La Semana Santa

¡Hola todos!

This week was the Semana Santa, or "holy week." Here they don´t celebrate Easter as one day, but they celebrate the whole week leading up to it as well. Each day is a different part or the last week that Jesus lived on the earth, with Friday as the day that He was crucified, and Sunday as the day that He was resurrected. And so the week is full of really cool traditions (mostly Catholic) to celebrate, each one with symbols of Jesus. 

One of the traditions that they do here is making alfombras, or carpets. They use lots of different types of dyed saw dust to make these really beautiful intricately designed "carpets" on the road. Then, a procession of people bearing a float will come and walk on all of the alfombras as they pass through the city. They were really cool to see, and while we aren´t Catholic, we still really appreciate the things that other churches do to celebrate the life of Christ. 

We also got to go play soccer as a zone this morning, and my companion and I are really tired from that. Latinos are really, really good. We found this really cool field in the middle of a bunch of really huge green trees, and played for hours. 

This week we accomplished all of our contacting goals and met more people than we ever have before, even though my companion was still getting a little bit better from his sickness. So we celebrated by drinking the last bags of water in the house...which sounds kind of sad. But we were super happy though :). 

We are already almost done with this change. And I have a feeling I might be leaving this time. I´ve been here in El Palmar for over 8 weeks already, which is really crazy to me. But we´ll just have to wait and see. And we´re going to be working harder than ever to help all of these people to come to church and find true happiness in their lives. It´s definitely an adventure, and we´ll just have to see what happens. 

Love you guys!

-Elder Cloward

My family was doing this challenge to ballance 5 oranges on top of eachother without them falling. So I found a supermarket and bought some. Success!

Also, there are lots of intresting Guatemalan fruits and vegetables that don´t exist anywhere else I´ve seen. Some of them are super tasty.

"Like a piece of horse meat burning on someone´s porch"

¡Buenas!

So this week was kind of anti climactic. I got all better and now I can hear fine in both ears. And we finally got to go out and start actually working. But then my companion got sick again. He has a really bad fever, and he actually started hallucinating in the street one day...so we have been stuck in the house for the last couple days. My companion is really, really hardworking, and a lot of the time he doesn´t mention how bad he actually feels until there´s no avoiding it. One day he said he actually felt good enough to leave, and so I called the laundry lady to tell her we´d stop by with the clothes in a few minutes. And then I heard my companion say he felt like "a pile of horse meat burning on someone´s porch." And I looked back and he was asleep on the floor, in the exact place he found me when I was sick. And he stayed there for the next five hours without waking up. I read a lot of things and learned a ton, and got some sleep, and solved the Rubik´s Cube around 500 times, and he was still asleep. He did wake up eventually, and he was really confused. Yesterday we were in the house too, and I actually taught him how to solve the Rubik´s Cube because there was so much extra time. 

He stayed here for a very long time 

Before he was sick, we got to go on divisions, which means that we switched companions for a day. I went to Rio Santiago with one of the zone leaders, and my companion stayed in El Palmar with the other. Also, one of the mission president´s assistants was with us in Rio Santiago too for that day. His name is Elder Tadje, and he´s a very white, very tall missionary from Utah. It was really cool to see how he worked. He really changed my perspective of some of the normal, everyday things we do on the mission. He had fun with EVERYTHING. No matter what, he was joking and making people laugh. But he was always doing things right and well, and he wasn´t ever lazy or slow with anything. At one point, we came to talk to a lady who was wearing corte and was clearly from the mountains, which isn´t uncommon to see here. She said she was from Solola, and all of a sudden Elder Tadje, who had been up there for a year of his mission, started speaking to her in this OTHER language. She brightened up and started speaking back, and they had an entire conversation together. I think he introduced us too, but we were totally lost. The truth is, Guatemala has around 23 languages that are spoken by people throughout the country. And the ones that aren´t Spanish don´t sound anything like Spanish, because they come from Mayan influence, not from Spain. He was speaking Cakchiquel with her, but I´ve also heard of Quekchi, Quiche, Pokomon, and a couple others. The culture of this country is really cool, and it makes me super excited to learn even more as I get to travel to other parts throughout my mission. 

