The weather is finally coming to the point where I feel at least a little bit of chill outside, which means that it's going to be a nice Cabo Verdeano winter once again! The biggest news out there is that snow fell on Fogo, up in Chã das Caldeiras, the little town on the volcano's crater. Probably nothing more than a few snowflakes, but I still think that's impressive. I guess there will be snow in Africa this Christmas. Eat your heart out, Bono.
I'm getting to know the area a lot better, and I was even able to handle a short division with a couple of other missionaries visiting for the Christmas Party. I've come to notice that Sal is like a great big melting pot of all of Cape Verde. There are very few people that are actually born here, most people come from Mindelo or Santo Antão, although I've met quite a few people from Santiago and even a few from Fogo. There isn't a set Creole here, so I hear every Creole from every island I've been on. It's the greatest thing ever, basically. Almost everyone here works in the big hotels that they have for the tourists, which is by far Sal's biggest export. There are so many tourists, all the time. People get confused here and think we're tourists, like today we were walking by some High School kids that were making fun of us in Creole, and Elder Teela just said "we understand you, you know" and they all freaked out so hard it was pretty funny.
Our biggest problem that we have right now is that we don't have any really progressing investigators. Like we are working with a lot of people, but we're also working to find a lot of new people because the ones we are working with are either not progressing, or are just following what we say without really doing these things for themselves. There's a really cool guy that were working with named Helton. He's married to an English woman who's living in England right now. He was on his way there with her, but somewhere on the way somebody lost an important document so he could stay in England, so he was sent back here and has been working on going out again ever since. He had no idea when things would happen, so we had a baptismal date marked with him, but he just received his passport and his wife said that she wants to be there for his baptism. We can't really argue with that, especially because he could be heading back in a few weeks. I like the guy anyways, although he has a ways to go before he could even be baptized here.
I almost forgot to mention that we had our Zone Christmas Party last week! It was the smallest party that I have ever seen here, with a grand total of 16 people. The Zone of Sal is small. I make more calls than my Zone Leaders do every night. Anyways, we did a little play on A Christmas Carol as a skit this year, where Elder Green acted like Ebeneezer Scrooge as he told us if we didn't have good enough numbers he would take away our Skyping privileges on Christmas. He was visited by 3 ghosts who showed him the error of his ways, and in the end he learned the importance of teaching people and not lessons. President and Sister Mathews gave their training on Obedience, which reminded me that there are always things that I can improve on. Sister Mathews really made a point when mentioning that every little thing that we do can have a bigger impact than we think. We saw a video that had tons of baptismal pictures that people had sent in, and I saw a lot of members and old investigators that I hadn't seen for a long time. It was really nice, and helped me to notice how much this country has touched me.
Well, other than the fact that the entire city of Espargos is pretty much out of water because they like the tourists over in Santa Maria more than us (probably because they have more money) not much else has been happening. The work is still the work, and it's still fun! Hope you all have a Very Merry Christmas! I'm just giddy to talk to my family in a week!
Boas Festas,
Elder Penner
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