Road trip, in a certain sense of the word

Dear Family,

Last week I sent my email on Saturday. Sunday was kind of crazy. Church was good, but we learned that there would be a fireside for our new mission president at 6:00. So we had from 3 to 6 to contact the majority of our investigators because we would not be in our area until Friday(today). We tried to go on splits to divide and conquer but one of the guys didn´t show. So instead we just went to the investigators we could and taught with a member. It went fairly well. The fireside was good.

Monday we got up at 4 to be at the airport at 4:30 for our flight at 5:30 to Mindelo. That was the 4th of July. Woot! Originally we were supposed to fly in Monday afternoon and have Zone Conference Tuesday the 5th, but July 5th is Cape Verde´s independence day and President Oliveira was invited to some government thing that day. So we flew in early early Monday morning. We had our Zone Conference then Elder Moreira and I did divisions with the Zone Leaders. That night to celebrate the 4th we ate waffles(definitely an American dish) and another American missionary and I sang the National Anthem. Since the missionaries usually have their P-day Monday and we had their zone conference that day, they had their P-day on Tuesday instead. And since Zone Conference was supposed to be on Tuesday, Elder Moreira and I didn´t fly out until Wednesday morning. So we just kind of had P-day with them. We didn´t use internet or anything, but we couldn´t really go out and work or do splits or whatever when none of the other missionaries were actually working. Except at 6 when they started proselyting as normal. Then we went out and worked with them.

Wednesday morning we flew out from Mindelo to Praia where we had a layover of 2 hours before flying to Fogo. We took President and Sister Oliveira around a little bit but in the afternoon we did splits with the missionaries there. Thursday we had Zone Conference in Fogo. It went well and afterwards we had our flight back to Praia. President and Sister Oliveira took Elder Moreira and me out to dinner before we all went back to our respective abodes to retire. It´s been a tiring week. We traveled through a lot of the mission. And I was able to visit some of my old areas. It has been really neat. Especially in Fogo. And President Oliveira is powerful. It´s going to be good working with him. But I feel bad for the way his first couple of weeks here have been going. Just the amount of stuff planned in such a short period of time. He only has a little bit to rest from these past trips because he leaves for a mission president training in Germany tomorrow. Rough.

Anyways, thanks all for everything. The prayers definitely help.

Love,

Elder Peterson