Speaking to people in their native language always gets to their heart, and that´s why I´m here speaking Spanish every day. The bible says that the gospel will reach every person in their own town and tongue, and I am here to do just that. It´s fantastic, and I´m excited to be able to do more of that...once my companion gets better.

Love you guys!

-Elder Cloward

Who needs hearing anyway?

¡Buenos días todos!

This week was super strange, but made us laugh a lot. We both finally got better from being sick. And then the next day I woke up in the middle of the night with an ear infection. I ran around trying all kinds of things, but nothing really fixed it, and my companion found me the next day sleeping on the floor in a different room. He said he really freaked out. It was all good though, because the next day I got some actual medicine which helped it to feel a bit better. I still can´t really hear out of my right ear, but it´s all good. My companion also got sick again, and he´s been coughing a bunch. We weren´t very fortunate getting sick again, and some of the week we felt like we were running on fumes the whole day. But, we´re getting a lot better and we´re happy to not be quite as bad anymore. 

Jeremy

We did help a lot of people too this week. We did a lot more work building the well, and I found myself digging in a hole that went over my head, which was actually really hard. But it was really fun to do with everyone. We did have to do something sad though. When we teach people, we invite them to act. To change and to do things to bring them closer to God. But when they don´t follow the invitations, we can´t really help them very much. It´s like when a kindergarten teacher explains how to read, but the student doesn´t want to. The teacher is limited to teaching and inviting, but the real learning is up to the student. And for us, when the people don´t decide to do things, we can´t keep visiting them. We had to do that with a family this week, and it was really hard to do. We´ve been visiting them since I got to this area, and they always listen and love having us there, but they just haven´t really progressed and chosen to follow the things we teach. So we had to tell them that we couldn´t keep visiting them. It was kind of sad, but I know that as we spend our time with people who do want to change their lives, we will bring a lot more happiness to the people in this country. The mission can be hard, but the things I´m learning are incredible. Even though there are sad things that happen, being here is worth every minute.

The conference invitations we made.
Lots of people came to watch because of these!

This week we got to watch the general conference! We were super excited, and we enjoyed it a ton. I´ve watched it twice a year my entire life, but I´ve never been able to focus this well and learn quite so much from the things that the prophet and apostles have said. It was really fantastic, and it really helped me to feel that God is really watching over us and guiding us through everything we do. One of the things that stood out to me most is that we need to focus on the simple things that will help us to be happy. Prayer, the scriptures, going to church, and serving people can make a huge difference in our lives. Also, Christ brings peace. He suffered everything we did, and so He knows how to help us to feel better if we ask Him for help. And when we ask Him to help us in our times of stress and sadness, He helps us immediately. He gives us peace, and helps us to feel loved. And sometimes the full blessings He has for us take longer, but there are always blessings He gives us instantly. I know that God loves us, and that He will always help us if we look to Him.

Love you guys!

-Elder Cloward

Oh yeah, also today marks 6 months of being in Guatemala! I can´t believe I´m already a FOURTH of the way done with my entire mission! I literally feel like I just got here still, and I like it that way. This is my life right now, and I´m gonna try and not think about how fast the time is going by.

Our little house

April fools isn´t funny

¡Buenos días hermanos y hermanas!

We had a rough week. We got poured on, and then we got really sick, so we were just kinda dragging ourselves around for half of the week. But it was really funny for some reason, and we still visited a lot of really great people and did some really cool service. And we got pranked really, really hard by the zone leaders. 

So our friend William wanted to make a wall in his house this week, so we helped him out. We made cement on the ground with a bunch of dirt we found in his back yard mixed with pebbles and a bit of cement powder, and then we built a wall out of cinder blocks. He taught us how to cut a cinder block in half with a machete, which is actually really hard. But we did it, and the wall is pretty nice. Almost all of the houses here are made out of cinder blocks and then smoothed and painted with an interesting color, and we now know how to do it. We also went to Rio Santiago to build a well for some friends over there. Her house is in a complete jungle, and she showed us some really cool Mayan inscriptions she found on some boulders back there. It was really fun actually, and we´ll have to finish it next week because we got rained out halfway through. But it´s all good.

