Guíame O Salvador

Talking with my family on Christmas was great. It always is! But it got me really scared about going home. I'm not gonna lie. We went to go buy baleadas because no one was home and people were busy or traveling. So while we waited for our baleadas for like 30 minutes (there was a line, since when?!) we found a sister from the cuartería we used to visit and we chatted with her. It was interesting...to be there waiting for baleadas, looking at the stars and moon, talking with the lady, on Christmas. Quite the Christmas night. It was interesting to ask everyone how their Christmas was...back home it was like "Great, I got this, I got this...I spent it with this person..." But here people normally responded, "Normal, con bien salud..." These people seriously live day by day and for them, Christmas is just another day. So hopefully we were able to shed some Christmas light on them and remind them the real meaning of Christmas. Really humbling thing though to hear them just be thankful for their health. In talking with the lady, we asked her why she was up in centro and she told us she was up there to be away from her husband who was just drinking and drinking in the house. Poor lady. So it was good to talk with her and maybe help her smile.

But later that night something just hit me and I got really sad and scared with the time. It was so hard to plan for the next day. To describe how I felt in those moments? Stuck. If y'all remember, I hadn’t felt like that since my first change here in Honduras. Like I'm between two "homes" again. I was holding back tears and went to the bathroom and heard my comp singing "Conmigo quédate Señor" and I just cried and cried. It was so weird. Just so many emotions. Like some things are certain, and others aren’t. But it's true, the Lord will always be there, no matter what.

We're seeing so many miracles pop up lately. As hard as the work still is...J_____ is a joven (young man) who’s 15 and he's been to the church in the past and is family of the branch president here and he wants to get baptized!!! He's already got asistencia (been attending Sunday meetings), we just need to teach him everything! We challenged him to be baptized yesterday and he accepted! He already read the introduction of the LDM (Book of Mormon) that we left him and even read the part in Moroni at the bottom! Super prepared este joven! So he'll get baptized this Saturday! We'll have to work so hard to teach him everything, but it felt like we were teaching a member, he's super smart and ready. All we needed was his mom's permission, but his sister talked with her and came up to us on Sunday. I was thinking, "Oh no, she's going to tell us that his mom wont let him". When she was like "Hablé con la mama y dijo que sí!" I started freaking out and high fiving my comp, it was so great. So we're working on keeping the mom's trust and showing her that her son really is prepared.

I got sick the day after Christmas. I had a super, super bad sore throat. It was awful but I gargled and tried not to stress out and talk too much, I'm better now.

K_____ came to church again this Sunday so it looks like we might be baptizing 3 weeks in a row! :) How great would that be?! The zone ended up with a retention porcentaje de 78. My ZL was pretty upset I think, but I know that the zone worked really hard. It will be ok and we'll reach 80 the next month! :)

D______ got baptized! Finally! It was a small service but everything went well and everyone helped out! She looked great and Sunday she came to church in a modest skirt and I know her family is feeling great, after so long of wanting her to get baptized! :)

But Sunday we had something unexpected happen. We showed up with K_____  about 8:40 and we said hi to some people, went to the bathroom, but then we went into the chapel to sit down. I saw the counselor of the President sitting up there waiting for the meeting to start. This man is so great, so sweet, and gentle. He stood out to me from the beginning. Everyone always talks about how nice he is. So I saw him sitting there and I was going to just wave and smile to him and sit down, but for some reason I felt I needed to go up and say hi to him...So we did. We chatted a bit and then he let us know that he had waited for us to come to the house since we said we wanted to go visit him. We hadn’t ever set a solid day or time, but since the last change I told my comp I wanted to go visit him, I didn’t know why, I just did. So we apologized and said we would set a day and time :)

That afternoon we got a call from our ward mission leader letting us know he wouldn’t be able to go to a cita with J______ with us...because he needed to take care of a kid at his house. Everything was fine until he asked if we had heard that someone had died. I couldn’t hear him very well and thought he was joking so I put it on speaker phone so my comp could help me. That’s when we realized he was talking about the counselor and how he had died. I knew he had had heart problems, but it sounds like he didn’t feel well at church, was given a blessing and left in a taxi for his house, but then died later. I was heartbroken. This man was always so nice. His wife wasn’t a member and his kids were all inactive, but there he was , a strong counselor in a little rama (branch) of T______. We went the 6 missionaries to the little viewing that night at his house. We showed up to see a big white tent put up with a bunch of guys playing dominoes and drinking and smoking. There were soo many people. We talked with the wife and held her hand for a bit while she talked. We didn’t stay too long since we had to cross the river. The viewing was always a little scary for me but it was good that we went.

