We did a lot of waiting this week. We've been waiting in a few different ways, but nonetheless, it's been a week FULL of it, which is always great :) I'll explain a few ways we got to wait this week.
On
Tuesday, President held Mission Leadership Council, for all the zone
leaders and sister training leaders, and though we weren't invited,
guess who got asked to deal with all the coming and going of all the
missionaries? US. Yaaaaaay....
We had a good solid two days of
running people around, waiting at airports and at houses and such,
which was good fun. It also meant a few early mornings, especially on
Wednesday morning, when we had to have the Fogo ZLs at the airport by
5am. Thankfully, Praia is small enough that it's less than a 15 minute
there-and-back trip, but still, it was a lot of running. After all was
said and done, the Sal Zone leaders, Elder Bullock and Elder Rodrigues,
my ZL from when I was in Fogo, were the last to leave, which meant we
had a little time to go on a breakfast date with them before we had to
do other office work, and get them off to the airport too. It was nice
:)
Some other nice waiting we got to do was at
Electra, the literal one electrical company in Cape Verde. Basically,
whenever there are missionaries without light or water, we get the call
and have to deal with it. There's been some missionaries without light
for a decent amount of time, so we did a LOT of waiting at Electra this
week to try and change that. One day we spent two hours standing because
all the dang chairs were taken (and also because we're courteous to let
others sit before us), only to finally get to our turn, and have them
tell us they had no clue how to solve the problem they told us we have,
buuuut that they'd do their best to help out :P it's a good thing I have
a colouring book, cuz I did a loooot of colouring waiting around that
day...
As for our work, we aren't doing any of
that 'waiting around' business, because we're too darn busy making
things change! One thing Elder Penner and I have found in our three
weeks together is a constant climb in our weekly numbers, and more and
more success in the lessons we're teaching and the people we're finding.
While we aren't exactly baptizing the whole area quiiiite yet, we've
had some really solid progress with a few of our investigators.
Yesterday, we talked with one of them, Adi, the guy I knew from Maio,
and as we talked about the Book of Mormon and how he could receive an
answer from God, he accept a baptismal date for the end of this month.
We knew it would be a tough goal to set, but he accepted it, and seems
really eager to read and to learn. He's mentioned that he's been
struggling as of late, since he's been out of work and has little money,
let alone family around to help him, so one of the things I think we're
making a big impact on with him is just being there for him. We're
really seeing a lot of progress and change in our area.
A
good (sorta) funny experience from this week also had us doing so more
waiting. It's really a long story, but to shorten it a bit, a few weeks
back, we had been put in charge of sending a mini missionary home to
Assomada, but while we were taking her to find a car, she told us she'd
rather just stay with her mom in Praia. Elder Penner and I didn't see a
real problem with it (while we both felt a little uneasy about it), so
we took her to her mom's house, and left it at that. Fast forward to
this week, the Assistants, while in Assomada, call us and tell us her
family still thinks she's in Fogo, since she never actually went home.
We had some repenting to do, and in the repentance process, we had to go
find the girl and tell her she needed to go back to Assomada. The Lord
helped us in that we were able to find her house easy enough, and that
the girl was willing enough to get ready and go, but while we waited for
her, we got an angry mom coming out and telling us she wouldn't be leaving,
but that her daughter would stay right there with her. What resulted was
a 20 minute unwavering argument where she tried to get us to move in
every way, but we refused. She threw out some good attempts to tell us
why her daughter shouldn't go back to Assomada, like that her aunt
there was a slave driver or wouldn't let her sleep inside (not true),
and also told us the reason why her daughter wasn't staying with her
before was because she was in prison while her daughter was growing up.
It's hard to believe the pleas of an angry mom when she's an ex-con...
BUT, the important part of the story was we resolved it all, not without
the Lord's hand in it, and got the girl back to Assomada, if only just
to report to the Aunt the situation going on.
It's been a good week. The whole mission office life really isn't as bad as I thought it would be.
Love y'all!
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