Rock-a-my Soul in the Bosom of Abraham

Dear Family,

The subject of my email really doesn´t hold any significance other than that it is a track on one of my companion´s cds that we were listening to the other day. It´s some folk song.

So last week I went on about how I was going to get a hair cut and even sent ´´before´´ pictures. Well, I didn´t end up getting a much needed haircut. This is because the task I mentioned that we were doing last week ended up taking up our entire P-day. It was a sad day. We only barely managed to get our shopping, email, and lunch in. And we didn´t even accomplish what we were trying to accomplish. Thank you TACV for ruining my P-day. However, today for sure I will be chopping this mop off of my head. Or at least trimming it a touch.

This past week is been pretty good as far as teaching. We have already taught as many lessons up to now as we did all of last week. And we have one investigator set up for baptism next week. And we have found a few more that may potentially be baptised in the following few weeks. However, I think I´m leaving this transfer, July 5th, but I still don´t know. I feel bad for the General Secretaries because they have to try and order all the plane tickets for transfers less than a week before transfers. Again. Needless to say, I´m sure I´m getting off of Santiago which is nice to see other parts of Cape Verde, but I will be going out to the boonies. Praia is the only place with real grocery stores, and all the other islands only get mail and packages once or twice a transfer depending on whether or not President or the Assistants remember to grab the mail when they go out to other islands for things.

Mom wanted a comprehensive overview of my area, so here goes.

First off, there are really only 2 ´´cities´´ in Cape Verde, Praia and Mindelo. Everything else is either a town, a glorified town, a village, or a countryside. On the island of Santiago, which I´m on right now, there are two other towns of report, Tarrafal and Assomada. We have missionaries in both. We went to Tarrafal last transfer for our office activity and are planning on going to Assomada for our activity this transfer, next week. They are both more green than Praia. The mission office is in a nicer neighborhood. Which isn´t saying much. You can have a really nice house right next to a lot with a half built, abandoned house. Or a nice house next to a one room dwelling that has been patched up with wood planks and sheet metal. Everything here is built with cinderblocks. The difference between the nice houses and the others is that the nice ones have a layer of cement over the blocks, making a smooth face, and paint. There are a lot of buildings here that have one or two finished floors then leave the top floor unfinished. I heard that might be because of tax purposes. For example, if taxes were lower for unfinished buildings, then build a house and start building another floor but leave it halfway done so although you are living in the house, it´s ´´unfinished´´.

I don´t know. things here are different. Traffic is still crazy. I will need someone to drive with me my first few times when I get back to make sure I didn´t pick up to many bad habits here. I will be glad for real traffic laws though. Here they have all sorts of crosswalks everywhere and people just walk across without checking to see if anyone is coming. And since it´s a crosswalk, you have to yield to pedestrians. And that´s only if they choose to cross on a crosswalk. Pedestrians here drive me crazy. Drivers here do as well. Especially with speed bumps. People here will slow to 5 Km/h to cross a speed bump. It´s ridiculous.

The basic diet is beans and rice. Sometimes chicken. My favorite native dish is Cachupa. It´s basically just beans and vegetables and meat chunks, but it´s really good. I want to learn how to make it so I can make it when i get back. The thing is, every island has its own varient of Cachupa, and there really isn´t a recipe for it. We´ll see what I can come up with. The stores here in Praia have good quality stuff. I hear the other islands... not so much.

Anyways, Hope you enjoyed this issue of ´´Canute is still in Africa´´

Thanks for all of the updates, and keep it up. I like to hear from you especially when you mention the little every day things like ´´Julie stuffed food down the sink so I would think she ate her food so she could have a popsicle.´´ That stuff is hilarious.

~Elder Peterson

Luscious Locks

Dear Family,

Today I´m getting a haircut. This is a little sad for me since I just now got my hair to where I like it. But I do need a trim and transfers are coming up, so I may as well go the whole 9 yards. Anyways, pictures are attached of my luscious locks. Enjoy.

I also attached pictures of the most interesting phenomenon, namely two bananas in one skin. I thought it was the coolest thing. If only I had had ice cream I could´ve had the coolest banana split ever. Alas.

