! But after he finally decided to have a look at my foot, he decided it might be a circulation problem. Other than giving me pills he said I should lose weight. Surprise surprise! But it’s good because now I have a doctor’s excuse every time someone offers me soda! Little by little I’ll get there! We went out and ran on a soccer field que se llama ¨Camo Fifi¨ which makes me laugh every time I hear it. I felt sick after running 3 minutes but uh yeah...I’ll get to 20 minutes one day. It was nice to sit in President’s office for a bit while his wife looked at my foot (she's a nurse!). After she checked it out. President talked to me about how things were going and I have to admit that I did start crying. I’ve always been super strong in our interviews but man, he just looks at you and you feel the love he has and everything had built up and I just cried a little bit.

This week we visited one of our ward mission leaders. He lives in super humble circumstances. Seeing his living conditions softened my heart. After visiting with him a bit he asked me if I´m an angry person in general, how old I was, my time in the mission... He told me at the end that I need to have more patience and open my heart to Santa Rita. He told me to not think about my family and college and my boyfriend. Ok. Uhh, I don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t think about college that much. I have plans but now's not the time to worry about it. My family strengthens me. They really do support me and help me so much. So I left pretty frustrated because I felt like he didn’t even know me yet and he was judging me.  I found it interesting that he asked if I was angry...never before in my life has anyone asked me that. 

Afterwards we went to visit a recent convert who is now less active. Almost all the recent converts here are less actives. I honestly don’t feel comfortable baptizing anyone here because everyone goes inactive! How awful it is that! I wish we could just focus on reactivation, but everything is inspired when it comes to our goals. It’s really hard work to try and reactivate people, sometimes harder than working with investigators because people know they know the gospel is true but they always have reasons for leaving the church.

I’ve started to go to bed at like 10 and earlier if we finish planning by that time because everything bad happens after that time.

Apparently there was a drive by shooting 2 blocks from us the other night. Not that I want to scare you guys or anything. It’s just the reality of this place. Then the next morning we found out that two more people died near where all the busses take people to Progresso...and then someone told one of the ladies of our ward that we shouldn’t be walking on a street at a certain time of day. It's called Calle Ocho and we're all like which one is that? Who knew streets in Honduras had numbers?! They said the houses on that street are all different colors. The bishop tried to describe it once. "Ya know where they sell vegetables on Tuesdays?" Man I died laughing...but yeah it's super serious right? So then we're all like okay, so when do we go back to our house, like 6 o’clock? Then we were like um mejor 5 ;) jk But it's pretty sketchy here in Santa Rita!

I've noticed that a lot of people here are missing an eye or are blind or have some illness....there’s something in the water you guys...but really though!

The Lighter Side:
So the school teacher here teaches in a little school that was so so interesting to see. You always hear about the one room school house with a ton of kids and one teacher in a third world country. I found myself sitting on the steps of one this past week! It was cute to see the kids come out one by one to have the teacher check the work they were doing in their little notebooks. They smiled at us.

It really is gorgeous here. There are a lot of rivers and the mountains are super super pretty. It looks a bit like Utah, cuz it's like we're in a bowl here almost with all the mountains around us. It's just really really green. :)

On my oatmeal package it says to keep it in a dry and cool place. I had a good long laugh when I was like, that is everything Honduras isn’t. hahahahhahahahhaha :)

My comp cut my hair last week! Felt so good, I was so nervous though! Like a true missionary she used some little kid scissors, but hey it was nice to get a little trim!

I saw my first squirrel this week! my comp thought I didn’t know what it was when I couldn’t see it in the tree but I was like girl, I'm  from NC, we like breathe squirrels!!! Hahahaha!


The church here is literally around the corner, you can see it from our house. Such a blessing, really though! It’s neat to teach people up in the mountains and be like, hey do you know where the capilla is? It's right there!!!! :)

So you know when you’re walking in the street and someone is walking towards you and you kind of go both ways and you try and pass the person but you both go the same way and its all awkward? I TOTALLY DID THAT WITH A DOG THIS WEEK. It was actually the funniest thing that happened this week hahahaha IT WAS HILARIOUS!

I found a quote I really liked this week in the January 2010 Liahona article entitled "Healing My Homesickness". It's by Thomas Henry Huxley and it says "Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done whether you like it or not". Sometimes the work is hard and I'm tired and I don’t want to work and it's hot and I feel like a bad missionary. But I do it, cuz that’s what I signed on for ;) Nuff said!

I’ve learned a lot about choice and accountability when it comes to missionary work. Before I didn’t really get the whole accountability part but it's so true. We choose what goals we set and we're accountable for the work we do at the end of the week. Speaking of work, we did so bad this week. We had a total of 24 lessons because this week was just so crazy. Hermana H. was throwing up one morning and me and my comp took care of her while her comp was sleeping. Then my comp went on divisions with H’s comp to get work done for them so that was at the cost of us. And it was like no one was home. I was super frustrated with our work but also with myself. I just felt like I had no motivation to work, to do anything and it scared me. Sunday was awful and that night we met a new family and after doing everything possible to encourage them to say the final prayer, they were just like mejor hágalo usted and I just started saying the prayer but I was fighting back tears I was so tired. I was just thinking to myself how tired I am. I think this week just wiped me out emotionally and physically, but it's not like we even got a chance to work that hard! But emotionally it was crazy! I’ve tried to do my best to help the other hermanas out when they have differences. I end up listening to one and then the  other for hours. Other people's emotions affect us, they really do!

Things are good with me and my comp! We work well together and we're both pretty laid back so that helps when we get rejected and when we climb up mountains to visit with people who don’t even acknowledge us when we say hi to them with sweat running down our faces. I’ve thought about the part in Preach My Gospel when Elder Holland talks about how the first thing you should do is be disappointed when people say they haven’t kept their commitments. Oh, I have no problem being disappointed! But then I look out on the valley and the mountains and the rivers and take a mini vacation and look at the view people pay millions to have and I remember that God does exist and that He does love us :)

LOVE,

Hermana Despain


Hey, did I mention I have 6 months in the mission??? ;)