Merrill & Colleen's Honduran Adventure

 Sunday June 25, 2023 Hello once again from Tela Honduras.  This is the church where we meet here in Tela.  I took a picture of the Telamar branch building but it is not on my phone, so I don't think it really took a picture,  I'll get a picture for next week.  They are both nice buildings for here.  They are not anything like what you would find in the US but for Honduras standards they are nice.  Both have been here a long time.  This one in Tela is a little bigger than the one in Telamar but they are both similar.  All the buildings here are concrete structures with tile floors so everything echoes greatly inside.  There are several children who like to run around and scream as they are having fun so it sounds so much louder than it ever would in a USA building with carpet and noise suppressing walls.  Reverence is a concept that is totally different here than back home.  In sacrament meetings it is always said here after th...

 Sunday June 18, 2023 This has been a busy week.  Can we just start there.  Not so much with missionary work but with the carnaval de Tela here this week.  It started Wednesday and finally ended last night.  Before we go there though I want to share an awesome experience that we had with this good man in this picture.  His name is German Madrid.  We met him the very first day we were at church in Tela. He has been Branch President here in the branch I don't know how many times, he is one of those people who is so very friendly and open and just great to be with.  He and his wife live very close to the church, and she has health problems to the extent that she pretty much never leaves the house.  He takes care of her and gets out some.  They were of the very first members of the church here in Tela.  He remembers the first missionaries who were here which are the ones that baptized them.  He likes to say that they were what the ...

 Sunday June 11, 2023 This sweet sister has completed her mission and so she was asked to share her testimony at a zone conference we had this past week.  It is always so interesting to hear their wonderful testimonies as they come close to the end of their mission.  They are always soooo good.  I think that at the end of the mission service they are all so close to the Lord and are so used to prayer and scripture study every day and are so involved with serving others, all those things that we are all supposed to do, to be close to the Spirit.  They have such sweet humble testimonies.  As they talk about like this sister did that the time goes by so fast and that they are so thankful for this experience of being a missionary.  This Hermana is from here in Honduras from Tegucigalpa. She said that she is so grateful for all of us here in the mission that sacrificed of their time to come on a mission to her home country to help her people to know more of...

Sunday June 4, 2023 Yesterday, on Saturday the Hermana's asked us if we could take them out to this family's house for a visit. There are 6 kids living here.  The parents are in California, working and sending money here for the kids. Everyone in the family are members of the Church except for the oldest son who is not in either of these pictures.  It was a great experience to be there and get to know them a bit.  I don't recall them ever being to church so it was great to meet them and hear a bit of their story.  They were all living over in another bigger city when they met the missionaries and were baptized, then the parents decided to try a new life and make some money and eventually get all their family to the US.  I am not sure why the oldest son was not baptized at that time but they moved the kids out to this small extremely rural village named Hiquaque, and the parents moved away.  It is all rather strange but here and I suppose all throughout cent...