So April Fools happened this week, and my companion and I completely forgot that it existed...but our zone leaders didn´t. They called us that day and sounded really serious and concerned. They said that someone in our branch had called them with a complaint, because he had seen us sitting on the curb drinking alcohol. He apparently took a video and sent it to them, and they said it definitely looked like we were drunk. They told us they had called the mission assistants to see what to do, and they were giving us both emergency changes immediately. I told him I wasn´t sure what he could´ve seen, but we didn´t do that. But he told me that I couldn´t really deny what was clearly in the video, and maybe we didn´t remember it because we were drunk. And we were like ¡¿WHAT?! So finally they told us it was all just an April Fools joke, and we got really mad. it was actually super funny though, and we were completely and totally fooled.

I am really excited this week. The General Conference of the church is coming up this Saturday and Sunday, and we get to listen to the prophet and the 12 apostles on a live video broadcast that goes to the entire world. If that doesn´t sound like a big deal, imagine Moses and the original twelve apostles in the Bible coming back to talk to us about what we need to do to live better lives and be happier. The general authorities today have been called of God and given the exact same authority that Jesus gave them in the Bible, and we get to hear them give us modern revelation for God. The scriptures tell us really great things, but there are a lot of things that are around today that the scriptures couldn´t have talked about, like modern technology and world news. The world is changing, and so God is still telling us what He wants us to do to come closer to Him and stay on the path that leads to eternal life. So we are super excited to hear what He wants from us, and we made really cool invitations to invite everyone to come and listen too. It´s awesome, and I know we´re going to learn a lot of really awesome things. Not to mention that we have a couple hunches about changes to the mission that they may announce. ;)

Love you guys!

-Elder Cloward

Swimming down the street

¡Oi!

So we had changes. And we´re both staying! We were right, and we´re excited to get to be together here for at least another 6 weeks. This week was super full, but really fun. The people here don´t agree on much when it comes to the seasons, but one thing they all do agree on is that April is the hottest month of the year, and May is when the rain starts. And I think they´re right. We´re getting tastes of the heat and the rain, and it´s crazy. This week has brought some really loco weather. One day it poured so hard that the streets were just rivers of water (apparently that´ll happen everyday in May), and we were waiting under someone´s roof for it to stop...but it didn´t stop. So we just decided to go out and teach. So we walked through the rain straight to the next appointment. We were completely soaked, and everyone was looking out at us like we were crazy. But that´s what you do when you´re a missionary. Clothes are less important than people, so people get the first priority. It was fun.

One of our friends taught us how to weld this week, which was super cool. We also walked by this house one day and heard someone yell "¡Buenaaas! ¿Que tal?" Basically "hey, how´s it going?" And my companion told me that it wasn´t a person. And so I asked him what he was talking about, and he told me that it was a parrot. I told him he was crazy, and that birds can get trained, but they still sound like birds. And he said "no no, I´m serious!" And so we took a step back, and he pointed to this green and blue bird sitting on a tire. And the bird looked at us and said "¡quiero comida!" This parrot was literally talking to us, and asking us for food. Apparently that´s really not uncommon here. And this guy came over and the bird yelled his name and told him to get over there and give it some food. It was really funny. He told us it was his bird, and it always starts talking when it gets hungry. I could not believe how good its Spanish was. And when we left, it said "nos vemos, ¡va pues!" One of the strangest things I´ve ever seen.

We also found this really cool road in our area that we explored one day, because it takes you straight through the jungle, right by the river. It was soooo green, and there were tons of exotic birds and trees all over the place. Guatemala is such an amazing country, I honestly can´t believe it sometimes. It´s so cool. 

But the best thing that happened this week was the baptism of Keneth., He´s a little boy that´s only 8 years old, and we´ve been teaching him for a really long time. He finally got permission to get baptized, and he and his mom were both really excited for it.

The baptismal service was simple, but one of the happiest things in the world. You can really feel the joy of the people, and the joy that comes from doing the things of God every time you go to a baptism. It´s a calm joy, but one of the happiest feelings I´ve ever had. It´s so clear to me that we´re hear because God wants us to be, and we´re getting so much help from Him that it´s just incredible. I´m really happy to be serving the creator of the universe, and I hope I can always help people to change their lives and become truly happy as they come to Him.

Love you guys!

-Elder Cloward

We also live in a fortress.

The fridge froze my juice

And McDonald's here is actually kinda good.