This week was kind of a dud. Here in Honduras, the last week of March is “Semana Santa” or “Holy Week”, and every one heads to the beaches or goes out of town. As it turns out, when everyone is gone, it is really hard to have teaching appointments. Who would have thought! I’ll start with Tuesday. Remember last week how I said it was just unbelievably hot? Well Tuesday morning, I was woken up to the sound of POURING rain. It sounded like someone was continually dumping a giant bucket of water on our roof, it was so loud. Probably the hardest rain I have ever been in. But yeah, it will go from super hot here to three days of pouring rain, back to super hot again like its no big deal. Anyways, this day was a SUPER dud. Not only was everyone gone for Semana Santa, the people who were in our area stayed hiding in their houses. Its kind of like Arizona. If the weather is anything but hot and sunny, the people freak out and just bundle up inside like it is the end of the world. So that made it really hard to do our normal teaching. And everyone here has tin roofs, so the appointments we did have were SUPER annoying because we had to like scream over the rain pouring on their roof. Crazy crazy stuff. Walking everywhere was crazy too. There aren’t any actual roads, so its just dirt roads, which means a ton of mud. So that was pretty fun. I had my trusty boots though, so all was well haha. We decided that we couldn’t really do much, so we went home an hour early. Zura just went straight to watching movies, like he always does, but I studied. Its kind of annoying, he literally just doesn’t care. But I feel like I'm wasting time if I’m not doing something missionary-like, so I just studied for the rest of the night. On to Wednesday. The rain cools everything off so much. I love love love it. It was 79 degrees in our house. That’s heaven here. So Wednesday morning, I went to shower, and apparently the rain has a huge effect on our water supply. I started filling up our bucket and the water was disgusting. It looks like if you poured a spoonful of nesquik in to a glass of water. Just filled with dirt. It was gross. I contemplated even showering, because I couldn’t rationalize showering in dirt as being worthwhile, but alas, I did it anyway. I miss the states sometimes haha. We carried on with our day, but it was raining like gatos y perros, so the people were all hiding. Oh! I remembered an interesting story. So we went to lunch at the restaurant our cook is at, and as we were walking up there was this giant, really nice pick up truck with two security guards with machine guns sitting in the back. Kind of odd. So we continue to the restaurant and there are these two guys sitting there eating. They are both wearing really nice cowboy boots, animal leather belts, wearing like the same clothes, and they both had super shiny pistols with extended mags sticking out of their jeans. Super sketchy. For anyone who has seen the show Breaking Bad, they looked just like the Mexican twin hitman, for real haha. I asked Zura what was up, and in turns out that they are actually legit hitmen. How interesting! I've never met hitmen before haha. Apparently they travel everywhere with those security guards that I was talking about. What kind of hitmen travel with security guards? LAME ones, if you ask me. So I went up to them and asked “If you think you are so tough, why do you travel with security guards?” So they both pulled out their guns, pointed them at me, and asked me if I was feeling lucky. Just kidding, that part didn’t really happen haha. They were lovely gentleman though. Very respectful! Well played hitmen, well played. So this day was pretty much just like Tuesday. A few lessons here and there, but nothing really earth shattering to mention. We walked through rivers all day, which was hilarious with Zura because he just had normal shoes. So there he was being all careful with his steps, trying to find all the driest parts to walk through, and I was just trudging through like a warrior in my boots. It always makes me laugh haha. Onto Thursday. Semana Santa continued to mess with our week. We had appointments in Balsamo, but the busses we need to take weren’t running, so we couldn’t go. We could have walked obviously, but by the time we would have made it there, we would have been late to our other appointments back near our house. So frustrating. We just decided to reschedule them and go to our other appointments. But guess what? Those people were out of town. So ridiculous. Walking back from one of our appointments that fell through, we met a ridiculously drunk guy. I don’t know if the achohol is different here or what, but when these people are drunk, they are DRUNK. Its amazing haha. He stopped us and started asking us for money. This happens to us so often that we have a routine. We tell them that we have something better than money, give them a Word of Wisdom pamphlet, and tell them to call us when they are sober. They can't even process what is happening, so they just stare at the pamphlet like it is a gift from aliens haha. After that, we continued