So this past week has been full of office work. As missionaries we have certain key indicators that we use to help us focus our efforts. Our numbers for key indicators are really low so far. But, as Preach My Gospel says, the measure of a missionaries success is not in the numbers. I guess that´s especially true for office Elders. As for today, I am in the office in between errands that are encroaching on my P-day. I am really going to enjoy having real p-days when I get out of here. Which I think may be this next transfer. I will certainly be ready to leave.

In other news, this week a lot more people sent me news, which is good. I finally heard from Bonnie down in Texas. Bonnie, church isn´t just a place to find boys even if they do outnumber the girls 8 to 1.

Back at home I hear that the normal summer work is in full bloom. Mowing, dirting, weeding, stuff. Mom wants Grant to get another job to get him off the computer. From what I hear from Grant, he´s doing plenty of normal people things like sports, biking, and working. Sometimes socializing as well. Ah well, I don´t have that problem right now. Which is pretty nice.

Unfortunately I don´t have any really interesting or new news. No baptisms, no visitors from out of town, no emergency transfers, no emergency room visits. Just the little by little corporate takeover of my life, i.e. The office taking all of my proselyting time. Well, we did have a division the other day which was pretty nice. I don´t have any major problems with my companion, but he´s the first I´ve had for more than one and half transfers, and the second transfer with the same companion is a lot different than the first. I´m sure I will have several more companions for multiple transfers so this is a learning experience. But it was nice to be with another Elder for a day. Being with your companion is great, but after a while of 24/7 contact, sometimes you just want to be alone. All of you who have served missions know what I´m talking about. Those of you who haven´t, imagine being with someone, even a really good friend, all day every day for even just a week. Thankfully the Lord really smooths a lot of things out. I know for a fact that I would not have been able to sustain that sort of contact with anyone before my mission. But now it´s just part of the job. It´s not an issue most of the time. Just those times when I sit back and start to think of myself and allow a little selfishness to creep in. I´m working on avoiding that. It´s part of the process.

Well, my times up. Thanks to all of you who wrote.

Love you,

~Elder Peterson

Two is Company, Three's a Party at the Peterson's

Dear Family,

The other day I just randomly remembered something from a deacon´s quorum activity way back when. We were going through and taking well known quotes or sayings and changing them. George Ransom had the saying ´´two is company, three´s a crowd.´´ He changed it to ´´Two is company, Three´s a party at the Petersons´. ´´ How true that was. Also it just made me laugh.

Today we came in to the mission office early to, as mother would say, ´´clean the gayrage.´´ We came in and went to the mission home´s basement and cleaned it out. We rearranged the things we were keeping and put the rest in the Hiace to go to the dump. Then we went to the landfill and dropped it off. I included some pictures. We ended up burning some of our really old records from 2005 and 2006. It was interesting when we pulled up to the dump, a bunch of people there came and started unloading the Hiace while at the same time evaluating our stuff to see if any of it would be of value to them. They also wanted us to give them other things we had with us that we weren´t throwing away. They were the dumpyard kings. Which I guess isn´t much.

This past week has been quite interesting. Yesterday we didn´t have internet in the office so it was difficult to get things done. But that´s ok. Aaaannddd... I really have nothing else to say. Man.

As far as the pictures, I sent a picture of my much beloved refried beans mom sent which you can also see some boxed milk. I also baked a cake from scratch a while back and I felt like including a picture of that as well.

I also included a picture of the camera crew that we worked with last weekend. Mom, we gave them our contact info, so they should be getting in touch with you sometime in the future if they haven´t already.

Anyways, thanks all for all the emails. It takes from my time to write, but I´d much rather read emails than write them anyways. Keep it up!

~Elder Peterson

Lights, Camera, Action!

Dear Family,

Sorry for my late email, but it is a situational thing, not an area change or pday change or anything drastic like that. Basically, my companion and I received an interesting and unique assignment this weekend.

