Landed in Honduras!

Okay, so I've been in Honduras for  5 days now. Culture shock is a massive understatement. The first day was really hard because I didn't know how to live here.

Let's talk about my appartment. We have the really nice version of a tin roof and walls painted pepto bismol pink. There are cracks between the roof and walls and between the windows and door where lots of little friend crawl in and sleep in my bed. We have a little kitchen area and a tiny backyard of tall weeds surrounded by a cinderblock wall. We're the luckiest ones because we're the only ones who have a washing machine! It's a really old free-standing one in the backyard that takes 20 minutes to fill up and afterward we hang up our clothes on lines to dry! We only have running water about every other 16 hours, so we fill up our pila (a cement tub outside) and buckets in our house to wash dishes and flush the toilet and shower and stuff!

Now lets talk about the bathroom. After we use the bathroom, we have to fill up the bowl with water to manually flush it. And We have 3 big buckets of ice cold water to shower with! This is how it goes down: I stick my head in a bucket and then scream cause it's freezing and then use a little plastic bowl to splash water on myself as fast as i can. My life is good....Real good.

This is just such a crazy experience! This morning I was mopping our floor and accidentally mopped a little gecko up... There have been at least 4 different lizards in our house so far. I am putting up a mosquito net tonight because I've been religioius about spraying OFF and still have about 11 bites.

Mom, my latina compañeras don't refrigerate our eggs... Is that dangerous?

I have a weird situation because I'm in a quadruple companionship! It will be a trio when one sister goes home in 2 weeks. I have two compañeras from Guatemala who are ANGELS and one from my district in the CCM! It's really fun cause we trade comps each day.

We had our first baptism this past saturday!! It was so, so cool! There were supposed to be 2, but one got scared and bailed.

We teach so much here. Everyone is so, so humble and honestly have next to nothing. They are so kind to me even though I'm the biggest Gringa ever. I'm easily the tallest person on any street I walk down and my skin basically reflects the sun and blinds everyone. I don't speak Spanish, but it's alright! I need to be patient! I had a cool experience in a lesson. My comp asked me to bear my testimony on the Word of Wisdom to a lady who I thought had a problem with smoking. But I bore my testimony about coffee and afterward I was thinking I was an idiot and was kicking myself but then my comp also talked about coffee and it turned out that was the only problem this woman had with the word of wisdom. Things like that are happening every day. All is well.

It's really hot. and humid. We eat lunch at 12pm and dinner at 9:30pm. So basically I fast every day.

Each day gets so much easier as I learn how to live without things I'm used to (like clean, running water). But it's absolutely shocking to see how people can get along with just the very, very basics. And often times without the basics. We ate dinner last night in the dark in the home of a member who doesn't have electricity. This is life here.

I wish I had time to tell you everything, but just know that I love, love, love you guys and I hope you're remembering that where much is given, much is REQUIRED. You guys better be doing all you can because you have NO IDEA how blessed you are.

We visited Children of the Dump many years ago. Most people here are wayy more impoverished and humble than those people. Try to imagine it. Dirt floors, tin roofs, adobe walls.

I miss you all more than ever here, but it's okay because I know that this is important and that it's true!