First Day in Guatemala!

Hey everyone, this is a quick email that im sending out as im sitting in the computer lab in the Guatemala CCM! They are giving us 10 minutes to write a quick email, so ill just keep it pretty short and say that i am here safely! After last nights ordeal of delayed flights and such we got here at about 6am (its the same time as mountain time by the way) and we got on a bus and traveled through Guatemala City to the gautelmala CCM! I took some awesome pictures ill have to send back to you guys in the next couple weeks. I got a new companion, Elder Martinez, and he was in intermediate spanish so his espanol is really good, so ill learn a lot from him. I saw Elder Chambers too within 1 minute of getting here, and he helped me get set up in my room and such. Its great to see him again, and since right now theres only about 60 missionaries here, ill be able to see and talk with him a lot in the next few weeks. Its so crazy that im in a different country, Guatemala is beautiful and the perfect temperature. its not as humid as i thought it would be, and its just exciting to be here and see the temple out my window. Everyone here is talking in spanish (Obviously) and its really hard to understand them becuae they speak so fast, but its going to be really cool to be able to talk to the latinos here and get a real sense of how they talk and what they are like. well i have to go, ill send an email saturday! probably...


Love,

Elder Henderson

**Note from Holly below**

Yesterday was a crazy & exciting day as Elder Henderson traveled down to Guatemala!

He wrote us a letter saying he could call us in between flights, so we were all excited to hear from him! From the times he gave us that he would call, I did a little research and had a pretty good idea of what flights he would be on...and I decided last second to take the boys up & try to see him at the Salt Lake Airport before he left. (there has to be some benefit to living in Utah...!) Miraculously, we stepped off the elevator from the parking garage at the airport, and we were standing right by the security line--where there were about 20 missionaries waiting in line!!! We spotted Cory right away & caught his attention. He was surprised to see us (to say the least!), but excited! Since he was already in the security line, we just talk back & forth a little and got a quick picture:

(With his MTC companion, Elder Russell)

Here are Tucker & Calvin with our little sign:

(they didn't quite understand how amazing it was that we were able to see Cory!)

So it was really quick, but it was so good to actually see him IN PERSON!!! And with his missionary badge on! Hopefully I didn't break any rules by doing that...

Now a quick recap on his travels: Cory's first flight out of Salt Lake ended up being delayed about 2 hours, meaning they would have missed their connecting flight to Guatemala. So they (all 20+ missionaries) sat in the airport ALL DAY waiting, until they finally got on a flight to Los Angeles at 9:30 pm, and then went on to Guatemala City to the Guatemala MTC. (For those of you who don't remember, Cory is now at the Guatemala MTC for 6 more weeks before he enters the field in Retalhuleu.) And as you saw in his email above, they didn't get to the MTC until about 6:00 am. What a long day & night!

The good that came out of it (for us), was that Cory had plenty of time in the airport to call all of us in the family, and we each got multiple personal calls. It was SO fun to talk with him!!! He is doing great & really loving the work.  We are all so proud of him!!! And we were so happy to get the email from him this afternoon saying he did in fact get to Guatemala safely! :)