December 17, 2012

Hola familia,

HONDURAS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thats so sick!!!!!! :) :) :) EL SALVADOR!!!!!!!!!!!!! dope!!!!!!! :) :) austin and jacob you guys dont know how excited I am for you guys!! Thats awesome! and way crazy how fast austin leaves... I had trouble sleeping last wednesday cause I knew you were opening you call. But I really am way way proud of you guys and I always pray for you 2. Especially now as you really prepare to leave. I'm so stoked that we will all be speaking spanish when we get back!! My accent will be different than yours, jacobs, georgias, and landons but my comp said that they speak vos in honduras too. So if thats true me and you aust get to speak the sickest conjugation there is. Its gonna be sweet!!! :) A couple questions.. Did you open austins call at our house then all go to jacobs or how did it work? ho was all there? I just wana know some details. Or maybe you can explain to me when we skype.

That is so sad about grandpa..... :( not sure what the think about all of this right now.. I wont lie I was expecting an email like this at one point in my mission but I was just hoping I wouldnt.. I am honestly so grateful for the plan of salvation and that we will see him again.. I'm going to miss him so much... :( but I know he will always be with us though. Cant explain all my crazy thoughts right now... doesnt help that me and my comp went and did his tramites to make him legal this morning and had to wake up at 4:30..

So this week was a pretty good week. I was actually worried about my new comp cause elder mcnabb and him didn't get along.. But things are good and we are becoming good friends. He actually lived in england for 10 years haha. But yeah so a couple things that happened this past week. On thursday we were coming home from district meeting and we went to get lunch and I followed my old comps instructions of what bus to take to get to the bishops house and we went way too far and got lost. Then we got off and took a taxi. I told him the street name and he took us to capital which has the exact same street name.. So yeah then we had to get on a train and get back and yeah it was nuts. But I had a really good conversation with the driver of the taxi so there definitely is a reason for everything. And it was definitely a test of frustration and faith. I also got your package mom and I was so happy to get a box of homesickness ;) hahaha no it was great! I loved it!! I used the wrong connector to plug the lights in and blew them out the second day. So I went to jared (our good friend that works with his family at their store) and he gave me free lights. So I decorated it and the box from sister nielsen was from the nielsens and the dicksons and it has 2 little envelope/packages in it and its the 12 days of christmas as a missionary haha. So i put those under the tree (as you can see in the picture). So yeah thank you mom! And tell the dicksons and nielsens thank you so much!!! Ao everything kinda changed yesterday. There are 2 wards that go to our chapel. Us (tonelero) and liniers. We have few members so yesterday they combined the 2 wards and tonelero doesn't exist anymore. They released all our callings and bishopric and so now we have a new everything and the sacrament room is actually full now haha. But yeah so now we are linier 2. And we are 4 missionaries in liniers. President is going to talk to us later tonight to let us know if he is going to change the boundaries or anything. But yeah so we confirmed jazmin yesterday which was great and rosendo (the man in the wheel chair) came to church yesterday and he has a baptismal date for this coming sunday. He isn't doing so good right now. He is in a lot of pain with his leg and his business isn't doing so good and he lives in a one room house LITERALLY the size of our bathroom. And its full of clothes and stuff everywhere.. but it has 2 beds and a tv so thats it.. yesterday we asked if he wanted a blessing of health (is that what they are normally called in english? I cant remember.. that's translated from spanish haha). We explained what it is and we are going to give it to him tonight. I am really hoping he has enough faith to be healed cause if he does then I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that he can get up and walk right after if its gods will. We will see how that goes. We are in the process of finding right now so we are going to be getting on that this week. So I think thats about it for this week. I know there was other stuff but I cant remember.. and my pics with my tree arent working so maybe next week. So yeah tell steggell I love him when he gets home this week and tell jamie congratulations for getting married and its really crazy I'm hitting my 1 year mark this week. I really cant believe it.. its gone by so fast... and at the same time I feel like I've been here for forever. But just looking back a little bit I have changed so much. Like even in the past couple weeks. My whole mission I have always been like scared of the phone. Never liked to answer it or call people or talk to people in the street or contact references or anything. But I don't know how or when but I think that changed in my mind sometime last transfer and now I carry around the phone I answer and call everyone, I contact our referrals, I talk to the drunk people in the street that talk to us, I lead the lessons. Its made me happy to see that thats not just what I'm doing but its what I'm becoming. Its amazing what the spirit can do when your obedient.. who ever knew! haha :)

So yeah we heard about the new teaching program. In spanish its "ven, seguidme" I think. And apparently my companion heard about the 5 week transfer and so he was thinking that we would all go home one week earlier but that's weird that brent is only one day earlier and others 4 weeks.. not sure how it works. But I'm hoping we come home just a little bit sooner so that we don't get home on Christmas eve. But I guess we will see. So I guess that is it for this week. I don't really know how the skype thing is going to work at this moment. We are kinda confused so we are going to talk to people or call our DL and then maybe get on a little later if we need to. So I will let you all know. les amo mucho!

Love, Elder Buxton