Mr. President?

Yep, still love this place. The people here are so awesome and open, they'll always let you into their houses, whether they know you well or you're a stranger. I love the people. And they say the funniest stuff, too. There was a guy (probs drunk, half the population is constantly drunk here) who was upset when we got his friend's phone number and not his, so we got our planners back out and asked him his number, and he said he didn't have a phone! We laughed pretty hard at that. There's another guy we just met who thinks I look like Bill Clinton. I don't know.  And yeah, like I said, half the people here are constantly drunk. You have to be careful or else they'll try to talk to you about the Bible and how nobody else but them ever wants to hear the true word of God, but they of course do.

I think there were more drunk people this week, though, because it just happened to be Carnival. Mindelo happens to have the second largest Carnival celebration in the world. We're not positive, but we think it ended yesterday. It started the Sunday before, but the main celebration was on Tuesday. The streets were completely empty, and only like two of our appointments were actually there. The Zone Leaders told us to go home at 6:30 just because they were worried about too many drunk people. Nothing really happened in our area. We saw some wicked awesome costumes, though. I didn't get to take pics, but they were wild!

The food here is pretty weird for me, but my companion from Portugal says it's not really that much different from there. I mean, we eat rice with pretty much every meal, and the only meats here are fish and chicken with the very rare beef, but other than that it's not crazy different, I guess. For breakfast I usually have a fruit, a yogurt, and a cereal that's kinda like Honey Bunches of Oats. There's only like 5 cereals to choose from on the entire island. And my companion has this stuff that's kinda like oatmeal, but you add cold milk and tastes like crap to me. I've had cous-cous (I think that's how you spell it) though, and it's really good, kinda like cake, but not really. It's hard to explain. The desserts here are all weird. They have donuts and chocolate cake, though! And all of the bread here is to die for.  There's this coconut bread that I love and I don't even like coconut. I'm doing pretty good here with food. The fish here is actually bearable. Not awesome, but bearable. My biggest thing to adjust to is that we don't have an hour for dinner, because the people here can't feed us. We just take 2 hours and make a big lunch. I'm pretty good now, but it was hard for a while.

Other than that, it's just been all-around awesome. Everybody here will accept the invitations that we give them, like they'll say they believe and that they'll read the Book of Mormon and everything, but we get there the next time and they didn't do it. Almost every time. But we're working hard on stressing the importance and some people get it, so that's good. We have a lot of baptisms set up for the 14th next month, but that requires these people to get to church! We talked with about 30 people to get to church who all swore on their mothers' graves that they'll get to church, and 9 showed up. My companion says that's about normal. There's a family we met about a week ago that I have a lot of hope for, because they really are interested, and they prayed to know it's true and they got to church yesterday and everything. We'll see what happens, I guess! 

Only 3 more weeks in this transfer, it feels so short to me! I hope I get to stay and work with these people a little longer, maybe, but I also am really curious about the rest of Cabo Verde!  From what my companion says, every place is pretty unique here. I think it would be really rad to be assistant to the mission president at one point, so I can visit all of the islands for Zone Conferences and stuff like that. I'm kind of at a point where I want the rest of my mission to happen all at once. Gotta learn this language a little better, first.

Hope everyone's having as much fun as I am! Love you all!

Elder Penner