American Idiot

Normally, I like to think of Billie Joel Armstrong of Green Day and try to avoid being your typical American Idiot, but today's the 4th of July! You betcha I'm gonna be singing The Star Spangled Banner at the top of my lungs! America! On this one day I give myself just a little bit of trunkiness for my home country. God Bless America.

What a great week! This week we had a big focus on getting new investigators, with a goal given to the entire island of Fogo to get at least 6. Well, our hard work got us all the way to hit that 6! It's not a whole lot, but it's a start, for sure! We also had a whole lot of good help from the members. They are absolutely INCREDIBLE here. I don't think I've ever had so much willing help from the members here. Our Young Men's leader came up to us and said "Hey, make sure I leave with you guys at least 3 times this week!" haha. We got a solid 14 lessons with members, which is just 1 less from the total number of lessons we taught investigators last week.

Another really cool thing happened this week! We got a surprise baptism! Remember that Monica I talked about last week? Well she was marked for the 9th, but last Thursday she learned that she needed to see the doctor in Praia that day. She came up to us on that day, and asked if there was any way we could do it earlier? I was like, why not this Saturday? She got super excited and said yes! So we hurried and got all the members to coordinate everything, and we had a baptism on Saturday! There were so many members there, and as luck would have it, the Young Women had an activity at that time, so they joined us. The room was completely full! I'm so glad, because Monica must have felt a good sense of companionship from the ward. Super great experience, all around.

There's a really neat member here named Abreu. He's the first counselor here in this ward, and I think he was in a spot in the stake beforehand, because everyone here calls him President Abreu. He's like the go-to handyman here in Fogo, and he's got a huge amount of energy at all times. He reminds me a lot of that one cop guy from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, haha. He ended up baptizing Monica. I just wanted to give him a shoutout, cause he's a boss.

We're teaching this guy named Izildo. He's a super chill guy. His Fogo accent is super thick though, so sometimes I almost can't even understand him. Anyways, we've been working hard with him. We were teaching him and his sister, but his sister had a huge problem with Joseph Smith and him being a prophet and anything. She tried to argue with us, but he started arguing back with her, so she stopped! It was cool to see his desire to learn. He's going well, but he decided to go fishing instead of going to church yesterday. We ran into him and were like, what are you doing? But he still ended up going. He promised to go this week, so we're gonna work for that. I think he could be baptized by the end of the month, though.

Happy Independence Day, my fellow Americans! Light a firework! Eat a burger! I made some really nice ones today, they were pretty close to the real thing. Anyways, have a good one!

Abraço,

Elder Penner

On the island of Fogo