Dec 13, 2010

Everything is going pretty good here! We had a pretty cool week but nothing out of the usual happened, at least nothing too crazy. One cool thing was what happened on our division on our way to sao vicente. We were sitting there on the boat going over and we had a big shark swim right up to our boat, it was the coolest thing i have ever seen! It was a hammerhead and was at least 3 meters in length, it was really big! So there is the highlight of the week, i have been waiting this whole time to see one and now i have done it! Now the only thing missing is a whale. The division was really cool though and i love going over to Porto Novo because its so peaceful there.

Our investigators our still cool but we still have a lot of work to do. The retention rate of people baptized is kinda challenging here because people will leave for any small little thing, and we have a few recent converts in this area who we have to work on because of that. We also have some investigators who have been coming to church and stuff but wouldnt really do the things to get baptized, so we are switching focus from them more to finding new people. We had the opportunity to do some service with one of our investigators this week. On tuesday morning we went over there and painted a few of the rooms of his house, it was actually really fun. It reminded me of working from before my mission and we got a big lunch of feijoada with them. Its a dish with rice, a bunch of beans and stuff and a sauce so the service paid off. Our branch is still helping too but our President is still a bit strange. It seems as though i have got a calling in the branch now, the sacrament prayer, cause every sunday during sacrament when hes making the announcements he will decide right in the moment who will pray, and he always says my name. I think its because he finally remembers my name now and still doesnt really know the names of the other 3 elders in the branch. He always would look at our name tags, so i started covering mine up so he couldnt see it and had to learn it. Unfortunately who doesnt remember half the members either which makes the members not feel so welcome in church. There will be a member that has been baptized for 2 years and he will say 'hey whats your name to them' and they tell him and he goes "oh, are you an investigator of the elders" and then he have to jump in and say that its acually a member with a calling and everything. The leadership is a little week here but we are working on it. Elder Olson and I were supposed to teach the youth class for sunday school, so we brought a ton of candy for them, and then we found out that president told us wrong and that we would be teaching sunday school to all the adults, about 40 of them including the district president. We probably would have prepared different if we knew that but it was still an awesome lesson and everyone loved it. They especially loved that we handed out the candy to them and they started during into little kids trying to get it, you would have though they had never seen candy in their lives the way they were answering questions just to get a sucker.