Everything you´ve wanted to know about Honduras‏

To begin,  Thank you so much everyone for the letters!

(Aaron Weaver, Hermana Aubrey Glazier, miss Brooke,

A wedding invite from Miss Janelle (no longer loosli). Congrats on your wedding!

and darling Mother Anderson)

Due to all the questions I have been getting, and my lack of talking about the country I´m living in, I now present to you:

Everything You´ve Ever Wanted to Know about Honduras

(in the eyes of Hermana Snelson)

The food:

Is delicious! I haven´t noticed any big difference... yes I eat more rice, beans, and tortillas than I did before, but I´m so accustomed to it now that I don´t think twice when I´m making the grocery list. That being said, we don´t cook for ourselves often, for the most part the members feed me and they feed me GOOD. They were right, you do gain weight on your mission! Haha. :) Here is  an example of the food we make ourselves. Corn we bought in the street, with ketchup, mayonaise, mustard, and cheese. It´s how they do it in Guatemala, and it was delicious.

One thing unique to here are baleadas. A huge tortilla piled with refried beans, eggs, cheese, and mantaquilla (a creamish thing... kind of like whipping cream?). That is a basic one, but they have the fully loaded ones with steak and bacon. Oh they are amazing. They have a lot of soups that are unique to here too... like Mondonga (with cow knees), and... I can´t remember their names. But I have yet to try anything I don´t like! Hermana C. and I were discussing this the other day... on  the mission you eat anything because you don´t know when you´ll be eating next! Haha.

Where I live:

I am in the city of Tegucigalpa! We have a grocery store within walking distance with everything I need, and if not we go to the mall next door and to stores just for paper. Haha It´s awesome. There would have been a picture of me showing that I do in fact live in the city, but it´s too dangerous for us to take my camera out unless there´s elders around. So next week hopefully. :)

We take taxi´s for everywhere we need to go not in our area. Like to the church! For a direct taxi it´s $1, for one that´s collective (makes stops) is about $0.75, and for the bus it´s $0.20. Obviously we try to take the bus anywhere we go, but I live in Honduras so the bus schedule is if you walk out in the street and see the bus you take it. I feel like we don´t really walk an extraordinary amount, or maybe I´m so used to it so I don´t think much of it.

The weather:

I think everyone thinks I live on the Equator.... I feel like the weather is the same as Hawaii, there are days when it´s hot so we just walk with an umbrella, there are days when it´s rainy (we´re in the rainy season now, but it´s not like.. a flood everyday) so I just walk with an umbrella. Yesterday it was raining so hard we stopped by the house so I could trade out my "cheap american umbrella" to get a beach umbrella. Haha. There´s humidity, but I seriously missed it when I went home from school, so I´m adjusting fine. :)

The language: I can pretty much understand everything people are saying to me. Everyone tells me my spanish is great, but I know it needs work. But this transfer is ending on Wednesday, and I have officially met my goal of wanting to say everything I want to to my investigators so that´s great! This next transfer´s goal (by my birthday) is to be able to communicate with everyone in the street- like people who want to talk about their trip to the doctors office.

And now we have some funny stories:

We were with the Family Salines and were getting ready to go. So we ask Alison (the 9 year old) to say the closing prayer. She´s the shyest one of the girls and was hiding behind her hands and was whispering something to her mom. Her mom was confused and said, "What do you mean? Hermana Snelson?" We found the problem- last time she prayed she said she was thankful for "las mormonas" and the girls made fun of her after. So she was wondering what she was supposed to call us. Ha! We told her the missionaries would be fine. :)

And something else that was funny was the other night we finished a lesson with them and asked if there was anything they needed. Katherine (14) brought out her math homework and was asking Hermana Concoha for help, who referred it to me. It was so funny because I was just sitting in Honduras, explaining Algebra in spanish, the usual :)

Here I am in the English class we teach.  One thing we do is learn 10 new verbs every week. Well, to help them remember we do an action. Like, in stead of saying "nadar, to swim" we just say "to swim" with an action. So in the picture I´m demonstrating "to send".

Another random learning the lingo example...We were walking down the street and I was skipping and singing an EFY song stuck in my head. (serve a mission, you WILL have EFY songs stuck in your head). Hermana C. was laughing and asked if I dance everywhere I go. Well, obviously I had to whip out the invisible maraca´s. She was laughing and I was trying to explain that my maracas were invisible... only problem was I didn´t know the word for invisible. So i´m trying to explain that it would be like if there was a person standing in front of you, and you couldn´t see them, "Hidden?" no... So accepting defeat, I then realized, "Do you know who harry potter is?" "The wizard?" YES. So I´m explaining his invisibility cloak, and then we found the word for invisible. In case anyone is wondering, it´s invisible. 

Every time we see this sign we laugh so hard, so we finally took a picture

Translation: "Careful! Women buying shoes!"

And last but not least, a great spiritual experience.

We were meeting with Marvin, when we asked about how he was feeling about his baptism. and he said he wasn´t feeling ready.

Well, the night before when we invited Jose to church, he said he wanted to know more about the doctrine before he went to church. (Many Christians here believe that you must repent BEFORE you go to church, so they are often wary to go to church with us until they feel ready to enter the Lord´s house). So I was studying for personal study for him, when I found this conference talk from President Uchdorf 

(http://www.lds.org/general-conference/2013/04/the-hope-of-gods-light?lang=eng). 

The part I like the best was:

"Isn’t it wonderful to know that we don’t have to be perfect to experience the blessings and gifts of our Heavenly Father? We don’t have to wait to cross the finish line to receive God’s blessings. In fact, the heavens begin to part and the blessings of heaven begin to distill upon us with the very first steps we take toward the light."

So I was planning on using this for Jose, but as soon as Marvin said this, I asked if I could share a quote with him. So we read this article together, and then emphasized how I got baptized when I was 8, and by all means did not have the firm testimony of the gospel that I have today. And he kept saying, "yeah... I don´t know." Hermana Concoha was just reiterating and I was thinking "we can sit here all day just talking but he doesn´t need to hear it from us, he needs to hear it from Him." so I had the impression to have him pray, right there.

So I looked up at him and said, "Hermano, we know that you are ready. God knows that you are ready. I want you to ask God to give you the same feeling that we have so that you might be able to feel ready as well." and he nods and says, yeah, I´ll pray tonight. And I just felt this... well burning in my heart and said, "No hermano, you have you pray right now." So we close our eyes, then waited.

It started out really soft and quiet, but soon it was louder as I could feel his courage and confidence building. It felt like there were just angels, standing all around us in this little security guard station and I just felt so perfectly happy.

The prayer was done and I sat there waiting, not wanting to say anything. I figured if Ammon could wait for an hour in silence, so could I. Finally Hermana C. said, "Marvin, how do you feel right now?" and he smiled and said, "Good, I feel really good."

So kids, follow the spirit- always.

Love you all so so much. Thanks for the prayers, love and support.

Hermana Snelson