Assistant - noun: a person who assists or gives aid and support; helper.

(As an aside, this is also the 100th post... Woot.)

Dear Family,

On Tuesday I went with President Neves to pick up my new mission president, President Oliveira. According to protocol, the moment the plane touched the ground, President Oliveira became the new president and President Neves became Brother Neves. That was weird. He took his tag off in front of us and everything. We waited at the airport for quite a while as they got luggage and all that jazz. Then we took them to a hotel because the Mission home was being changed. Not necessarily ideal to have the move happen as the new Mission President gets here but whatevs. So the rest of that day we just taught our investigators and were kind of on call for whatever the new president might need.

On Wednesday we started the day really early by taking the former president Neves and his family to the airport at 4:30. No bueno. Elder Moreira and I then had a brief meeting with President Oliveira at around 8:00 before starting the Zone Leader´s Council. I will say right now that I got a spiritual confirmation that morning that President Oliveira is indeed the man called by God to lead this mission. And I´m pretty excited about it. The ZL council went well and after that Elder Moreira and I kind of ran around taking people to the airport and giving rides and such.

Thursday was supposed to be a normal day, but we went into the office to do a few administrative things and ended up staying there all day trying to help President Oliveira get settled in and get everything figured out. There´s a lot of stuff that´s kind of a mess at the moment for a variety of reasons and President Oliveira kind of got dropped right in the middle of it.

Friday (yesterday) we had our Zone Conference here in Praia. It went really well and all the missionaries left with really good thoughts and feelings about President Oliveira and where he wants to take this mission. We were then assigned to plan out the Zone Conferences for Mindelo and Fogo. That took a good bit of time. I went to bed tired and with a headache. I really can´t list all the things that we have been doing this past week but it´s been busy busy busy. And next week we will be out of our area for most of the time due to the Zone Conferences on the other islands. So woot.

Thanks for all of your love and support and prayers and stuff. It really does help.

Elder Peterson

p.s. The one picture is of me and Elder Moreira with our former mission president and his wife and our current mission president and his wife.
The other picture is of my mission "family." My trainer´s trainer (my grandpa), my trainer (dad), my trainers "brother" (my uncle), my "uncles" "son" (my cousin), me, and my 3 "brothers" or the other 3 Elders that my trainer trained. So one big happy family.