We had crossed that river the last change with the President and his wife and their nieto. It was amazing to think that people cross that river all the time just to get to the church. People here make so many sacrifices it’s not even funny. Maybe they’re not all very good at sacrificing time, but the strong members sacrifice a lot. It was neat to cross that river with everyone helping the other.

Another time that sticks out in my mind with that hermano, is when we were all together for correlation and he was there. Sometimes he wasn’t able to be there because of his heart, but at the same time, his heart was there...ya know? That’s the effect some people can have on others, to where their heart is still there even though they aren’t physically there. Interesting :) But I remember that we finished the meeting by singing "Guíame O Salvador". The President directed it and he loves singing. The Spirit was so strong and now every time I sing or hear that song, I think of that night. Listening to all the strong leaders there sing their hearts out. They put up with so much and make so many sacrifices and give it their all. That hymn seriously makes me tear up every time. Some things come as a surprise and others don’t, but in the end, El Salvador will guide us and help us. He always has and He always will. It’s not about us, and He helps us see that. This isn’t my time, it’s His time. Even though life is hard and things can be confusing, Christ is perfect and God's love for us is perfect.

Happy New Year :)

Love,

Hermana Despain

¡Él es la dádiva!

Before 2014 ends I'm thinking we should have a "Preach My Gospel 10th Year Anniversary" fiesta. (Swear I'm going crazy). And we could put up a banner that says "PMG: Saving Missionaries One Page at a Time". We could like have little competitions and eat food and stuff. And chocolate. And wear party hats. Sounds good to me ;)

I gave my capacitación last week! It went well. Sort of forgot to use all the stuff I had written down on the board (oops). I just got so into it! It was great though and I could tell that some of the Elders really were taking it to heart because one of the districts here in the zone this week, reported that 26 out of their updated 29 recent converts have attended church in the month of December!!!! And that’s December, the month where everyone travels and leaves or decides not to go to church because they’re too busy making tamales. So, so, so proud of them! The zone's retention went up by 8 percent this week so we're getting there!

I guess we're just so on top of things here that we give out copies of the Book of Mormon by 5:15 in the morning. But really though, last Tuesday we were headed to T____ I think and we managed to drop off a Book of Mormon to an investigator before she left for O_______! She ended up not feeling so well and not traveling that day so we got to visit her later on that day!

Today in Wendy’s we met a member from the barrio M__________ in C_____! I asked about past missionaries there and he knew them! He also said that they ate at his house every Thursday :) Small world. Lots of stuff seems to happens in Wendy’s. My comp tried her first Frosty today! :)

Since we don’t have weights and we're running low on folletos, I've started using coconuts as my weights during the strength training parts of Jazzercise :) I guess that’s what you have to do in Honduras...use coconuts for weights.

My companion asked me one night as we were sprinting home, "Have you seen a movie called Pride and Prejudice?" I about died you guys, none of my companions have seen it! We freaked out for a solid like 8 minutes about how great of a movie it is and all about "Señor Darcy". So fun. She's also seen Hannah Montana. Definite bonding moment.

On Sunday I handed out the little "HLJ" (CTR) rings my mom sent and we handed out "El Es La Dádiva" cards to all the sisters in the Relief Society and then we took pictures! We invited them to share it with a friend!

I will never get tired of looking at the stars here with the mountains and the beach on the other side. They’re so gorgeous here.

I heard that N___ G____ got ordained to receive the Melchizedek Priesthood! So happy for him! J____ R____, our recent convert who got baptized in O_______ just got called as the ward mission leader! We can tell he's excited and really energetic. We're going to get him to read about his assignment in Preach My Gospel and we've been visiting him more often. He wants to see a picture of my house...don’t know why. He just does haha. One night we went to go visit him and his tía R_____. I ended up sharing a bunch of pictures with them that my family had sent me a few months back. Ok I think it was actually a year ago cuz there was snow everywhere...But we had been talking about enduring to the end and I was like "Alright, we got to spice up this lesson..." So I started out with the pretty pictures of the roses and pine trees and we talked about God's creations. But then I showed the picture of the sweet gum ball and talked about how sometimes there are some things that aren’t so great in the world and talked about how my mom sometimes falls on the sweet gum balls. Then I showed the picture of my dad's foot and explained how he fell when he was cutting down some trees. I made the connection to how we have to perseverar hasta al fin just like my dad did in his physical therapy. I can definitely testify of the incredible power and Spirit that personal examples and pictures and hymns bring to a lesson. I swear every, single, time that we start in on a story or show a picture or sing a hymn, the people look up, the kids come around, the people pay attention. It's amazing.

