Nov 29, 2010

Hey guys!
Well i hope everyone had a good thanksgiving and that you guys are enjoying your snow. Its kinda been cloudy here but that just makes it even more humid so its kinda annoying. I know you guys have seen my pictures and have been thinking that i was putting on the pounds, but i am losing all of that now luckily from all the sweating i do. I think i am almost back down to the weight i started at luckily. But other than that this was a really good week. Our thanksgiving was way good, a million times better than last year! The goffs invited all of us over to eat at their house and i dare say that it was the best food i have eaten since i got here. We had all of the thanksgiving foods (just switch turkey with chicken) which was pretty cool. Elder Olson and I provided all of the stuffing, gravy, a cake and cranberry sauce. You guys are probably wondering how we scored all that stuff huh?... well lets just say we have connections out here. We know a lady out here whose daughter lives in Boston and she ships food over here to sell it. So the day before thanksgiving we passed her and she just gave us all that for free, it was way cool! Well it all turned out really good and i had a really good day, next up is christmas and it will be cool being able to talk to all of you guys.

Another cool thing that happened was on Saturday, a huge cruise ship came in to the port going from italy to brasil. It just so happens that part of our area is down by the port and one of our lessons fell through right there, so we decided to go do some contacts in that area. We kept running in to all the tourists from the ship and they started talking to us. The first ones were a couple from italy and the guy spoke just enough english to talk with us. He told us that they were being taught by the missionaries in italy right now and that they were really liking it and it made there day just seeing us. That was cool. So we just kept walking a little more and all the sudden i see this white guy yelling "Elder, elder" and comes running up to us. The first thing he said to us was "howdy" so i immedietly guessed he was from utah, and i was right. Turns out that there was a group of 80 people on the ship that were from the U.S. and all of them were members. They all served back in Brazil like 30 years ago so they were all going to visit again. Long story short we couldnt take 5 steps without a new couple running up to us. We started doing contacts with the people here and they would walk up and take pictures of us. I never felt like such a celeberty in my lift. It was really cool talking to them though and they had a lot of questions about the church and stuff and how its going out here on the islands. It felt weird seeing people from Utah. That night it sailed back out but the next day on sunday another one came in so on our way to church we saw quite a bit of tourists. During our church meetings a couple from england came in just to take a tour of the church, it was kinda weird but they were nice.

Other than the tourists and thanksgiving it was just a pretty normal week. Wait i take that back... one more thing happened. We had to go do a baptismal interview on Santo Antao one day and we were really tight on time and ended up missing the boat back, so we had to spend the night there. I can finally say i was stranded on a little island, can any of you guys say that? It was cool cause we got to go teach the people out there for the night. I love it there, it is so calm and peaceful, i wouldnt mind serving there at all. Well other than that things are about the same. We still have a lot of investigators but for a lot of them there are some challenges that are making it so they cant get baptized. We have taught them all for a while and pretty much they are to that point where they will have to decide for themselves what they are going to do so hopefully they make the right decision.