As I mentioned in my last
letter, this past interview with President Mathews, he more or less,
'called (us) to be a rock for those below' as Marcus Mumford and Winston
Marshall would say, as they harmonize together in an oh-so-beautiful
way that I miss so badly.
I really miss real music hahaha.
This
week became a new focus for us in not only teaching less active members
of the church, but in actually finding them out. In doing so, a lot of
this week became a bit of an awkward goose chase in taking the names we
were given, and putting a name to that face, and then further
apologizing for not a) knowing their name before hand and b) not knowing
they were a member of the church. It was kinda crazy, cuz in our first
night of work with this new focus, we were able to get from a member a
list of 22 people she knew living within a 5 minute distance of each
other who were less active or inactive members of the church. Our area
has such a high population of less actives it's crazy. Every week, we
have about 60-70 people at church in our ward, but I'm pretty sure if we
had every single less active member and their family come, we would
have a frequency of 120-150 people; it's pretty incredible.
With
a bit of history on Cova Figueira, there are likely 50 cities in Cape
Verde that have a higher population, but have not accepted the church as
well as they have here. Starting in about 1998 or so, people started to
make the trek every week to go to church in Sao Filipe, about an hour
away, so that they could have the restored gospel. Because of such a
small population, just about everyone here is related in some way, so as
one family would embrace the gospel, their brother would embrace it, or
their cousin, or mom, or aunt, until this point in time, when some
parts of our area are like legit 80% or 90% members, but a large amount
are inactive, for a various amount of reasons, as I'm sure some of you
can imagine. Now, it's our job to come in, and lift up 'those below', or
those who have fallen along the way. Woo-hoo for us I guess?
It's
been quite fun this week as we've searched out all those people, and
just about our most frequently asked question we ask people is, 'hey,
were you baptized in our church?', to which the surprising answer is
often like yes about 50% of the time! Some days this week, we just went
out and contacted the houses members have directed us to, and that's
been the full extent of our work; there are SO many houses that we have
to contact doing so :P One of our favorite things to do is to show up at
houses, and help people de-shell their recently grown beans, and use it
as an opportunity to talk to those people. One day this week, I'm
positive 3 hours of our day was spent just shelling beans and
talking/teaching people; needless to say, Elder Mason and I have gotten
pretty good at shelling beans. We're almost on Cape Verdean level
hahaha.
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