10/25 Letter Home

First of all the biggest thing that happened this week was probably the weather. On Friday during the middle of the night a huge rain storm came in and it didnt stop until Saturday late at night... there were floods inside and out of our house. There was about a 3 foot deep river that formed in the street by our house that we have to cross everyday, so to cross it that morning us and everyone else around us all hopped into a city bus, drove across the river, and then got out on the other side. The bad thing is that the water is so dirty from flowing through all the trash and stuff so you have to be careful and not get in it. I will try to send you guys a film of it if the computer lets me. It always got into our house too so we had to spend the morning mopping. Besides all the water the weather was really nice though, it was nice to have it cool for a change, it kinda felt like october weather from back at home but still not cold enough to use a long sleeve shirt. One cool thing i have noticed though is we always have our best days teaching wise and also for finding new people on the days with the worst weather.... i think its the Lords way of blessing us for still going out and working hard even in the cold or something like that.

Another cool thing that happened this week was a missionary couple that came to pay us a visit this weekend. They are from Idaho and serving in Germany but they are the head of this thing called Outreach that is getting pretty big in the european area. Its a group of people between 18 and 30 that are single and its just for them to have activities and stuff twice a week to help them stay in the church and find new people for us missionaries to teach too. Its pretty cool and it seems like its going to help a lot. The casal Goff from Orem are the ones in charge of it here in Mindelo... and by the way speaking of them they want you guys to tell Roger and Ellen Cornell hi for them cause they know them well. They also want to know if you dad deliver mail in their area (garden village or garden park) because they want to talk with you when they get back in march. But so anyways they are working on getting this outreach program going strong here to help out the young adults. I think it will be good and has had a lot of success in europe. The couple from Germany came and had a meeting with the district and branch presidents, the presidency of the outreach, and some of us missionaries to show us how to use it last night for a couple hours. After it my companion and i went out to the town square where everyone goes to hang out sunday night (its probably the nicest place and most tourist place in the country) and we passed out a few invites to some people that age down there. One cool thing about the culture here is everyone is open to talk with everyone so when we invited the people they seemed really excited about it and they said they would go to the activities. Hopefully they go and then we can start teaching some of them.

We were also supposed to have a baptism this last week but there were a few complications. He drank coffee one of the days so we told him we would have to delay it another 2 weeks to get him more ready and he didnt really like that and still wanted to be baptized that week. We told him that the baptism isnt just something you do cause you want to and you have to follow a few standards to be baptized... to make a long story short it took him a long time to understand the importance of baptism and repentance and that its not something that just happens over night. He has gone to church for a year now and knows pretty much everything but he says he doesnt want to wait two more weeks, so we told him it will have to be him to decide and we will be here waiting if he wants us to help him prepare a little more. I think its kinda good that happened though cause if it didnt he would have just kept doing it after his baptism without realizing the importance of it. WE had taught him about it, but there is a difference between someone knowing something in their brain and actually knowing it and planning on following it. Hopefully we can help him out though. I think he is a lot like a lot of the members here that dont really understand the importance of stuff here. But we are here to help them with it. Other than that everything is still going about the same and we are still full of people to teach. Transfers will be in 2 weeks so we will see if i will stay with my comp or get a new one, i think we will stay together though.