Monday, June 27, 2016

Drop It Like It's Hot

Hi to all from the wonderful island of Fogo! Now I'm in the wonderful area of Congresso Baixo, with Elder Jhangiani, and I gotta tell you... IT'S SO HOT HERE! The afternoons here make me feel a physical weight with the heat. Also, everything here seems like it's at a 45 degree angle, so matter where I go, it's either up or down. After being stuck in an office and having a car for most of the day for 6 months, it's been a bit of an adjustment, to say the least.

Despite the heat and the new leg workout I'm getting, I really really like this area. The Congresso Ward is the strongest ward in Fogo, I hear. The chapel seemed just about full on Sunday, and the members were complaining about how low the frequency was! It's so cool! There are a whole bunch of returned missionaries here, too, which hopefully will mean that we'll be able to teach a lot with them. They ought to remember how important it was to have a member to teach with them. And that's another thing... the members here are like the most chill people I've met in Cape Verde. Every member wants to talk to us, they love the missionaries. I met the famous Gomes at the airport when I got here. Gomes is famous mostly for his tomfoolery and for the fact that he served his mission in Utah. He's the only member I know to have served in the United States. Super cool guy.

Elder Jhangiani is a righteous kid as well, he's got such a strong desire to teach the gospel and to learn the language. He's from Paraguay, so his native language is Spanish. You think it'd be easy to go to Portuguese from Spanish, but you actually just confuse things because they're too similar. He's got a really good heart, though, and he really wants to become a better teacher. I hope that I can help him out with that. I think we're gonna get a lot of good work done together.

This area has a lot of good potential, but this last week it was somewhat difficult to teach people. I came to notice pretty quickly that it's a little more difficult here to get people to sit down with you than it was in Praia, so I realized that I had to up my game. We started focusing more on contacting people everywhere we could, marking as many appointments as possible, completely filling up at least 2 days ahead with appointments for every half hour, and we're also trying to get as many references from members as possible. The turnout isn't a lot right now, but I'm happy with what we have achieved and it's going to augment pretty quickly.

Our most progressive investigator is a girl named Monica. She's a super prepared person. The Elders met her a week before I got here, and as they taught her she asked if she could be baptized. They marked her for the 9th of July right then and there. Since then she's been going so well! The two times I taught her last week, she expressed to us how good she felt when she read the Book of Mormon and how she's felt at church. She went to a youth activity that I didn't even know about on Saturday. So she's pretty much for sure getting baptized on the 9th.

I'm having fun! Good area, great ward, great comp! I'm excited for the rest of this transfer! Hope you all are doing well too!

Abraço,
Elder Penner

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