Hey Familia!
Man it´s so weird being outside the city! We are only
about 2 hours outside of Tegucigalpa but that makes a huge difference.
All this week we´ve been trying to help a family, that another set of missionaries
in our district are teaching, get married and baptized. It´s literally
taken all the time, effort, sweat, prayers, and marriage knowledge of all 6 of
us in the district to do it! So this is what went down.
Monday we went out to Siguatapeque and played some intense
games of soccer. That ate up a ton of our time getting out there and
getting back, so we had no time to do anything else (except eat an amazing American
burger at a place we found buried in Comayagua). By the way cousins, I will
kick your cans in soccer any day of the week when I´m back. They don´t
call me the White Latino when I´m playing for nothing.
The family that the Elders were trying to get married is
AMAZING! Seriously the most chosen family I´ve ever seen in my whole
mission, but there was one problem. They were from the Mosquitia.
I´m not even going to explain how difficult it is to help people get married
when they’re from there, but let´s just say they had to take a plane and a boat
to get to where they lived just to take out a paper saying they are really
single. When Elders find a family from there normally, they put a fecha [baptism date] with them for about 6 months in advance.
Anyways, we´ve been working on the marriage for about a month now. So all
week we were calling as many lawyers as we could find and the family was
calling all the contacts they had out in la Mosquitia to try to get this
done. So Wednesday, the Elders called us and said the family had a family
member that worked in the alcaldia [mayor’s office] there,
and they had sent the papers by plane and we had to go to the airport in Tegucigalpa
to get them. So we took off running to Tegucigalpa in the first bus we
could find. The problem was, we were super low on money at this point, so
we had just enough to take a bus to Tegucigalpa and then another to the
airport. About 2 hours later and 60 Lempiras poorer, we took a couple
steps off the bus when the Elders call us. They told us that the papers
weren´t actually going to get there until Thursday.
Thursday I went with Elder Zamora this time out to Tegucigalpa,
because the papers coming in were under my name and he knew a lawyer that lived
near there that would get the wedding done pretty cheap. So we headed out
and got to the airport. The flight that it was coming on they said wasn´t
coming in until 4pm that night and there weren´t any papers on it. We freaked
out and made some calls, and figured out that it was from a different company,
and picked them up. Then some random Gringo comes up to us and starts
talking. He asked where we were from, and I said Mesa. He asked if
I was a Toro. He said he used to live there and even played ball back in
the day with the Mt View bball coach Ernst! We were pretty pumped to talk
to a gringo and he even bought us food from the airport! We died at how
much he spent, could´ve fed a Honduran family for a month for just two little
things. Then we left and turned in the papers to the lawyer. We
realized at about 4:30 that the last bus leaving for Comayagua left at 4:30.
We flipped and went to the bus stop. As we arrived, I looked over and
said, ¨hey, isn´t that the bus?¨ We looked at each other and took off sprinting.
Let me tell you, I haven´t sprinted in about 2 years but Elder Zamora and I
gave it a good try, so we didn´t quite run down the bus. We took the walk
of shame back to the bus stop. Everyone just watched the dumb Gringos
sprinting several blocks and laughed as we got back. We thought we´d have
to stay the night in Tegucigalpa, but long story short we found another bus and
got home at about 7pm.
Anyways, the family got married and baptized and are pumped
to get sealed in the temple. We all feel great for what we did and even
better to know that they´re on the way back to living with our Heavenly Father
again as a family. Everyone said it was impossible that the family was
getting married, but I know without a doubt Heavenly Father was in control and
it was amazing the things that just fell into place for them. 1 Nefi
3:7
Love you!
Elder Cook
Nephi
3:7
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