Week 79

One of my biggest fears in life is having my testimony become weaker after my mission and go inactive. I know I was never really "spiritual" back home, I never studied, and I hardly ever prayed, but my mission has opened my eyes to life. One of the most sacred things to me right now is the Book of Mormon, it literally changed my heart. Boyd K. Packer said that "true doctrine, understood, changes attitude and behavior". 

 When President Matthews called me to be Zone Leader he told me that I need to inspire the missionaries here to be obedient and serve not only with might and strength, but also with heart and mind. It's been a tough first week, I felt like a huge load of responsibility was dropped on my shoulders.
Getting sick didn't help, I had a really bad stomach virus for 5 days, but I'm doing better now. I have no idea what I ate, but it was BAD. I joined the club.
Being a Zone Leader is tough sometimes, but at least I have a boss of a companion who helps me out a ton. Here are some pictures of us, we climbed a small mountain this morning.
Assomada is sick! Sooo much better than Chao Bom, lol. This city is always way colder than other cities in the island because it's so high up.

They are starting the construction of a chapel here, that's the sign we are standing in front of. It will be done in 14 months, sadly I'll be home by then. 

So here I am standing on a cliff with 150+ foot drop on the other side. It was scary standing there because there was a lot of wind. 

Also, you made it on my planner. I need more family pictures, I'm running out because I keep putting them on my planners. I've been studying a lot about Peter, he's like my favorite missionary ever because he matured and changed so much. He even walked on water, a miracle that a lot of people only ever remember Jesus doing. 

I hit my Sister Mission this past week! 18 months! I celebrated with shawarma and a Monster. 

Week 52

This week was pretty awesome, sorry no pics again, but interesting things did happen. First of all, on Tuesday I went on a division with the Zone Leaders. I went to another city called Esparagos and Gooch stayed here in Santa Maria. It was way fun getting to know another area. I also tried shawarma for the first time!!! You know like at the end of the Avengers. It was alright, nothing way special, but it was still good. Also, we had interviews with President Matthews, and I found out that I'll be staying here next transfer and I might be training a greenie straight from the MTC. I hope not cuz I feel like he wont learn anything from me haha.
Sorry I don't send pictures... there's nothing to take pictures of, just the same old streets every day that aren't really anything special.

Week 43

What's up!!! You're so lucky to feel cold over there, I still sweat like crazy every day, although it does feel a slightly bit cooler than last week. Man so this week was super sweet!!! The Zone Leaders came over for divisions and slept here for 3 days. When you are isolated in an island 2 hours away from any other elder, a division feels like Christmas morning. Elder Welch (my old comp) is now Zone Leader so he came back along with Elder Ernst. They are both such bosses, I stuck with Ernst all division long and I learned tons from him. He's kind of a legend in this mission, he trained a greenie his second transfer, while he was still a greenie himself. That happens like... almost never haha.
So, another interesting story about this week, we had Stake Conference! But it was on another island, so EVERYONE that has a calling in our branch (about 80% of total frequency) left all weekend long to go to it. And lucky Elder Zuniga and Elder Reid stayed behind to have regular Sunday with investigators and anyone else who doesn't have a calling. I was acting as Branch President Zuniga this past Sunday. It was actually pretty sick, I liked it a lot.
I taught Elder's Quorum, prepared sacrament, blessed it, gave a talk during sacrament... stuff like that. All while taking care of investigators. It honestly wasn't that hard, but I would have loved to travel back to Sao Vincent and see Helder and other people from my old ward.

So anyways, during the divisions we were playing with the special effects on my camera, and we made an EFY counselor!!! It's my huge smile with Elder Welch's eyes, lol.

On the left here is Elder Reid and Elder Ernst is in the middle.

This is me with the Branch President's agenda, which kinda made me Branch President Zuniga lol.

Also, this literally happens every time I let one of my comps cut my hair. I bought some clippers back with Elder Burch for about 5 bucks and a regular haircut at a barber is $2.50 so I've already saved like $7.50. Good job Zuniga haha. I just tell all my comps to buzz it off. 

So I hope you're not expecting Garca to be like a super beautiful place, lol it's kinda super isolated there and it's in the middle of nowhere. Here's us pointing at it: 

We had a member with us and man, if you let a Cabo Verdean use your camera they literally take like a billion pics from every possible angle lol. 

