8/2 Letter home

Its crazy to think that one more week has already gone by, time is flying. It sounds like the family reunion was really fun, it would have been cool to be there! I would kill for some dutch oven cooking and bbq right now. We are still eating at that resteraunt where that lady cooks for us still and at first it was alright but im starting to get sick of eating rice every day again so i think we might be taking a break from it and cook at home again. Did you guys get to ride some horses down there? I am still waiting for the day that you guys write and say that you just bought some horses for us too ride. And if the horses thing doesnt work out i wouldnt find 4 wheelers either, just something to get me up in the mountains every day. This area here in mindelo actually kinda reminds me of kanab with the scenery (besides being surrounded by the ocean). But there is lots of red rock and its just deserty kinda like that and a few mountains and stuff... i was going to take some pictures of it but the day i took my camera out with me it was kinda cloudy so it wouldnt have been all that cool.

So the coolest part about this week was the trip to sal that we had. We headed out there early wednesday morning and stayed out there until thursday morning. Sal is definitely different from the other two islands that i have been on. I dont know if you guys are remembering the movie "I am Legend" but its kinda like that. You see houses and stuff but its just dead quite and nobody is out. Sal is just flat with random houses just scattered across the desert without any streets that really go to them or anything. It actually has the nicest resort out of any of the islands and has the coolest beach in the whole world there with pure white send and clear water where you can see all the way down to the bottom. The only thing is it was cloudy that day too so we didnt bother going out there, i will for sure be going there next time in about a month though. Most people that live there though dont live there permanately, they just go there for work for months at a time so i got to see people from all the different islands. It was a really fun division and i really wouldnt mind serving there one day, but i am still wanting fogo or brava the most. It was really weird flying there, you get to flying altitude for like 5 minutes and then they come back on the intercom and say that you will already start descending. The planes are pretty small too but its cool being able to fly around.

We actually will be flying early tomorrow morning to go back to praia for our zone leaders counsel cause it got switched from next week to this week. It will be cool getting to go to praia again and i am hoping i will have time to see people i know before the counsel starts. I miss all of the people from there! I dont know how excited i am about the zone leaders counsel though, i think it is going to go forever ( like 8 hours) and we will just be sitting there discussing a bunch of different stuff. Its been a cool oportunity to be zone leader but i am so ready to get out and just be a normal missionary, this is my 5th transfer and i know i will be staying at least one more because my companion will be leaving at the end of the transfer in 2 weeks to another area so i will have to stay here to get my new companion.

The work is still progressing but very very slowly and we are having to work hard for it. We still have a couple really cool people that we teach. One is a 44 year old guy that just lives at his house with his sister and mom. He is really quite and stuff but i really like him because if he says he will do something like come to church or be at his house for his appointment, he will really be there. And if he wont be there he will tell us. Thats unlike 99 percent of the people here that say they will do stuff and dont. He has been coming to church these past couple weeks though and reads the book of mormon every day and i believe he will get baptized. We also had a cool experience with a less active this week. All of his family are members of the church (its actually the brother in law of the brother of President Neves). He is 19 and i had never known him before but we ran into him and taught him once and he is a way cool kid. He has been in active for quite a few years though ( he is one of the few here in this country that baptized with 8 years old) so we tried to get him to start reading the scriptures and stuff and we also invited him to play soccer with us next week and stuff cause he plays for a time. The lesson went pretty normal though and i didnt think a whole lot of it afterwards.... and it can kinda actually get really frustrating sometime because most of our lessons are like that and dont seem to really make anything better than it was before we came. It is sometimes kinda discouraging cause you feel like you work really hard but nobody really even cares and that we are just wasting our time here. But so last sunday his mom bore her testimony at church and during it she thanked me and my companion for going over there to teach him because after we left, he got really excited and started acting like a new person. He read the part we left for him in the book of mormon and is starting to do all that stuff again. It was nice to hear that we actually did kinda make a difference and i am excited to go back and teach him again now.

So yeah that was just one cool story i liked but for the most part things are going about the same. Hope everything is going well for you guys though and thanks for everything. Only a couple more weeks until the hunts start!