Oi! Bom dia!
So this week was crazy. We left the MTC on Tuesday at 3 am and then arrived in Cape Verde Wednesday night. I felt like I was in airports for days... I never want to go on a plane again. On the way there we had a few problems... my companion got sick because the planes hit some turbulence, and so she lost all the food she hadn´t eaten for the last 24 hours. I think it would have helped if she would have had some food at at least one of the layovers or ate a meal that they had on the plane. Anyways, I also lost my camera on one of the flights... oops. Worst thing ever... so I no longer have any MTC pictures and I can´t send any for the next few weeks till I get a new one. Sorry.
So Cabo Verde... where do I begin... this place is CRAZY! but I love it! There are literally no white people here. The only ones are the missionaries, and maybe a few tourists on the other islands. Our second day, thursday, we found out who our companions are and what area we would be serving in. My companion is sister johnson, from Alabama and she started her mission in porto novo and has been here for 6 months, and I am serving in the city of Porto Novo on the island of Santo Antao. My island is known for its crazy creole, which i definitely do not understand, and its hot weather. Luckily the weather hasn´t been too bad, but the langauge though... oh my goodness. This is not the language i learned in the mtc. Seriously. People will ask me my name and I can´t pick out any words, and they are speaking Portuguese and not Creole. Or they will just say welcome and I won´t understand. its rough. but I am working really hard, i just have to get used to how they talk, they just slur all the words together. All the people tell me I will understand in one month, but I think it will take a bit longer, but i hope that it will only take a month.
So to describe Porto Novo since I don´t have any pictures, its beautiful! The houses are all made from cinderblocks, and most are very small, usually just have one front room with a queen sized bed, and then a back room with a kitchen and maybe some chairs. Most houses have chairs, most have stools, and some, the really poor people, just have beds, so we just give the lessons sitting on the edge of their bed. Some people have electricity, most dont. Most have cement floors, and only a few pairs of clothes. We teach a ton of people! We have like 10 investigators right now that have dates, and we have 3 who we are trying to get baptized on Saturday (Adilson, Antonia, and Josilyn). They have crazy names here, and I have no clue how to spell them, we just guess based on how they sound.
Everyone here is very friendly, we talk to everybody and my companion knows like all of their names. There isn´t really a lot of diversity like I have heard about. The skin colors differ in shade, some very dark, and some look like african americans. Everyone has black hair and brown eyes.
Sorry, I´m kinda just jumping around everywhere as thoughts come to my mind about what I can tell you about.
The main streets are cobblestone, but its very uneven, and then the other streets are all dirt. No one has addresses. Only the main streets have names, aka like 3 in our area. People describe their houses by what is around, like stores or obvious landmarks like the one bridge or big yellow house, the church, or the school. Then they say how many houses in and the color of the door or wall. So our house is the orange and blue one on Bairro street(Buy-ho).
We live with the two other sisters in Porto Novo. There are only 4 sisters and 4 elders on Santo Antao, all of the sisters are in porto novo and one set of the elders, the other elders are farther north in some other city. Our apartment is nice. We don´t have hot water so thats been fun to take showers in. I think all the other apartments that sisters stay in have hot water. Santo Antao is not the most advanced island, we are way out in the middle of no where. The port is beautiful. President Mathews said it was one the of two prettiest islands. But it is not green. Its hard to describe the city, because its so different. The city center where the stores are is like Old San Juan in Puerto Rico, but the buildings are only one story.
The city is small, it feels like the size of pleasant grove maybe, maybe smaller. I´m not really sure. But our area is small, my companion says they it´s a lot bigger than the one she was in before, the one that the new 2 elders took. There used to only be 2 elders and 4 sisters here until the last transfer so they came and we switched parts of the areas.
So yeah...
One funny thing that happened this week, before I run out of time. We were teaching Antonia and her daughter Josilyn, in their house on her bed, and Antonia has a probably 1 year old baby. So we were talking and the baby is standing on the ground at the edge of the bed and just starts peeing! It was really weird because we didn´t know what to do! Antonia picks her up and grabs a sheet hanging up(like a curtain) and wipes off her own legs and puts the sheet on her lap and puts the baby on her lap and just keeps listening. it was so weird. she just left the pee on the cement floor. Then later the baby decided to play in it. Yeah... at least she didn´t get any pee on us. Oh and the baby always grabs everything and sucks on it and she got a hold of my companions hymn book haha. it was covered in saliva and probably pee. So that was the crazy story for this week!
I love you all, and I love Cabo Verde!
The people are so humble and yet so happy here, they are so willing to hear the gospel and have been prepared to accept it.
Till next week!
Sister Kohlert
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