Elder Cook Week Seventy

I´m great!  Just got back from Ojojona. It´s so beautiful there! We took a camion.  I don’t know what that is, big truck? We had to take all the house stuff so it didn’t all fit in our truck.  We went there to see a house that we´re opening up for more missionaries and we put beds and things they’ll need in it.  No we aren’t opening an area that would be cool, we just added more missionaries to that area.  I loved getting out of the city.  Two weeks from today I´m heading down there again. Its 5 hours away.

I still feel like I'm the a new guy out here!  We have a fecha [baptism] for this Saturday. She calls almost every day saying she won’t get baptized, she starts to worry, but then we go and teach her, she feels the Spirit, and then she´s back on track.  

We have some awesome families we are teaching right now!!  One we have planned to get baptized for next month!  I´ve never baptized a family and I´m so excited for them.

This dog followed us around for a whole day!  We couldn´t get rid of him.  He´d even wait outside people´s doors when we were teaching.  He followed us the 30 minute walk all the way to our neighboorhood and spent the night with us. 

Elder Cook Week Sixty-Nine

I´ve acquired the skill of differentiating the sound of a gun compared to a firework.  Yesterday was the craziest day ever.  The mission has gone by CRAZY fast too!  I still feel like a greenie sometimes.  I miss strawberry shortcake.  Tell them to enjoy it while I´m eating beans for dessert. [We had the missionaries and a newly baptized member over for Family Home Evening and had mentioned we had served them strawberry shortcake.]  

No I don’t drive the missionaries to their homes as they arrive to the mission.  That would be a ton of gas and I definitely don’t have time.  We pick them up from the airport and take them to the mission pres. house, then they go get their companions at the change meeting [transfers] and take a bus to wherever they´re going.  

Yeah Sunday is our busiest day!  We are running around everywhere trying to find people because it’s our only full day we get to teach.  Yeah changes in the office are even faster than normal changes.

We have several families we are teaching right now, but not a lot of progress. We've really been focused on finding new people.  It’s weird, when you live in a place where they only speak English it’s so cool when someone can speak another language, but the perspective changes when you live in the country of the language you’re trying to learn.  I love speaking Spanish but I’m really trying to get rid of my accent and Elder Wormald is helping me with that a ton. The work is good, I’m good, my comp has been out 9 months, almost all his family are members.

Prayers would be great for the families we are teaching.  We have two rooms in the house, and I put the piece of the ceiling that fell back in place, kind of.   

Love you

I don't fit in cars very well

  

Remember that the Spanish BoM are way 

bigger than the ones in English, but this 

picture still does not do that thing justice. 

We thought it was a bird at first!   

Elder Cook Week Sixty-Eight

I gave up on the shirt. I just stapled it real good. I ended up having to staple it a lot because one or two staples didn´t work for very long.  

We have an investigator we are working with! He contacted us on the street about a month ago and has been coming to church ever since. We´ve tried setting a fecha with him, but he always says that he wants God to touch his heart to do it, so he will put his own fecha. We’re hoping he´ll get baptized soon though. He loved watching the baptisms last week and said he knows he needs to be baptized.

Seat belts aren´t required here (most cars don´t even have them), the majority of speedometers/gas gauges in cars don´t work, lights and blinkers are an up to you kind of thing and to use them is rare.  

I always run into problems with dogs here! Like that one that kept trying to get into church a while back. The dog [in the picture] is of a member and jumps the fence every time he sees us walk by! And guess who has to put him back? And then he got out again. That day he jumped the fence 5 times! So we gave up and he followed us. We called his owner and he finally came and picked him up. Then a few nights ago a cat fell through our roof onto my bed.  I was about 2 minutes from sleeping there.  In the picture that´s my bed and that´s part of the ceiling on the floor.  Cats here like to wander into our house. I slept with one hand protecting my face in case another came down with claws out.


We got the whole little neighborhood of people together for a lesson the other day!  That same one that we brought water for. Took water for. Carried water for. La misma familia por la cual jalamos agua el otro día. Still can’t figure out that word. This neighborhood is pretty neat. We have one Mormon family there already, now we´re working on the rest!They´re all like one big family.  

Today was one of the craziest days in the office I´ve had.  

Love you!

Elder Cook Week Sixty-Seven

The teaching is awesome.  In this area haven´t baptized for over a year, and from the colonia Satelite no one has been baptized in over 5 years, we have two baptisms coming up this Saturday! The two investigators I’ve been writing you about. We are so pumped and so proud of these guys! They are real converts. It has been amazing to see their progress in the last couple of weeks. I´ve never seen such  strong testimonies. One even wants to try to go on a mission! I feel so happy all the time. I love seeing these people´s lives change and knowledge of the gospel of Christ grow. My testimony has become so much stronger in these last couple months. And I´ve really learned to value every second we get to preach the gospel.