on our way, and another guy stopped us. He wasn’t drunk though, but he was different. He looked like a real life Voldemort. It was seriously so scary. He was as white as paper and was skin and bone. Hes like “You guys are the mormons right?” in a really creep voice. I said yes and then just kept thinking “Please don’t suck out my soul with your magic powers. Please don’t suck out my soul with your magic powers.” Then he’s like “Your religion is cool and all, but I studied in PALESTINE for 4 years. So yeah, I know a few things about religion.” Ok? Thanks for telling us haha. He literally just said that and walked away. I think it was a mind trick. It creeped me out haha. After the encounter with He Who Must Not Be Named, we went to find a reference with a member. After that, we had English class which was a dud too. Everyone is out of town, so only 3 people showed up. Not cool. And remember Christopher? He is like hiding from us. We think it has something to do with his mom, but we aren’t sure. So we will see what happens there. On to Friday. My birthday. I didn’t get a call from a single one of you. That makes me sick. I joke haha. Thank you to everyone who sent emails to me! But I digress. I'll just skip to the birthday festivities. Hermana Magda invited us over for dinner and cake. She is seriously so good to the missionaries. She's awesome. Anyways, she made me my favorite dinner: Tortillas with beans and eggs. I don’t know if that would be weird or normal in the states, I have had it so many times here that its normal. But I love it haha. Anyways, she made me a cake too! How sweet. They sang me happy birthday, then told me to take the first bite because its “tradition”. What they were trying to do though was get my head near the cake so they could slam my face in it. I'm not stupid haha. I kept saying I knew what they were going to do and I wasn’t going to do it, but then they like got upset because I wouldn’t do it, so I was like dang. I really don’t want to put my face in a cake right now, but these people are going to cry if I don’t. So I did it. It was a fun night overall. Quite different from my birthdays in the past, but fun nonetheless. On to Saturday. Early Saturday morning, President Veirs called. We NEVER get calls from him, so I was freaked out that we did something wrong or something. Zura answered, but he asked to talk to me, but he was just calling to say happy belated birthday. What a mission president! He is seriously the coolest. We had a lesson with a family that we are hoping to baptize in April, and it was pretty sweet. We went to a members house that night and they gave us “tamales”. They were like tamale on the outside, but just beans on the outside. Really weird. But I ate it. Now cut to Sunday. 4 in the morning. Those tamales were not sitting well with me, if you catch my drift. So I had to deal with that, and then went back to bed. When I woke up at 6:30, I threw up. Happy Easter! (PS, they don’t celebrate that here, so we didn’t do anything for it. Kind of interesting). But yeah, I was dying. My stomach hurt so bad. But I just fought through it and went to church. I made it through the second hour, but I literally couldn’t take it anymore. We decided to go home so I could go to bed, but Elder Zura had to do some stuff before we headed out, so I just waited on this bench in front of the bishops office. Hermana Magda came up and asked what was wrong. I was being SO dramatic. I was like “Hermana…Im dying. Tomorrow is P-Day. Write my family for me and tell them that I loved him and died a valiant death.” It was funny haha. Anyways, that’s about it for this week. It was pretty lame, I know. But hopefully next week will be more interesting. People will be back in town, I'm 20 years old now, I'm a new man, and I don’t have a demon inside of me eating my intestines. All of those things sound like a recipe for a good week to me! On to the random stuff. 1. Sugar cane is SUPER popular here, in every form imaginable. Where we wait for the buses, there is a lady who juices sugar cane and sells straight sugar cane juice in bags. Pure, unadulterated sugar cane juice. So I tried it, and it was pretty good. I kept grunting “SUGAR WATER. SUGAR WATER” like the guy from Men in Black. I was the only one laughing though because Zura has never seen that movie, and the lady selling it doesn’t speak English, but it was cracking me up. Really, there are only 2 people I know who get that reference (Catie and my boy Dan the Man!) 2. The movie Cars here is like the biggest thing ever. There are Lightning McQueen stickers, toys, posters, etc EVERYWHERE. I seriously don’t get it. Such a random fetish that EVERYONE has haha. 3. I just found out that Elder Zura is getting changed this Wednesday, so I will get a new companion this week. Very nice! 4. This is my 8th week here. EIGHTH. That’s crazy. It feels like YESTERDAY that I was saying I have been here a month. Time is flyingggg by. Anyways, that’s about it. I hope everyone is doing awesome back home. Stay classy!
Elder Shuga
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