Hey!
So first, that´s too bad that you guys got snow this week. I think winter is over here, it´s starting to get hotter every day. I was actually just joking about that with my companion about how it´s probably getting colder at home now that it is warmer here. The weather is really nice right now but everything is turning brown unfortunately. It really doesn´t rain in this country. Elder Bunderson, my companion, said that since he´s been here it has only really rained for two days. He´s been here over a year and he showed me some pictures. Man did it rain! He was in Mindelo and the street was flooding. But the most I´ve seen here is a sprinkle. Just enough to make the dirt wet.
This week was actually a pretty good week. Monday we didn´t teach anybody... not sure where everyone was. Tuesday was Carnival and Wednesday was a holiday called Cinza. Those two days we had fewer lessons than normal but they still weren´t terrible days. Apparently Carnival isn´t too bad here. In Brazil, the missionaries aren´t allowed to leave their house. Apparently it gets pretty bad. We´ve been finding a lot of really good people this past week. We´ve kind of started fresh with finding investigators. Right now we have some really strong investigators that just need to commit to a date! M, the one I wrote about a couple weeks ago, is doing everything he needs to do. He reads, comes to church, keeps his appointments. He still won´t commit to a date until his family joins him. And we still can´t ever find them! So we´re still working with him and then the other one that we have is N. We´ve been teaching here since my first day here and she is also doing everything. Sometimes she is hard to find but she is ready for baptism. The only thing is her dad doesn't support her decision and says he will disown her if she is baptized. He lives in France as well, which makes it even more difficult. However, after she told us this problem, without hesitation, she told us that she is praying and that she knows that with the help of the Lord, everything will be alright. She´s got so much faith, she really has proven the truthfulness of this gospel. We´ve also had some really cool experiences that have really strengthened my testimony of the Book of Mormon. We had one investigator tell us that when he first started reading, he could read very well because he has poor vision. He kept on trying and now he says that he can see perfectly when he reads. Another investigator, who doesn´t understand us very well sometimes, told us that everytime he reads, his mind is clearer and he can understand a lot better. The third person told us that he doesn´t really like reading. But he told us he would read and we left him a chapter. He told us that he read the entire chapter that night and that he couldn´t stop. He was going to read it again before our visit but he ran out of time. The Book of Mormon is truly a powerful gift given to us from God. All of our investigators who have honestly read the book, are progressing very well. It´s so great to see!
Thursday we went to Praia for another Zone Conference Zone which was really good again. I feel like they are always good. The Assistants and Sister Oliveira all talked about obedience and cleanliness. That is very big here since we´re pretty much in Africa. President Oliveira focused a lot on the Pattern of Excellence for the mission. Ours is different than most. From what I understood from the MTC, the pattern of excellence is the range that your key indicators, or goals, should be for the week. I´m not entirely sure how it works but if your weekly numbers are close to the pattern of excellence, you should be having success. Ours however is basically a list of standards or qualities that we should be trying to have as missionaries. Certain goals that we should be striving for and things we should be focusing on. They all come from examples in the Book of Mormon, such as Ammon and Alma and missionaries like them. We went over it for quite a while and really studied it. There is a lot in there but everything is built to help us become better missionaries. We also talked about how your attitude affects everything that you do in life and that the attitude of missionaries affects their success. It was a really good conference and I really learned a lot.
I´m not sure how power works here but it goes out randomly all the time. It´s been a lot worse lately though and there have been a couple nights where the power has gone out in the entire city. There are hardly any street lights here to begin with but when there is no power anywhere, you can´t see ANYTHING!!! It´s kind of crazy but you can really see the stars, which is really cool. Something that you don´t get to see very often in a bigger city like Medicine Hat. Right now the moon looks like the smiling mouth of the Cheshire Cat. It´s weird to think how the sky is different in different areas of the world. I really like it though. It´s really neat the different teaching experiences you get here in a country like this. So far we´ve taught in the street, by flashlight, candle light, in the dark. You never know what is going to happen so you´ve got to be prepared.
Not much else is new though. I´m still doing well and am excited to keep going.
