Success in La Mata

Monday: P-day in Comayagua 

We spent the day in Comayagua. We played soccer, basketball, uno and spike ball. It wasn't as boring as previous p-days.

Tuesday: Family Home Evening I guess?

After hours of no success, at around 6:30 we had family home evening  with an inactive family. Their inactive neighbor joined and someone from the branch dropped in. We talked about dedicating time to the Lord and compared it to the Widow's Mite. Even if you only have a little time, you sacrifice is still worth it. 

Wednesday: Taulabé

Because we had so little success the previous day, we decided to visit another town in our area. (Our area is pretty huge when you look at a map but practically no one lives outside of Taulabé and Siguatepeque). After a 1 hr bus ride, we arrived in this small town. It has a busy main part of town but it ends pretty fast if you walk away from the town center.

We taught this one family and one of them shared his story of repentance from his alcohol addiction. He's not a member but it's nice to see the miracle of forgiveness outside of the church. There was this one lady who was in her 90s and she couldn't hear well but she's really good at reading so she read the lesson aloud. That was an interesting lesson for sure.

We went to a part member families house to teach only to get invited by them to go out to eat. This is the person I taught my first lesson to. We went and got pupusas (Cheese filled tortillas) and had no lesson. Not great missionary wise but we got free food and I had horchata for the first time in a while.

Thursday: At least there's success in La Mata

After all of our appointments fell through again we decided to knock on doors in La Mata and we immediately got a lesson. La Mata is kinda where we default to if lessons fall because people are all more receptive there. Missionaries avoided it because it was  far but our success there proves that they needed to go.

We decided to visit an inactive family and were surprised when this family didn't know much about the Book of Mormon. We taught them about it and the boyfriend of one of them was really interested. Because of how slow this area is we have time to visit inactive families and always seem to find something.

Friday: Yep La Mata is a great place to teach

This is the day we did our normal visit to the Mata and we taught a lot of lessons.  Someone was interested in the talks from conference and another family is progressing faster than we expected. 

This family was a referral from one of our investigators (That doesn't happen a lot) and we taught them about the Sabbath Day. They were interested in attending (Didn't end up but that's better than most people) and we think they might attend this next week.

Saturday: Carne Asada and a member referral

Appointments fell through again (Not la mata = not a lesson apparently) so we visited Bertha again (Evangelical Lady who loves talking religion and about our church but had no interest in attending or the Book of Mormon). We talked to her about the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. She has no interest in reading them but loves to talk religion and about them. We also taught about the Law of Chastity as well. She likes the beliefs but has not interest in the church which is weird but I guess in the future it'll be easy to teach her.

After Bertha we attended the Elder's Quorum activity. It started 1-1.5 hours late (Typical of this area) and we taught an  online person while we waited for food to cook. Apparently that one lady who took us out to eat (Her name is Leslie and I am going to use that for now on) came to the activity and left in the span of 10 minutes. The members here are "helpful" and apparently they didn't want to talk to her much. 

We had Carne Asada -steak with peppers, lime and avocado- which was similar to the states but because its Honduras there was also refried or liquefied beans.

That night we contacted some references and someone we hadn't talked to or met before wanted to go to church the next day. We decided that we needed to pray for the people in our area so we spent 25 minutes praying for each individual person we could think of.

Sunday: He's been reading WHAT?

The person we contacted the previous night came to church and we talked with him. Apparently he's been reading the book of Mormon via Gospel Library? He a referral from a member from the other area and he's very interested. He's already the person progressing the most and we just barely met him. He didn't mind 3-hr church (This Branch has timing issues: 15min late and 1.5 classes are not normal) and wanted to know about the next week's Come Follow Me lesson.

We coordinated Family Home Evening with a family that's neighbors with Bertha's son who's interested and we hope that he can attend.

We went from a do nothing week to being optimistic about a baptism quite rapidly.  We are very optimistic for this next week and we hope all goes well. The members haven't been very helpful (The Branch President attended church for the first time in several weeks and the Stake President thinks he's helping a lot more than he actually is.), but we got people progressing more this week.

Timing

My companion explained that the culture here is strange when it comes to timing. 30min late to something is socially acceptable, and they don't really care how long something goes. It's difficult to plan sometimes because you never know if a member is going to be late or not, but we get forgiveness for tardiness.

Social Media

The only Facebook account in the entire mission is the missions main account. Pres Baquedano is not a big fan of Social Media proselytizing because we get way more success in person. When half the people here (at least) don't have phones or access to the internet, in person is so much better.

P-Day Dinner Out

Laundry by hand

Soccer with Elder Nunez

Soccer

Clean shirt?

Asleep on the bus

Chips made with green bananas