24 February 2014

24  February 2014

Dear family!

Another week has flown by. I’m not quite sure how the weeks do it, but before you know it, every day is Sunday, waiting to see if the people we’ve taught decide to come to church.

Tuesday we contacted a family that had an electric keyboard sitting on their front porch. I played the keyboard for our song in the lesson (‘’I Know That My Redeemer Lives’’).  I think it was the first time I played the piano in a lesson as a missionary.

Wednesday we had a multi-zone conference and Elder Carlos H. Amado came to teach us. The conference was a spiritual feast. He taught us a lot of things about how to teach lessons where we teach by the Spirit and our investigators can feel the power of our message. I also came away from the conference with instructions that I need to keep doing my personal study in English. After three or four months in Honduras, I started doing my personal study almost entirely in Spanish, as a way to improve in the language more rapidly and familiarize myself with how to relate the scriptures in the language I use to teach. However, Elder Amado taught us that the Spirit will speak to us more rapidly in our native language. Thus, Thursday morning, I pulled out my English scriptures for the first time in months and Friday I pulled out my English Preach My Gospel.

Also, we picked up some copies of the Book of Mormon and pamphlets after the conference. Walking from the conference to the punto de colectivos, a lady stopped us and asked for a Book of Mormon. I’ll probably never know what happens to her, but I hope she reads the book and prays about it.

Thursday we retaught Rides about the Restoration. We also gave him his personal copy of the Book of Mormon. We’re still hoping for a miracle with him.

Miracle! The first round of paperwork that we need in Tegucigalpa finally came through. Now the papers are in Langue and hopefully in just a few days we will have the paperwork we need to have Ricardo’s marriage so that he can get baptized. I don’t know how much of the drama I’ve shared, but let's just say these papers have been in the works since the beginning of January or end of December.

We’re still teaching our neighbors and they are slowly progressing. Hopefully, they won’t wait many more weeks before they decide to visit the church!

The things that people can grow in their backyard here include, but are not limited to, oranges (dulce y agra), lemon (limón), papaya, avocado (aguacate), and guayaba (guava).  Also, you can buy oranges on the street for 2-3 lmps (10-15 cents). I think that limón here is more like lemon, but it doesn’t seem that both exist here. But we make up for it in the variety of bananas! There are more fruits than just banana (guineo) and plantain (platano). By the way, one of my favorite foods that I would never have considered making is fried platano. You cut it into thick strips and then fry it and eat it with beans and mantequilla (our closest equivalent might be sour cream, but not sour).  

In other news, we now have four sisters living in our house. Hna Trujillo and Hna Cuc switched houses.  Now I have an exciting opportunity. Hna Cuc is teaching me Kekchi, her native language. It’s kind of wild to read it because it uses mostly the same letters but with strings of consonants that seem to be lacking vowels. I’ll keep working on it!

Hermana Davis