Honduras!!

Hola. I am here in Honduras finally! So the last day of the MTC was super boring. We just sat there and had a bunch of presentations. Funny story, the last day we were having to weigh bags to make sure they were good, and my companion was over by a total of 15 pounds. He had to leave a few things behind, but it was stuff like shampoo and mouthwash. Anyways, i had to leave the MTC at 3 in the morning to catch our flight to El Salvador, then we connected to San Pedro Sula. they were both about 40ish minutes long so it was really quick.

When we first got here, the mission president was waiting for us to take us to the local stake center where we got a few talks about how everything works out here. Anyways after that, they sent us out in the city with one of the older missionaries to go talk to some people. I went out with Elder Lucha, and he is from El Salvador and doesnt speak any English. It was super funny trying to talk to him, and i am sure i sounded like a 2 year old. I thought i was able to understand what people were saying in Spanish pretty well before i got here, but for the first few days i had no idea what anyone was saying. This Spanish is a lot faster than the Spanish in Guatemala. Also for some of the people here the S is silent, unless it is at the end of a word. Not all people speak like that but some. We slept at the secretary's house and it was alright. We had baleadas for breakfast and they are super good. Then we had to go back to the Stake center and get our assignments and head out.

My trainer is Elder Chavarria, and he is from Costa Rica. He is super cool, and he knows a lot of English so that is really good when i have no idea what is going on😂.  We took a taxi for about 15 minutes to my area. My area is called Smith, and it is in San Pedro Sula, and as far as San Pedro Sula goes it is pretty safe(knock on wood).  It is kinda a lower middle class area, with a few streets of what is called a Bordo(not sure if that is spelled right). basically it is a bunch of people who just kind of piece together houses, but they are all super humble. Everyone is super friendly here, i have only talked to maybe 1 person that i would call rude. They name the mission areas here after the ward boundaries, so the ward i am in is also called Smith. There are about 130 people that come to church on average is what i have heard.

My apartment is in a neighborhood called Villa Florencia. Sooooo, the apartment. The apartment is pretty good until you get to the bathroom. It is super tiny, i barely fit in it😂. For the first 2 days, i only had an idea of what was being said, probably about a 3rd of the time. Since then though, i have kind of gotten used to the way people speak here. Emphasis on kind of. Probably half of the work we do in the area is with less actives and part member families. The investigators we have are really good though. We do a lot of contacting of people too. We had a really good lesson with this investigator, Julio Cesar. He is super awesome and when we were talking about faith, the Spirit was super strong. We have a few people that are really hard to get a hold of, but we are trying to do better with that. That about covers the info part of this week. Oh, i almost forgot. It is SOOOOOOO hot here 🔥. The only time i am not sweating, is when we are sitting down and there is a fan turned on. Nobody here has any kind of air conditioning. Oh, and every house here has a huge fence that is locked, before you even get to the door, which is also deadbolted. So, we stand outside the fence and just yell BUENAS! till they come open the door. Oh thats another thing, instead of saying buenas tardes, or specifying what time of day it is. Everyone just says buenas.

Roads are either dirt, or kinda like cobblestones. I dont know how to describe it, but they use it sometimes for paths.  We mostly walk everywhere.  Taxis are super cheap here it was about a 15 minute ride from the stake center to our house, and it was only about 3 dollars in american money. My first day here we rode a rapidito. Imagine a smal vw van, but converted into public transportation. They are super sketchy, the drivers here are horrible. I honestly think the rule here is that the bigger car has the right of way.

Food Favorites:

Maracuya Juice
Mora Juice
Tamarindo Juice
Baleadas
Honduran tacos(they kind of look like taquitos)

Bags of water(kinda weird right? But they are only about 10cents in American money, and when we are walking around, we run out of water super quick, and these are cold )

Foods that were not good:

I only had one i didnt like, and it was this weird soup that had peas, corn, yucca, potatoes, and whatever kind of meat that they thought to put in it. The bowl they gave me had a huge piece of soggy chicharron in it, and it was disgusting.(It was probably about the size of a 3X5 note card, maybe a little bigger.)

Funny Stories

1. We were talking to this one guy in the street, and then this drunk guy on a motorcycle came up and started talking to us. He asked if i knew spanish, and i said un poco(just a little). then he started yelling at me in Spanish, "Here we only speak spanish, you need to know spanish, if you didnt know spanish before, you need to go back to your country, why didnt you learn spanish before" he probably repeated that 20ish times. I kept saying yo se(i know), but i guess he really wanted to get his point across. Anyways we finished talking to the other guy and left.

2. We were talking to this other guy, and we asked him if he had a religion. He said no. Then he went on to tell us that there are infinite gods. His motorcycle was a god, money was a god, he was a god, we were gods. Just kept listing stuff. He also was talking about how he liked to live in the street and not in a house, because he liked seeing what people did. Then he started talking and the only verb i caught out of it was "matar." If you want to know what that means go google it. Needless to say we got out of there in a hurry.

That is a really long email but it has some pretty good stuff in it.

Elder Jensen