Got in a little "heated discussion" with an investigator this week. I've never had anyone accept a baptismal date and then reject us in the same lesson. Turns out he's the pastor of 10 churches here in C_____, maybe that’s why. We were explaining about modern day prophets, authority and the Book of Mormon. In order to understand about the Book of Mormon we start out asking people where the Bible was written. In all the people we've talked to in a year and a half, I've never met a single person who knows where in the world the Bible was written. So he obviously felt a little defensive about that and was trying to talk over us and change the subject. We taught more and I expressed to him how God doesn’t want His children to be confused and once again he got really defensive and started going on saying "You tell me I'm confused? Well señorita, you’re confused..." But didn’t even have any good reason for saying that. So that was a little disappointing, but we did what we could. I just ended with my testimony.

So even though we lost a day of work going to S__ P_____ to renew my residence, and we lost another day of work doing a super contact for our district leader's area, we worked to be able to teach 35 lessons this week! It was crazy! The super contact was really good, nice to get out of our area for a bit, but honestly there was such a different spirit not working in my own area. There just wasn’t so much motivation! It wasn’t so much "Well these are our houses, these are our people...". But it was great to help out and fortalecer the other missionaries work. The Zone leaders came to help out from T_____ and we all ended up going to a nice restaurant on the beach. But it was getting really late and we're poor missionaries so what did we order? Pollo con papas. It was fun and really pretty!

We found such a great couple this week. They’re African American...or let’s just say they have dark skin cuz they could be Garífonas, I don’t know, but they’re a young couple living in a one room apartment in a poor little area with their one year old boy. They both love their little boy so much and have so many great questions. But we really thought they would come to church and when we passed by Sunday morning they did the whole "We have lots of things to do" deal and it’s like "We've been talkin about this day every day this week that we've visited you all...But we'll visit them this week. They do need to get married still though, slight setback. But man that would be such a great baptism to have before I left. It was so cool Saturday morning though because the dad was home too so we got to teach them both. We were teaching Lesson One and teaching about albedrio when all the sudden the guy gets up and grabs a black marker they had and starts writing on their wall (no really, cuz they have cardboard all over their wall to give it more support). And I'm thinking, "What is he doing??" He was like "I don’t want to forget". That’s when I realized he was writing "albedrio" with the definition. It was so cool. It was like "Heck yes, that’s what it’s like teaching in Honduras, having people write words on their cardboard wall so they don’t forget". They’re really special.

Tomorrow morning on our way to the multizona in C_____, we'll do a Secret Santa gift exchange as a zone! Here's to hoping I don’t get like dirty socks or something. The gift I'm giving is pretty awesome I have to say.

I can’t wait to talk to my family on Thursday! It's been 8 months, talk about forever! I can’t wait to be a full time missionary serving on Christmas! We don’t have any citas fijas that day since everyone will be out of town or super busy, so we might just hand out "El Es La Dádiva" tarjetitas in Centro or something or go caroling. Make some more memories :) Pero sé con todo mi corazon que Cristo realmente es la dádiva. I love that the card says "He IS the gift", not "was". I hope everyone has a great Christmas this year and that we all remember "who" it’s about, not "what" it’s about. Being in a place where people are more concerned about having money for tamales instead of money for gifts is a humbling thing and it’s a little easier to remember Christ and His humble birth. Love being a missionary during this Christmas time. Es lo mejor :)

Con todo mi amor,
Hermanita Despain

There's just no time...

Just another day here in T______ :) We went fishing again for our p-day activity :) Lots of chill fun. The ocean was really pretty today too so that was nice!

