Elder Cook Week Twenty-Nine

Hey familia!

I’m not sure how Conference will go down since I’ll be in a different area in a couple days but I’m stoked!!!!  We won’t get to watch Priesthood session because we have to get back to work though.  And yeah I’m way excited to move.  I feel I’ve already knocked all the doors in Los Laureles.  Brooklyn, that's exciting that you're going to the dance!!  Make sure you keep my Cook legend alive out on that dance floor- aka dance super bad.  A bunch of little Honduran kids are trying to read my email over my shoulder.  I don’t think they realize it’s in English. 

This week I learned about the impressions of the Spirit!  We found a guy, contacting doors that was super positive.  He had lived in the States and knew a little English.  He invited us back for this week, so we went over on Tuesday.  We started the lesson and I just felt that something wasn’t right and he was a little on edge. He started going off. As we walked out of  the house, I realized it was the spirit that had tried to hold me back.  He just wasn’t ready.  I prayed that if inspiration came like that again that I would be able to recognize it and act on it.  The next day while walking, I had a strong impression to visit a family of the house we had just walked by.  We had worked really hard with them for months and they just hadn’t progressed, and the father was never home anyway, so we hadn’t visited them in a long time.  So I shrugged it off and kept walking.  Then I remembered my prayer so we turned around and walked back to the house.  They let us right in and the dad was home.  He told us they’d been reading the Book of Mormon in the last couple days and had loads of questions for us.  They really want to know if it’s true!!  I was so grateful that Heavenly Father had given me that prompting and I promised I would never deny a feeling like that again.  In the last couple days, I’ve had more feelings that have turned out to be inspiration.  Heavenly Father wants to help us!  He is there, and we just need to pay attention to the slight brush of the Holy Ghost to guide us.  It can come en la manera de thoughts, feelings, and through other people.  If we try to receive inspiration, He will give it to us!  It might be in his own time and his own way, but it will come.  We just have to be ready to receive it, and then willing to act on it no matter what the answer is!

Love you guys!  You are always in my prayers.  It’s really hot here.  

Elder Cook

This is Tommy, the dog.  In his true form. 
His eyes glow during the day too.

We eat this a lot.

Elder Cook Week Twenty-Eight

Familia Favorita

Yeah we knock on a ton of doors!  A good 20-40 every day.  We get up at 6:30, exercise for 30 minutes, get ready/eat for an hour, 8:00 we do personal studies, 9:00-11:00 companionship studies, 11:00-12:00 language study, eat lunch until 1:00 and head out to work!  5:00-6:00 we eat dinner, 9:00 we enter the house, plan for half an hour to an hour, write in our journals, then go to bed at 10:30. 

There are dogs and cats and chickens everywhere!  The chickens were weird to get used to at first, especially when you’re trying to teach and they’re crowing in your ear, but now I don’t notice them too much.  Yeah we’ve gotten pretty fast from the dogs.  Did I tell you about Tommy?  The self-proclaimed guard dog from the devil that chases us away from our investigators house?  Usually if the dogs get too close you can just throw a rock near them and they’ll back off, but this one steps closer!  The Hondurans around there just laugh as we run. 

There are a bunch of outdoor markets but most of them we’re not allowed to go into because people are killed there a lot.  Yeah there are a couple weird animals but mostly weird bugs.  There are red wasps that look like the ones from Jumanji and these ginormous helicopter sounding beetles that you can here coming from a good 15 feet away.  There are tons of geckos but the ones here make super annoying sounds all the time!  I’ll make the sound for you when I get back because I don’t know how to describe it.  I’m in the city so nothing too exciting yet.

So we were talking to an older lady a week or two ago about mosquitoes, (that’s always a good conversation starter here) and they never get bit by mosquitoes because they are Latino and they laugh and laugh because I always get bit because I’m a gringo.  Then she tells us that the real reason why I get bit is because when a mosquito enters a house it looks for the most handsome male in the house to bite, so you always know who is handsome based on the number of bites he has.  They all stopped laughing. And I almost died laughing.  Now every time I get bit by a mosquito I thank her for the compliment.

Did you know I dream about milk almost every night?  I reach into a fridge to pull out a cold jug of American milk and I always wake up before I can taste it or it doesn’t taste like anything.  I think one of my deepest baggy desires out here is to drink real milk.  I also teach a lesson in every dream and wake up freaking out that we are not in missionary clothes or that we’re late for a lesson.  I’ll wake up and say hey I taught lesson one! Then my companion says sweet I was teaching lesson two! It feels like I never go to sleep sometimes.

Our investigator from a few weeks ago, came back early yesterday!!!!!  We are going to set his baptism for the night before I leave.  Pray for him!

Love you guys!

Elder Cook 

Elder Cook took this picture of the banner one of his primary kids back home sent him.

Elder Cook Week Twenty-Seven

This is my District!  I´ll miss them when I change areas in a couple weeks.

Hey Familia!

