Language School Begins

We arrived this evening in Copan Ruinas to start our two weeks of language school and experienced our first slightly scary adventure on the way. We have gotten fairly familiar with some of the roads that we often travel here, but about half of the trip to Copan Ruinas is on roads that we've never travelled on. We have a map of Honduras, but we've discovered that signs aren't used nearly as frequently in Honduras as in the states so we were slightly nervous about getting lost. Soon after turning on the road to Copan we got pulled over by the police at a sort of make shift checkpoint. We've already heard stories of people being pulled over for inconsequential reasons and having to pay a fine in order to leave so we expected this to happen to us at some point, but it would've been nice if we knew just a little bit more Spanish! He took Sean's US license and we both got out of the car as he checked our spare tire well, etc. He kept talking to us and we kept saying 'un piquito espanol'. Didn't seem to make much of a difference. Why is it that when people find out you know a small amount of their language they still speak in complete sentences? Ha! Finally I called the head of the ministry in Honduras and passed the phone to the police officer. Apparently we didn't slow down enough as we approached the cones in the middle of the road (no radar guns to argue over nor any signs letting us know this) and we needed to pay 650 lempiras (roughly $30) now or else they would keep Sean's license! So we paid the man and went on our way. We probably passed about 6 more checkpoints on our trip and Sean slowed down to about 10 mph for each one. I was afraid we'd get pulled over for looking so sketchy! Thankfully we made it the rest of the way with no other ridiculous fines.
Now we're hanging out in our room at our host family's house. The way this school is set up is that we'll have one on one lessons in Spanish for 4 hours a day and then we live with a host family that cooks all of our meals and speaks to us only in Spanish so we have to practice it. Tonight we had an incredibly delicious meal and chatted with our host, Corrie, a bit. What I got out of the conversation was that her husband went to Guatemala to visit a friend that is very very sick with heart problems and took some medicine that is now giving her stomach problems, then a whole bunch of stuff I didn't understand at all. Sean thought it was a family member that is sick with heart problems and is throwing up. Bottom line somebody's sick and he's visting that person. We could definitely use your prayers these next 2 weeks. We've quickly discovered that knowing Spanish is crucial to our time here. We know it's unrealistic to think we will be anywhere near fluent after 2 weeks, but we don't want to squander away our time here. We'll have so much free time to review what we've learned and we have a friendly and inviting family that is willing to have awkward conversations with us. It is in our nature to want to hang out with each other, play cards and read books over hours of studying and awkward interations. So we will often be torn between what we want and what we know is best for us. Please pray that we will choose the latter!