Happy Thanksgiving

Hey family hows it going?
Everything is going pretty well here, just really hot!! It doesnt seem like winter at all so its kinda hard to believe that Thanksgiving is really here! It will be cool though, now that i found a lady here that has connections with food from Boston i will actually be able to get a little bit of american food! The Goff's house should be alright too, we will be going there for our lunch. It will be weird to be home next year and have a normal thanksgiving, i wont know what to do with myself with all that food.

So this week had a few days that were different from the basic routine. Yesterday and Saturday night was district conference... we were actually able to get i think 9 investigators to the sunday session along with a few less actives too. In total i think there were about 540 people there out of all the members from Mindelo, the branch from Santo Antao, and a few from Sal. The only bad part is that the Madrid temple president is american and didnt know a whole lot about cabo verde cause it looks like he thought flights came here from the mainland every half hour so he didnt get his plane ticket in time. We still had an area authority from portugual who gave some really good talks and it turned out well. On Friday we had a lidership meeting here too that the president and assistens came up for. It was the whole day which is a little long for me, but i learned a lot. One of the pluses about being in leadership is getting to learn new things that normally i wouldnt learn. The zone is going well though and there arent really any problems going on. The time is going by really fast with Elder Olson though... im curious to see if i will be transfered to another island right before christmas or just stay here one more with him. However, he told me that his dad knows a really good calling card that you can get for really cheap and thats what they have used for their phone calls. I think his dad will call you guys and let you know about it but i think it would be good cause the last two phone calls didnt work out as well.

So the people here are still doing really good, i decided im really going to miss them when i go home! It was kinda funny yesterday as we were walking to the conference in our suits, cause we never wear our suits. Everyone was just watching us and we were gettin a lot of attention, its not every day these people just see two white guys in suits walking around on these dirt streets. I would die if i had to wear a suit every day though. So one cool story is that there is a family who lives here and the parents our both inactive members, but two of the daughters who are about 20 and 25 are both active. The dad was actually the first branch president here in mindelo about 20 years back and everyone loved him so out of the older members nobody really knows why they went in active. Well we are just starting to work with them now and the dad came to conference yesterday and really liked it. The mom is a little harder but her mom just died and is having a hard time so we are goig to try to talk with her a little about the plan of salvation this week. Its hard to talk with her though and we still havent really been succesful. Our next baptism marked will be december 11 with sandra, a girl in her young 30s that is doing really good!

Nov 15 letter home

Hey everybody,

So its a little later here in the day cause we had been fishing all morning. It was really fun though, i had been waiting to go for forever so it was nice to finally get out and go! There were six of us missionaries and a member from one of the branches and we headed to the west side of the island where they have a way cool beach and a way cool areas to fish where it drops right down deep so there are a lot of fish there! We caught about 25 total with 1 octupus. It felt good to real in some fish after so long! The biggest one we caught was about 24 in. but they were the coolest looking fish i had ever seen, they were all realy bright and colorful! I also grabbed the octupus and its suckers on its tennacles started sucking onto my hand and it would stick to you, it was really hard to get off! I had a blast though and we will probably go again in not to long. I also saw a group of dolphins swimming out from us for the 3rd time on this island.

So other than that let me think of what has been going on... our area is still doing really good. This area is probably my favorite area i have served in so far just because there is so much work today and here in downtown Mindelo is an awesome area! Its pretty cool being with Elder Olson, we just need to remember to speak Portuguese more to keep improving instead of losing it. I feel like we got our area really organized now so now we know exactly who are the people who have interest. We also spent half of our time teaching all the recent converts of this area which is a lot... but now the branch is going to start teaching them so we will have a lot more time to teach normal investigators and help out the less actives. It will be cool. We have quite a few people that we are preparing for baptism now... i wish i could tell you about each one individually but that would kinda take a while... just know that they are cool people though! We are getting a lot of help from the members now and we are seeing tons of miracles that are happening and people that are wanting to change their lives! Well other than that i cant really think of anything that is new. These week i cant remember if i already told you guys but its district conference (stake conference) and we will be having the temple president from madrid coming to speak with us.

Well thats sweet about byu picking it up, now hopefully they can keep it going! It sounds like the utah jazz are on fire too, especially with beating the miami all star team! Well i hope everyone has a good week and thanks for everything! Good luck with the surgery mom.

More Pics

11/1 letter home & pics

How are you guys? Things are going pretty well out here. I actually just got back from the beach... we headed out to the other side of the island this morning as a district with the Goff couple too and just played some football and stuff. It was pretty nice and we had the whole thing to ourselves besides a few fisherman there, but i sent a few pics of it. Other than that everything is going about the same, not a whole lot happened this week.

This last Tuesday we did have a day that was a little different though. We have a new senior couple here from Ogden that just got here and the wife is our new nurse. They live in Praia but they came up this week to see what health centers they have up here so she can know what to refer us to. So anyways we had to go translate for them for most of the day cause they dont speak portuguese and it was pretty fun. It was kinda fun seeing how the gift of tongues really does work for missionaries... in the first medical center we went to the head nurse was actually from cuba and i had to translate for her and our nurse, but she spoke about 40 percent spanish, 40 creolo and 20 portuguese. The cool part is that it didnt even matter and i was still able to understand everything she said and we got it all taken care of. It was a pretty cool day, it pretty much felt like i just took a day out of the mission and spent a day with my grandparents.

