News From Nicaragua: First Baptism!!

Family and Friends,

How is everything going at home? It has been a pretty good time here in Nicaragua. It has cooled down a little bit this week (doesn’t mean I’m still not super hot) but it is still super humid and it has rained almost every night. The rain is super hard and it kind of stinks during lessons because you can’t hear anything. Everyone has tin roofs so the rain is just super loud. It is especially hard when it’s a different language that you don’t know perfectly. But all is well and I’m having a good time!

I know you were worried about what I am eating but we eat meals 2 times a day, only on some days we only eat one. I found some Cap’n Crunch at the store and bought it to eat for breakfast. I’m super stoked. We mostly eat chicken here and there is some gross food but I just try to down it.

You were also wondering about where I live and if there are any bugs or animals that sneak in. There are a million ants in our house which kind of sucks and I have a ton of bug bites on my ankles from them but its all going good. There is also this cat in our house that likes to poop so we have to clean that up sometimes.

I’ll tell you a little bit more about what I have to do every day. We have this thing called the standards of excellence. They are goals that we are supposed to meet everyday as a mission, and that is what we pretty much try to do everyday. Anyways we are supposed to teach about 7 lessons, have 12 contacts per person (a contact consists of sharing a gospel principle and an invitation) and bring 6 people to church every week. We have been doing pretty well with this but it is hard to get 48 contacts with 4 people. The language is coming along super well! I have a lot to learn but am able to teach which is good.

Anyway this week was pretty good. Not much happened Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday. We had zone conference on Friday, which was super great. In my last email I think I said that our zone was the worst number wise, and we are trying to raise it. My zone is super tough. Everyone here goes to a church, so we mostly teach the restoration. The people aren’t very accepting, but that is super relative because I know how hard some other missions are. Real life is definitely hard. So it was pretty much just a pep talk to encourage us to find people to get baptized. It was super great to meet the whole zone and do practices and stuff.

Everyday we worked on our baptism prospects for Saturday, but not all of the baptisms worked out and bunch of them fell through so we just pretty much worked with Ana and Gregoria. We are working on a bunch of people, and try to place about 3 baptismal dates every day.

Just a little bio, Ana has been listening to the missionaries for 7 years. She told us that "she doesn’t have an answer" but with 7 years of missionary lessons you would think she did. She has a daughter on a mission and a younger daughter who is baptized. This type of person we call a jarron azul (blue jar) in our mission, because they show us a movie on the first day about a blue jar, and how the person in the movie did everything they could to get the jar, never giving up. That is how all the missionaries have worked with Ana, never giving up.

Gregoria is a super nice lady who does our laundry. She is super quiet and before us supposedly didn’t want anything to do with the church. Missionaries had been working with her for a while too. Her problem was that she wasn’t married so we had to get that all done.

My first day here we placed dates on both of them for the 25, and were super determined to baptize them. On Friday they both had their interviews. Gregoria was easy because she wanted to get baptized, but Ana was pretty hard. She was in the interview for 2 hours, and one of our APs was doing the interview. He was doing everything to resolve her doubts and finally she decided to get baptized. Our AP said she was the biggest jarron azul in his whole mission.

Anyway, both of them ended up getting baptized on Saturday. I got to baptize Gregoria, which was super awesome. We were all super happy because she got married right before her baptism. We baptized Ana later in the day. It was awesome.

Mom, we have a piano here but it is electronic and doesn’t work so everything is acapella. It stinks, not going to lie.

Everything is going super well here and I hope everyone has a great week! This email was super scatterbrained, sorry. Love you all!

Elder Hanson