Fly On

 
This past week, I've had a steady stream of missionaries calling me, asking usually along the lines of this question: 'I just need a yes or no answer: DO I HAVE A PLANE TICKET?', seeing as how transfers took place today. I can think of at least 4 people who asked that exact question. It's ridiculous.

We had a lot of work to do this week to get everything ready for transfers. That meant a lot of flight cancelling, a lot of flight buying, a lot of planning, organizing, and maybe a little digging too; Elder Penner and I get curious about stuff too, so we did some digging to get stuff out of the Assistants too, it was fun. Though not 100% of transfers went smoothly, most of them seem to be out of the way, but more on that later. 

So, we've started teaching this lady named Paula, from Fogo, who we got as a reference from the sisters a little while back. She's he sister-in-law of one of their super cool investigators, and now Paula is really interested too. The only problem with her, is she is like WAY too chatty! Being office elders, and with her studying to catch up with school at night, our schedules kinda collide to teach her, so this week, we took time out of our lunch to teach her in the middle of the day (sidenote: nothing happens in Cape Verde between the hours of 1 and 3, so it's a miracle when someone is willing to talk then), but seeing as how we really don't have all that much time, we made it our goal to teach her in under 20 minutes, each lunch, and rush back to the office. Well, our lesson ran a decent amount longer than 20 minutes, we left there after more than an hour, just talking about praying about the Book of Mormon :P it was loooong. We both walked out of there saying, 'okay, we can't ask her ANY MORE QUESTIONS' because every time we do, she goes off for like 20 minutes! She is really cool though, and does have a solid desire to follow. Sometimes it makes me laugh to see such incredible differences in Heavenly Father's children. 

Coming into this week, Elder Penner and I also noticed that our contacting numbers have been on a steady decline throughout the transfer, so we made it our goal to make sure we hit our goals. Last night while we were walking, we walked past a large group of people, and I thought 'gosh dang, I hate doing large group contacts', but sometimes you just gotta throw care to the wind and talk to er'ybody. I'm continually finding one of my favorite things about this whole missionary gig is that I love talking to people, even if it's awkward at first sometimes. 

A couple good moments from this week: 

Elder Penner remembered that our area had a place that made really good bread at night, but couldn't remember where it was. We wandered and wandered, asked like at least 8 people where it was, got NO help, called another elder who served in the same area, and after about 20 minutes of trying super hard and walking in circles, a guy on the side of the road was like 'what the heck are you guys looking for?', and once I explained to him our dilemma, he sighed a judgmental sigh, and led us to where it was. It was definitely worth the effort though, cuz that bread is gooooooooood.

We had a less active guy show up to church yesterday, who we've been working with for a while, and he brought one of his bros, and we were like 'heck yeah, sharing the gospel', until we got to gospel principles, when the bro introduced himself to the class as a member of the church. Both Penner and I looked at each other like 'lol dang it'. 

Today, in the entire hooplah of transfers, we got a panic call from the Assistants telling us to get a bag to the airport for a missionary leaving in under an hour. Once we got there, we found out 2 elders weren't gunna be able to fly cuz they didn't have their passports (you can fly here with just a driver's license sometimes) and so in my call to the APs, Elder Mendenhall told me, 'Elder Massey, you do what you can and you tell them they are GETTING THEM ON THAT FLIGHT'. While I would love to have a miracle end to this story, it really resulted in a panicked me running around the airport, saying 'PUT THEM ON!' and trying to be assertive, but one problem after another led to them closing the gates cuz it was too late, aaaaaaaand the two Elders didn't 'fly on' (hehehe). I hate telling people at airports what I want them to do. I don't wanna deal with that stress again :P 

 

(Their MTC group had lots of travel difficulties getting to Cape Verde - missed their flight in Madrid for Lisbon due to the 2 South African missionaries traveling with them being deported by immigration back to the USA because of visa problems....it was not a happy time for them trying to figure out what to do.  Thankfully it had a happy ending and they all ended up arriving safely.  I think this week's experience hit too close to home trying to work with uncooperative airport personnel...)

It's been a week. 

Love y'all! 

Elder Massey

And what would a letter be without at least one dog picture....