But let's see...this week was crazy stressful, getting back from changes, getting settled again with a new companion, getting back into 12 semanas and training and all that, seeing where investigators are at, and keeping up with the retention. I LOVE being secretary. Even though it's super stressful and I lose some sleep, I love it! It's so neat to take dats and keep things recorded and figure out percentages and report that information. I think the Lord knew that was the sort of assignment I could handle :) BUT! I have to give a capacitación (training) mañana. I'm so excited! I planned all morning for it...okay like an hour and a half but of my p-day! I need to talk about having love for the assignment and how we need to love our converts and everyone that we are responsible for. It's going to be so good! (Wish me luck!) It felt so good to see that as a zone we improved in our retention by 26 percent, entonces alli vamos! My ZL called after I sent the percentages and he sounded so, so happy. When he thanked me for my work it felt so good! It was like "Ok, it's all worth it," the staying up late, my hair all over the place, my desk covered in papers and pens, and my cereal bowl...all worth it. To know that my leaders are pleased with my work? Best thing ever.

With all this work and business I feel like I just throw on whatever is clean. Like I still take care of myself, there’s just no time for anything anymore and I don’t know when that started. Still hitting it hard with Jazzercise! :) But in all the crazy chaos of so much work I'm really trying to write in my journal any chance I get, even if it’s a random time during the day.

Looks like D______ will be ready to be baptized the 27th of this month! K_____ finally came to church. We passed by for SO many people Sunday morning its not even funny. More like how many people lied to us about going isn’t even funny. Then we got to the capilla and the power was out. Gospel Principles class was a nightmare of reverence with the jóvenes. So that’s stressful when you bring investigators and you want them to have a good experience and you’re left 6 missionaries trying to keep kids reverent. Little complicated, but we try to do what we can.

Talked to a guy in English today while we were eating lunch. I heard someone struggling to order in English and I just swiveled around in my chair and felt bad for him so I helped him out. It was funny to be translating and helping him know what he should get and what he shouldn’t get. He was from Texas and helping out with the government. He asked what we were doing here, for how long and all that. It was weird to talk about it all in English but it was neat! He asked if we can go to bars (mhm...) and if I had been to R_______ or done any diving. "Well ya know we're not really here for that...and the water is dangerous..." "The water is dangerous?" "Yes..." But he was receptive and respectful and thanked me for the help. In the end he ordered baleadas en vez de sopa de mondongo. I probably saved him from a bad stomach ache.

Like all my shoes are falling apart, I swear it’s a sign.

A few weeks ago we were coming out of a cita when my comp shouted, "Hermana, it’s a monkey!" So what did we do? Took off running to go touch the monkey of course! Two seconds later that thing was climbing all over my head. It was a super chill monkey, it was so cute. The owner of it had it on a little leash and was talking to me in like half English, half Spanish. She said when the cruseros come all the Gringos give the monkey money. De verdad, aprovechan de los gringos aquí...hasta los monos...

I teach the English class here every week. It's been interesting. Some of the students are super smart and work hard and pay attention. I've learned a lot I think, on a mission, about how to be a good student...after trying so hard for so long to be a good teacher, I've learned what it means to be a good student. Sometimes its stressful though to teach the class and like switch  my mind from teaching English to Spanish. It's cute though having had like 4 companions tell me I should be a teacher. I always ask them why,  they say that and they never really have an answer, they’re always just like "Idk, you just should". The students seem to have fun though. We've learned how to answer the phone, use some helpful verbs, order something in a pulpería, animals...all that fun stuff.

So we've been giving out the "El es la Dadiva" (He is the Gift) cards. (Did you all ever notice that Dadiva spelled backwards with an n at the beginning is "Navidad"? Hmmmm...) That’s been a fun experience, I feel more like a missionary handing out little cards instead of handing out folletos. It's been neat to just be able to walk up to any random person and talk to them about Christ and it's easier with Christmas so close. I have to say it’s a little hard to feel the Christmas spirit when I'm sweating under the hot sun, but I just look at the pretty mountains and ocean and it's all ok :)

Things with my companion are good. There really are never enough hours in the day for everything we have to do! But that’s a good feeling. She walks pretty close to me and like holds onto my bag sometimes. We watch out for each other and she’s really intelligent. She's already gotten a degree, I mean she’s 24...We work well together. We've already had lots of disappointments just in these past few days so she's definitely seeing the reality of the mission field. She’s really positive though so that’s good. She’s still adjusting to walking so much and so quickly. I guess I could slow down, there’s just no time to walk slow...but I'll be patient.
Looks like we might need to  make the nightmare of a trip to San Pedro this week since me and my DL's residencia's (Visas) are going to expire! Should be fun! Lots of time to practice the 42 principios! (I'm such a fletch)...

Hope you all have a great week, stay safe and stay happy! Like an Elder here says, "Soy Mormón, y soy feliz!"

Con todo mi amor,
Hermana Despain