Ayyyyy

Okay, this week, lemme tell y'all a story of some lame things and some really cool things that happened here in Mindelo.

So we have this really cool family, who are like really really ready to be baptized. The problem is, not all of them are. The two kids, Kuk and Janete, love the church and they're totally pumped for their date on the 14th. Fredeilson, their older brother, is really pumped, too.  He even bore his testimony yesterday! The problem is, he´s living with and has a kid with a girl that he´s not married to. So we have to get them to at least marry before their date, which we put for April 4th. His girlfriend is somewhat hesitant about marriage, though, so it might be a problem. Then there´s the mom, Maria, who we have to plead with every lesson to read the scriptures, and she still hasn´t come to church once, though she has a baptism date on the 14th. A lot of people here are like Maria. They say they believe our message, they read the introduction to and pray about the Book of Mormon, but after that they don´t read it anymore and don´t go to church (they ALWAYS say "I didn´t have time, I had a really important thing" and when we pry they admit they were just washing clothes. It´s always washing clothes, too.)   They just don´t understand that faith requires works, as the scriptures say.

But the biggest problem we´ve had with the family is the father, Manuel. First of all, his work just happens to be the exact same time as our working time during the week. We´ve been trying since we arrived here to get an appointment with him there. We finally managed to see him on Tuesday, and had our first appointment with him on Saturday. The first thing we noticed when we got there on Saturday was that he was drunk. We then tried to teach him the first lesson, but we could tell that he couldn´t take in all the info we were giving him. So we just decided to focus on eternal families instead. He kept telling us that he believed in our message, but he´s Catholic and didn´t want to switch faiths. We tried to explain to him that if he believes our message, that there are some things that he needs to do in order to be with his family forever. He was adamant. We were really straightforward, really direct, like we told him straight out that he can´t live with his family forever if he doesn´t do these things the Lord commanded, and he just didn´t get it. It was really sad, for me. I mean, we can still baptize the kids with the permission of the parents and neither have a problem with that, but the gospel is about families and we want them to be together forever. We´re gonna try to see if we can´t get an appointment with him when he isn´t drunk.

On the other hand, something really awesome and unexpected happened this week, and that would be our first baptism here! We met Nelido 2 and a half weeks ago, and he accepted the baptism date that we gave him for the 14th of March. We taught him about the importance of church, and he came to church both of the following Sundays, which was a blessing in itself. We were still a little worried, though, because most people here have at least a little problem with the Law of Chastity and the Word of Wisdom. But we taught them both to him last Tuesday, and he told us that he´d been following them for at least a month! He told us he´d made the decision for his health, but I don´t think it´s a coincidence that he made that decision a week before we got there. Well, when we heard that, we invited him to be baptized this Saturday, and he accepted! We held the service on Saturday, he received the Holy Ghost Sunday  and we couldn´t be more excited for him! In the picture I sent, he´s the one next to my companion. In the middle is Fredson, a really awesome ward missionary who performed the baptism (his first time baptizing, too!) And next to me is another awesome ward missionary named Roney.

Well, that´s about all I have time for this week. Hope you all are well! As they say here, Te Cool (which literally means have cool).

Abraço,

Elder Penner

Cachupa with eggs and sausage