Mason's Letter -- Jan 11, 2009

Hey family.

Well I feel a little bit embarrassed right now because I'm sitting here with my sweater on and I'm cold. It has been raining all week and windy and stormy. This month is the worst month for the rain and storms and stuff. So I guess I'm officially used to the hot here because once it gets below 60 degrees I start getting cold like a catracho (Honduran). When I first got here I would laugh at all the natives who got cold when it rained while I was still hot and sweaty. But I guess that's now me.

Anyways this week was pretty good. Our house has been a tiny bit flooded with all the water, so the guy that owns it finally came and fixed the leaky faucets. So now it's better. So me and my comp complained about that for awhile and then we went to a member's house. This house is completely flooded with about a foot or two of water. So we spent some time with buckets shoveling out the water. I was talking to him and I guess this same thing happens every single year. And every morning for the past 10 years or something he has had to shovel out the water. But he doesn't have enough money to move his house or fix it, he's like 60 years old too. So I felt like a real jerk when I was complaining about a tiny bit of water.

This week I think we got the trust of all the members in the ward back. We have been teaching a lot with the members and trying to get references. And we are starting to get some good possibilities. We have 2 couples right now that want to get married and baptized. But one doesn't want to get married until February because of money problems and the other we have to jump through some hoops to get the paper work done for her. So that's a headache to marry people, but it will be good. 

That is just a really big problem here in Honduras--people don't care about marriage. You can have a huge family that has been together for like 20 years and you will ask them if they are married and they will say yes.  Then you have to say no, like really married, like lawfully married? And of course they have never really gotten married. Just have been living together and having kids together and calling it marriage. Then we will ask if they want to get married and they will say no, they don't want that commitment. haha it's screwed up.

But most of our investigators right now are in Miramar. So this week Independecia (the other ward Mason serves in) got kinda mad at us for only working out there. They are jealous and say that we need to spend the same amount of time in both. But technically we are the missionaries for Miramar...we just adopted Independencia after they took the sister missionaries out because it's an inefficient area. So our first priority is Miramar. The other ward is so hard to contact in and stuff because it is the downtown city. So that sort of made me mad how they have been saying that to us. We just say, hey if you guys give us references like the ward in Miramar does, we will come out here. But the ward is really lazy and they don't give us anything.

We are working really hard here with Elder Brown. I'm learning a lot of things and I'm really starting to make strides in the language. We get along great and I'm having a really great time. It seems like now that there just isn't enough hours in a day to teach all the people that we want.

So that has been my week--really wet and cold with a lot of working. 

I'm loving it here.

Elder Mason Cardon