My pocket that I sewed ripped off again. It´s driving me crazy!  
  

Elder Cook Week Sixty-Six

Elder Ochoa

Zone Conference Loarque

The meeting with Elder Ochoa was awesome.  We study Preach My Gospel based on what we are going to teach that day to help the investigator, so it´s not just one chapter for a couple days

We live about 10 minutes away walking from a church.  But there are parts of the area that are about 30 or more minutes away walking. We aren’t following the world cup but everyone always tells us what’s going on.  And we definitely know when Honduras plays by the screams of joy or gnashing of teeth from every house in the country.  The world cup is better than Christmas here.    

The office is stressful as always, but I´ve come to enjoy it more now.  Everything there is electronic, here a lot is paid in cash, or checks, or I have to deposit it in the banks. I´m in charge of paying rent, but sometimes weird things happen or elders move so we have to arrange paying the owners.  There’s one bank that won’t be in service for a month because their computer systems are down in the whole country!

 

Elder Cook Week Sixty-Five

Hey Family

Time goes so fast in the office!  I feel like it was just P-day.  We had an awesome week!  We’ve gotten to see some of the fruits of our labors in the last couple days. We put a fecha [baptism] with a few people we've been working with! 

I also learned that sewing is something way harder than it looks. My pocket ripped off one of my shirts a couple weeks ago so I used a safety pin to fix it.  But then I washed it and the pin disappeared!  I tried using super glue, but that only worked until I walked to church and it fell off again.  So I decided to sew it.  It was going pretty well and had some super positive thoughts like opening up my own sewing store because I was so good at it.  The other elders were gathered around, and then I finished and it looked great! One of the Elders said, “Hey I think there’s something wrong there.”  I lifted it up, and realized I had sewn three different parts of my shirt from various locations into the pocket.  Sewing career ruined!  Mom, Grandma Young, Grandma Halls, I am so proud of you guys.  The ability to sew is something to be admired, and I have been humbled a lot by it. 

Let me tell you about one lady we are teaching.  She is around 65 years old and super funny, she’s like our grandma.  When we were first visiting her, she always hid.  One day a couple weeks ago something changed and she came to a ward activity and loved it!  Then, she went to church!  She accepted us to teach her, and then accepted a fecha!  We were so excited and grateful that the Lord had softened her heart. But now she’s not sure if she wants to be baptized. Pray for her please!  We love her a ton but can’t figure out what to do still.  We are pretty worried about her. 

Another girl we are teaching has a fecha for the 28^th of June.  At first we were only teaching the mom, but we invited her to listen one time and she loved it. She has been reading the Book of Mormon every day.  She is come to all the activities and came to church. She said that what she felt there at sacrament, she’d never felt in her whole life in the Catholic Church.  She said she didn’t know what it was or why she kept having it, and said it was the same feeling she got when she read the Book of Mormon and every time she did, it made her want to read more and pray more.  We explained that it was the spirit testifying that the church is true and challenged her to baptism.  She accepted right away and is excited.  Every time she heads out to a church activity or to church, her mom always says, “Okay you can go, but don’t go turning Mormon on me.”  So we are praying really hard that her mom will support her decision to follow Christ. 

My comp is awesome. We see a lot of little kids begging for money, we see that way too much here, it is hard to see  The other day when we got back in the car my comp said to us gringos, “You guys have never seen that before have you?”  We said “What” he said “The begging children. I guess the closest you guys have gotten to that are the paparazzi that have followed you around.”  We told him paparazzi didn’t follow us around.  We started going through his other myths about the USA, like we mostly just walk around on red carpet, and poor people don’t exist there, and all we eat all day every day are hamburgers.  I almost had to pull the car over, I was laughing so hard.  I think we might have broken him a little when we explained the real USA.  Love that kid.  Well I guess I’ll be writing in a few days again. 

Love you!

Elder Cook 

We played fútbol with the Teguc office!

The Tegucigalpa Mission office and the Comayaguela Mission office are both within the Tegucigalpa Mission boundaries.  Elder Cook and the other Comayaguela Office Elders live within their mission boundaries and drive to the office each day.

 

Elder Cook Week Sixty-Four

The rain should have come a long time ago but we’re in a drought.  We haven’t had water for a couple days because it has to be rationed out. We helped a bunch of families jalar water. (Is there a word for that in English?) on Saturday.  Best workout I’ve had on the mission!  Where we live right now the people only get water like once every two weeks so when they do everyone tries to lug up as much as they can to their homes.

Working in the office has been getting easier!  I feel a lot better this week.  I've gotten a ton done and I feel way more organized and my headaches are gone!  I've been starting to enjoy it a lot more.

Working on this week´s letter still.  Sorry.

gotta go love you!

This is where the containers are filled

We carry them up the stairs

We delivered them to the houses up there

Like good missionaries we clean up whatever we break

They fed us beans and tortillas after we were done