We did lose quite a bit of time working this week though because of that and also interviews with President Neves cause he was up here and yesterday we had to go to a leadership meeting of all of the branches here to get ready for our district conference that will be on the 21 of November. We will be having the President of the Madrid temple coming here along with a general authority from Portugual as our speakers so it should be really cool. But we were still able to get quite a few good lessons in and we will be having a baptism next Saturday. It was the kid that drank coffee so we had to postpone it but he is doing good now and he is ready. He is 18 and he is already saying he wants to go on a mission so he should be a strong member here. We have a new investigator now from a member that brought her friend to church and she used to live in portugual going to school and she actually talked with missionaries there. We have only taught her twice so far but she is really interested and we already have a baptism date for her in december and its cool cause her friend can always teach her with us, we just teach her at the chapel down here. I have had the opportunity to get a little taste of a european mission lately too. We have an area inside our area where we get a lot of tourists that we run into sometimes. On saturday we ran into a few guys from sweden that started speaking with us in english and i decided that its so different talking with people from europe instead of Cabo Verdeans. They make a lot of educated questions while asking about our church which is really cool cause here when we talk with people they just keep shaking their head and saying yes but they dont really say anything else. Other than that we are going to praia tonight for our zone leaders counsel and then back here tomorrow night. Well thats about the update on the work.

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.

10-18 Letter Home

I guess i will just jump right down into it and let you guys know what happened. So we had a general authority come visit us on Friday which was the highlight of the week. It was Elder and Sister Schutze from Germany and they were really nice and funny. Sister Shutze's english was a little hard to understand but they both had some really good stories. My President called me the night before we would have it and told me i would have to give a 15 minute thought for it, so i was a little bit nervous but it all went well. Schutze actually came up to me after and thanked me for it and everything and said he was inspired and learned a lot from it and that i have a gift for teaching, so it was kinda cool having a general authority tell me that. Maybe he was just saying it cause he has to be nice but i feel a lot better at that type of stuff than before my mission! His main topic was about how we need to be examples for the members and leadership here because the church is still young and still has a long way to go. There have even been some problems going on with our mission President, and even though its nothing really serious its still something that wouldnt be happening if we had a President from america or europe or somewhere. The culture here plays a big part in it. Schutze actually pulled a couple of us aside and talked about it though and just said we need to be patiente with it and try to help it out the best we can and that one day the church will be a lot stronger here and not have these problems. I really liked him though and he helped a lot. He actually was in the area presidency of Russia when Ryan was serving there

10-11 Letter Home

Its crazy to think that one more week has passed, it has been going by really quick! They say that the last half of the mission goes even faster and it looks like thats true. So hopefully the picture i sent to you guys works... thats what the sentapedes look like here. They are about 10 in. long and way thick and they hiss at you! I havent been bit yet but my companion has twice and a few other missionaries have too. We were walking last night with a member down a trail and one slithered up on a member that was with us foot but he just kicked it off! They are vemonous though so it keeps life pretty exciting and you have to go to the hospital if you get bit. Luckily our house is in an area that isnt really trashy so i dont think we have too many there.

Besides that not too much crazy stuff is going on. We had our division to Santo Antao with the elders out there this last week and it was really fun. Porto Novo is the only city that has elders there so far but its really different from here or praia, its a lot more calm, i really like it! The power went out while we were walking that night and it was really cool, it was nice and peaceful and you could see all the stars and everything! I went out and walked with Elder Smith from Ceder City and he is a cool guy, i always learn a lot on the divisions. Thats the plus side of being the zone leader. The down side has having to deal with all the problems in the zone instead of just concentrating on our own area.

As for our area its going really well. We always have a lot of people to teach and we have 2 girls that are getting baptized this week. The only thing that could be better in our area is that we need more familys and guys here that can get the priesthood. This branch is bigger than my last one but it still needs more guys that could help with the leadership and also guys that could go serve missions. Its kinda sad cause a lot of people here dont realize the importance of things especielly the younger people. There are quite a few young guys here in the branch but most of them dont care about doing things like passing the sacrament or even being worthy to do it. Lots of people think that they dont need to worry about living the commandments but then when the consequences come they just complain and wonder why all that stuff is happening with them. I just want to say to them, "I told you so!" But we cant force people to listen to us... we just lay it out for them and they have to decide for themselves if they will follow it or not.

I cant remember if i told you of that investigator of my last area, Patricia, lately but she is doing awesome! She just finished the book of mormon after only like 3 and a half weeks of reading! She has a way strong testimony and is going to be baptized at the start of November along with her kids! She is probably one of the best things that has happened in my mission so far, its stories like that that make it worth being out here! The work is still progressing here!

Thats too bad that you guys didnt see a whole lot of elk on the hunts but thats way cool about the bears! I cant wait for next years elk hunt! Thats good that byu is picking it back up too. Im sitting right next to Elder Rogers right now and he said he just got an e mail from bronco mendehall that has the update on everything going on. He says that the only have one freshman reciever thats doing really anything so they ran the ball more last game... and also that poppinga is running the defense. Hopefully that gets things going better. I like hearing about these football updates cause all i hear about from the people here is about soccer!

Well i cant really think of anything else going on thats new. This next week we will have a general authority coming to talk with us... his name is Shutz or something like that and he is from germany. It will be cool to hear from him.