Week 31

So this past week I didn't really email you much so I'll go over that too. It was probably the shortest week in my mission. We stayed in our area on Pday and Tuesday and then left on Wednesday right after lunch so we could get to Sao Vicente Thursday morning for Zone Conference. It was awesome getting all the trainings from President and seeing everyone else again since I've been stranded on this island for a while. So we were supposed to take a boat back to our area Friday morning, but apparently there was this huge party going on in Santo Antao so EVERYONE was traveling over there. Enough people to take up all the tickets for the next few rides. We didn't end up coming back to our area until Saturday night. A pretty cool thing about all this is that I got to chill and do splits with the Zone Leaders and another couple of Elders. So it was the end of transfers, and Elder Montes was told by the Mission President that he was leaving the island to go train on his last transfer. Ever since day one here in this Zone, Elder Montes has been my Zone Leader and a pretty awesome friend. Him and my trainer basically taught me everything I know. This was the last time I was with him, and now he is in San Tiago in the middle of nowhere training a brand new greenie haha. That's pretty awesome.

Our district all thought it was going to change a lot, that a lot of us were gonna get transferred and whatever, and everyone ended up staying together, haha. Our district is awesome, the sisters make good food and cake.

Speaking of transfers, I'm already at 5! It's still a super small number, I know, but compared to when I had only one planner, I've been here a while.

Also, I found this fluffy dog in Mindelo.

So this past Monday we celebrated the birthday of a member, her name is Julia. It wasn't a big thing, just a get-together with a bunch of crackers and stuff. It was way fun though, this branch reminds me of Port Isabel so much. We are all one big happy family. There's more pics of it but they are all on Elder Burch's camera. I'll forward them later. And well, I guess that just about sums it up for this week. We are working a lot on helping less active members become active again, I think that's what we are going to focus on more than baptizing this transfer.

Hey! Remember the lady that beat me with a stick??? She's the old one next to my comp in the last picture haha. She's super funny and everyone loves her, but she isn't afraid of hitting or slapping anyone in the face. One time we were eating at an activity and I was stuffed from eating so much, and she came up to me offering cake and I said no.... big mistake lol. She literally shoved the cake in my mouth haha. The same happened to Elder Burch. She's crazy but everyone loves her. Her name is Eugenia.

Well, that's it for this week, I love you!!! Bye!!!

Week 27, Smitten by the Lord

Pssh, no. My SD card is still all messed up. And sadly, no we didn't reach 40 people at church :/ We were smitten by the Lord. The Zone Leaders came to do a 2-day division with us. We are super good friends with them so we basically had a party during lunch and at nights when we were back at the house. We slept like 10 hours in those 3 nights with them, and survived off cake and energy drinks. We weren't very obedient with our study hours either. We learned so much from them and they really helped us a lot, but it took a toll on us at the same time.
Even after they left, we both felt like crap and were super tired and sleepy and couldn't feel the spirit as we taught. Yesterday we only had 26 people at church. We had investigators and stuff there, but now members who have never missed church since they were baptized weren't there. Even though part of the division hurt us, we also learned a lot and had some pretty cool experiences. Especially one we had with Elder Montes.
Montes is an awesome friend of mine and is super old on the mission (he's about to die lol). So we were walking toward a house of a reference we got from one of the members. We were a little tired because 3 appointments fell through and we had not had the chance to teach anyone. So we were walking down this alley that was kind of lit up so we could actually see where we were walking. We got about 5 feet away from the house and this super skinny man with dreadlocks comes out of this super sketchy, dark looking alley and starts talking to us in English. He said "there's a woman down there that needs your help! Come talk to her about your message" and stuff like that, so our first thought was "man, maybe we are being guided to someone" but at the same time I felt pretty uneasy, like something was out of place.
The man pointed to the steps of this sketchy alley and told us to go down. Elder Montes said "we aren't going down with you behind us, you go first" So he went and we followed. We walked slowly down the stairs and saw this guy reach the end of the alley and turn right. So we continue down and at the end of it we both kind of stuck our heads around the corner to see what was going on, and we saw this even darker and creepier alley with a small run-down bar on the left and a woman sitting down on a bench talking to the skinny man. I got the weirdest feeling inside me like I shouldn't be there and I turned to Elder Montes and I knew he felt the same way. As soon as the skinny guy took his eyes off us Elder Montes turned to me and said "Go. We have to get out of here." So we both just took off as fast as we could. I don't really know what was going on down there, but I'm super grateful I didn't have to find out.

On a happier, brighter side, Elder Montes came to our house on a diet. He didn't want bread or soda or anything like that. We got him to fall hard lol. This is him after like 12 hours with us lol.

His comp is Elder Neymeir. He's a boss as well. He taught me a lot during the splits. 

Well, that basically sums up this past week. Elder Burch and I are doing fine, we are just completely broke lol. But we'll last a couple of days more until we get money.