So last week we learned that some people would be coming to Cape Verde to do some filming for a project the Europe Area Presidency was working on. Yes, Cape Verde is part of the Europe Area, at least as far as missions are concerned. So we didn´t know a whole lot of details, but we knew when they would be coming and that they wanted to be filming some members. So President asked Elder Shelhamer and I to set up an itinerary for them for their stay as well as set all the appointments and make the arrangements, etc. so everything would run smoothly. Also, we were asked to be at their disposal during the day to be translators and to get them around and such. So this past week we met with the first councelor in the Cape Verde mission Presidency as he is the mission PR representative and he gave us a list of families and their numbers that they recommended we use for our filming. So we spent a good bit of time scheduling everyone, and we ended up having more time, theoretically, then they had given us people. So we came up with another list of recent converts and other members with strong testimonies that would fit the bill as it were and scheduled them as well.

The idea behind the project is to film interviews with the members in a style similar to Mormon.org for a website the Europe Area is going to make for Portuguese speaking areas. However, it´s not going to be a Mormon.org site, only similar. So we have been filming them in short little segments just asking them simple gospel based questions that they can respond to and the Area can use in the website for nonmembers and investigators and such.

They flew in on Wednesday night. They got in on Thursday morning. They were expected at 9:50 so President said that we could go pick them up and give them a good welcome, but if their flight was too delayed we would contact a member that usually does late night pick ups. Well, the flight was delayed. So we called the member, but got kind of a nothing response, he appeared a little, disoriented or drunk. So we called President and he called the member and he got kind of the same impression. There was really no one else for the job, so we ended up coming back to the airport at midnight to pick them up and take them to their hotel. Their flight was even more delayed and then they had to wait for backage and stuff. Long story short, we didn´t end up going home until 2:30 in the morning. Yea. the next morning I remember waking up on my knees finishing my morning prayer. So, if nothing else, I´ve got myself conditioned to at least get up on time, even if I´m not fully awake.

That morning, Thursday, we had Zone conference, which was pretty good. After that though, we started our filming. The people who came were Brother and Sister Hatch and Brother Wills. Brother and Sister Hatch are American, but they work for the church doing similar filming type projects and the person who was originally supposed to come got sick so they were drafted to come along. Brother Wills is a proper English bloke. He´s really a hoot. So we filmed Thursday afternoon after which they treated us to dinner. Man, it was good. The next day, Friday, as you know was our pday. We were still completely wiped from staying up so late the previous night, so Friday morning we awoke, said our personal and companionship prayers, and went straight back to bed. After all, it was Pday. We got up around 10:00 which doesn´t seem like sleeping in too much outside the mission, but here it seemed like forever. We got up, cleaned our house and went grocery shopping. Then in the afternoon we started filming again, which is why we weren´t able to do emails yesterday. Again after the shoot they treated us to dinner. Way too kind. They really are great people.

So this morning, we did our normal morning routine but started filming a little earlier, at 10:00. We got a lot done in the morning because we didn´t have a lot of the noise and interruption problems we´d had in previous days. So we took lunch and got started again at 2:00. We´ve been filming interviews pretty much all afternoon. We ended a little early today because we went through our interviews fairly quickly and one wasn´t able to come. So after dropping them off at the hotel, Elder Shelhamer and I came here to the mission office to do our emails.

The whole filming and interview process is really fascinating though. It´s got all of the behind the scenes feel. Brother Wills does the filming, Brother Hatch does the sound. They have a reflecting sheet to help with lighting that Elder Shelhamer and I would trade off holding. We eventually rigged it up with some chairs so we didn´t have to hold it. But basically we´d brief the members a little about what we are doing, have them sign a contract stating that we can use the video for whatever purpose we find necessary and they won´t be paid for it, then go in and interview them. Since they church people don´t speak Portuguese, Elder Shelhamer or I would give the interview. We´d ask the questions in English and in Portuguese for the benefit of both parties, and then they´d respond in Portuguese. Elder Shelhamer and I would act as quality control to make sure the content was all kosher. Oh, and I also got to do the clapper board. Joy!

Anyways, this has certainly been the most interesting assignment I´ve had yet in the mission. And we´ve got one more day of filming tomorrow and they return to England.

Also, tomorrow is Fast Sunday, so don´t forget. I almost did.

Thanks for all the letters and such. Snail Mail may take a while to get here, but it is also much appreciated as are packages.

Much love,

~Elder Peterson