Ludicrous Speed

A couple of days ago Elder Gilbert and I looked at each other and were like this transfer's half over!!! It's been going so much faster for me since I finished my greenie stage of the mission, it's insane. Also, yesterday marks 5 months on the mission. I'm almost a quarter of the way through! I'm sitting here thinking to myself that I just barely got here. And I've heard that the mission only starts going faster from this point on. Crazy.

Anyways, it's been a pretty good week for us here. We were able to reach most of our weekly goals, which was pretty awesome. We'd been having some problems getting investigators to church (only 4 last week, the worst I've ever had here) and with getting references from people. However, this week we've been seeing the results in our hard work in this area, which is always a really nice thing to see. One thing that I've truly noticed here is that true results are ONLY achieved with hard work and prayer. That's the secret. There's no shortcuts or easy way out. But oh, how the blessings are recieved!

I just wanted to give a little update on our recent converts. Nelido hasn't been getting to church for about a month now. We visit him through the week and he says "I'm going this week for sure!" and then doesn't show up. As they say here, we're going to "dar uma faca para ele." We've also got a few facas for Kuk and Janete, because Kuk also hasn't been going to church, and Janete goes, but not every week. Laura and Antonio Evora are as strong as ever though, we don't really have many fears about them. It's only going to grow stronger as we prepare for Maria Alice, Antonio's wife, to be baptized this week by Antonio! I've come to notice that the people who seem to have the least problems staying active are the people who have overcome an obstacle to join the church. That sure as heck doesn't mean that we're going to stop visiting Nelido Kuk and Janete and getting them to get to church every week. It's a little frustrating because we talk with them and they're like we know we're fubecas (i don't think there's a direct translation, but it basically mean's we know we're being dumb and we need to get better) but they still aren't doing what they need to. The answer truly is to read and pray every day and to get to church every week. Again, no shortcuts, no secrets.

Also, we saw a miracle yesterday! So there's this guy named Ivandro, who talked with other missionaries and was almost baptized, but he moved to our area. So we've been spending some good effort for 3 weeks trying to contact him and mark a spot where we can meet him (it's impossible to find people's houses here, there's no such things as addresses or even names to roads). He wasn't showing up to meetups we marked, because of a lot of bad luck. We had been thinking the last two days to stop trying, because it was wasting a lot of money we have to call people. However, yesterday this guy stopped us to ask us if we knew where this other person lived. We said no, but we'd like to visit his house to share a message about the Book of Mormon. We asked him his name and he said Ivandro, but we thought nothing of it because there's a fair amount of Ivandros here. But he also told us he was almost baptized recently. We asked how recently and he said a couple of weeks ago... we were like wait a sec. He said that some Elders had just called him the day before and we were like that was us!!! It was insane how we just found him on the street, because we have one of the areas with the most people in Mindelo. It was nothing short of a miracle. We're so grateful to have finally found him, and hope to report more good news about him.

Well, that's about all I have time for, hope you're all fantastic! Ficam bem!

Abraço,

Elder Penner