We have pots to cook with and a stove type thing.  No oven.  We email from little internet places and we are allowed 50 minutes to write the president, put in datos (not sure what that is in English) and then try to write whoever else we have time for, so not a lot of time!  It costs about 20 lempiras.  We ride the bus a lot!  Our area is huge.  From one end to another it´s about 45 minutes- 1 hour walking, depending on how fast you walk.  But the buses are super different than the ones in the states.  They don´t have a time schedule and they are paid based on how fast they go.  It´s sketch sometimes.  President Fortuna said no more food lists, so now we eat a lot of rice and beans and eggs, because it´s cheap.  But the traditional food is a plate of beans, rice, avocado, mantequilla, an egg, platanos, and no matter what food you eat there´s always tortillas.  

I´ll take pics of the apartment next time but it´s really nice!  I´m in a very wealthy area.  Hey tell every family member that is in seminary or going to be in seminary to study scripture mastery!!  Did you know scripture mastery is just preparation for the mission?!  I wish someone had told me that when I was in seminary!  I regret not memorizing them as well as I should have.  I have used almost every single one of those scriptures in my lessons!  Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and Doctrine & Covenants!  It´s awesome that they have kids memorize those.  We found 14 new investigators this week!  We basically have had to start over with the people we teach.  No one was progressing and most of them dropped us.  But we have some awesome new families and super positive people so we are pumped!  One family is super interesting.  The hermano plays a guitaron in a mariache band, his wife isn’t able to talk or hear.  They are super nice and want us to come more!  We use lots of pictures and movies and write out our lessons.  We are working hard and praying a ton!  I love it out here.  Love you guys!

Elder Cook

Hey we found Colonal Sanders!  Who knew it would be in Honduras.  He has a baptism date coming up soon.  We got to go to this KFC after the temple and it was the nicest restaurant I´ve ever seen!!

 

Elder Cook Week Twenty-Six

Hey familia! 

That sounds just like Brooklyn. Mozart that hasn´t quite mastered stairs yet.  I laughed pretty good. The man I mentioned last week told us he has to leave this Wednesday for his job to a city about 3 hours away.  For a month. Every time we have a baptism date with our investigators, they run away!  I don´t know what it is. We are worried that with him being so far away he might smoke again, and he doesn´t have any kind of phone to contact him, so we are going to have to pray A TON for him the next couple weeks.  We got him a couple packs of suckers to eat and scriptures to read to keep him busy. 

I ate some interesting soup yesterday!  Se llama sopa de mondongo, or cow stomach soup. People love it here!  It´s like a delicacy.  It was some weird stuff.  The texture is like gum and it looks like a cows tongue all cut up, like with bristly things coming out of it. 

An investigator told me they were going to name their kid after me the other day!  They told me to write it down so they could spell it right.  The guy said that when his son would ask him where he got his name, he´d say from a big gringo in the church.  Pretty sweet.  Do you know how many people have asked if I´m President Kennedy´s son or related to him?  A lot. I´ll try to write more next week! Ask me more questions!  This week wasn´t too exciting so I run out of things to say.

Love you!

Elder Cook

The first picture Elder Cook sent us from a cliff overlooking the National Soccer Stadium near the Toncontin International Airport in Tegucigalpa. The second picture we found on-line of Mondango soup.

Elder Cook Week Twenty-Five

Hey Familia!

Did you know I have a permanent lump on my head now from hitting it on doorways so many times?  I now have an automatic reflex of stooping every time I walk through a door, even if it’s a big one. 

We had a temple activity for our investigators yesterday with all the missionaries from the misión, and I felt like a normal sized person there, even a little short!  It was great. The investigator that was going to be baptized Saturday had a lot more things to resolve than we first thought.  We had a few lessons with him about the Palabra de Sabiduría (Word of Wisdom) this week. He really did want to change.  Yesterday we went to the temple for an investigator activity and couldn’t get a single one of our investigators to go.  We were feeling pretty sorry for ourselves seeing all the other missionaries there with their families, and felt even worse when we realized the whole message was about families and marriage, which is exactly what every single one of our families needed.  We had started our fast Saturday to Sunday for this same investigator.  We asked for a miracle.  

When we got back to our área after the activity, we started walking to our cita.  We took a weird route to get there and ended up meeting this same man along the way.  He opened up like I’ve never seen before and told us all the bad things that are going on in his life.  He told us to give him hope from the Book of Mormon.  We went back to his house and shared Alma 36 and some scriptures from Doctrine and Covenants 121 and 122.  I have never seen someone be so sad, so low in his life, and then after reading and talking for half an hour be so happy and so determined to change his life.  He said he felt the Holy Ghost so strong when we were reading, so peaceful and full of hope.  He said he would start going to church and reading and praying every day.  He said he would start that moment to be a different person, for himself and his son. 

This is why we’re here!!  The gospel is good news!  It is the only true source of happiness on this earth!  It is the only way you can find peace, hope, everything you need!  People NEED the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  That was some serious motivation.  This is why we don’t mind getting doors slammed on us, and dogs chasing us out of neighborhoods.  We know what people are searching for, even if they didn’t know they were on the search in the first place.  I love this work, so much.  I can’t express it in an email, but it’s just the best.

Love you guys!

Elder Cook