Mason's Letter -- November 29, 2010

Hey familia,

Wow, I really miss the snow. that looks so awesome. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving weekend over there. This week was just a normal one. For Thanksgiving I went and bought some turkey ham and some bread and cheese and made some Honduran turkey sandwiches. haha It was really ghetto but made me think of the states for a little bit. Then me and some other elders bought some root beer in a gas station...we bought every single root beer in the store haha so that was another Thanksgiving treat.

So this has been the last week of the change...last change with my companion!! haha So today we found out who will be leaving the zone. I was way excited to be put with another zone leader who wants to work, but to everyones' surprise I also have a change. So yeah I only had one change here in Choloma. I'm a little sad about that, but oh well. I guess the only reason they would take me out would be to put me back down as a district leader or--heaven forbid--an assistant to the pres. We are all a little bit shocked here, but we will see what happens.

So this week I have once again passed a lot of time away from my own area. Right now I'm in Cerro Verde. I've been here since Saturday trying to get things going once again. The good news is we found a baptism, and she will be baptized tomorrow. So that's pretty cool. I'm glad we could do that. Today in the morning a member invited us to her biligual elementary school to talk a little bit in her religion class. So we went there and got to share an experience where God protected us. So I told about when I almost drowned as a little kid in that one pool by grandma and grandpa's apartment thing. It was really fun and I made the story really funny and the little kids loved it and they loved practicing their English with us. It was really cool.

On Saturday we had 2 more baptisms in Choloma. It went great. My comp baptized the lady and I baptized her little boy. We have had some difficulties with her husband, but he went to the baptism and she said in her testimony that she wanted him to also get baptized and stuff. It was really powerful and I know he felt it. So hopefully he can start going to church. So we ended the month with 9 baptisms here in Choloma. It was a great month for baptisms and really fun to have so much success so quickly. I guess I was just called here to help these people that were ready to get baptized and that was my only purpose here. We also found a good entire family for the next elders that are here. They are a family of like 5 or 6, and I'm sure they will be baptized here soon. In the month I think we ended with about 29 or 30 baptisms in the whole zone. That's a pretty fair month for us. It could've been higher, but I'm satisfied.

On Wednesday the AP's called me and asked me to go down to San Pedro to translate for a big dentist thing that the church is doing right now. They have a huge free dental clinic going on in the stake center in San Pedro. There are like a hundred American dentists mainly from Utah, but all Mormon. They are doing a bunch of free work on future missionaries and other church members, taking out wisdom teeth and a bunch of other great things. So I got to help translate for the dentists. It was really fun. The dentists were horrified at the state of the peoples' teeth. It was the first time for most of the people to visit a dentist in their whole lives. It was way fun talking to all the dentists in English and was like being back in Utah for a little bit haha. And while I was there an American foot doctor took out my ingrown toenail. It has been bad for awhile and has been really hurting me. Well he took it out and did a really nice job. It feels great now. So that was cool, and free. So that was a fun day and a nice change from the routine missionary work. haha

So while we were there some of the kids (the American kids) wanted to do a service project and clean up the garbage that was on the other side of the street from the stake center. haha they asked me if that was a good idea and I explained to them that the garbage looked like it was just thrown there but really it had a purpose. The garbage truck would come by in a few days and the workers would clean it up. It was just a disorganized dumpster spot. haha They were all scared as well that there would be glass and guns in the garbage. I also told them that that was possible haha. So they never did it, but such a typical Utah Mormon mom type of thing right? haha Also while we were there one lady started freaking out about how much dirt there was on the floor so she made us clean up and disinfect the door knobs! So we had to explain to the janitors that we needed to disinfect the doorknobs and stupid stuff like that and they just looked at us like we were crazy. haha I forgot how extremely clean the people are over there. haha that is one thing Honduras has helped me do... just chill out and not worry about things so much. Mom will probably think that's a bad thing that I've developed haha.

So that's about it for the week. It was really great because I haven't been with my lazy companion at all. Also I bought a hammock today for really cheap, like 5 bucks. Some little girl on the street sold it to me and it's really nice. I'm excited for that.

Well I love you all. I will be excited to see where I will be sent to now.

Love Elder Mason Cardon