After Christmas

Hello!

Holiday or something yesterday, so it made doing our errands about 10 times more difficult and we weren't able to use the internet yesterday, so...surprise!

Well, I'm glad the week after Christmas went well. It's a shame not to be with my own nieces and nephews, but at least I have my little substitutes here [obviously not as sweet or cute, but they do their best. :) ] We had a good week, not exactly super productive as far as the work goes; If there's one thing every Caboverdian loves, it's a party. Pretty much everyone was eager to let us in to visit or eat, but it was harder than usual to squeeze in a prayer and a lesson.

This week the branch had a huge New Year's Eve (Eve) party on the 30th. (Of course when we try to organize a big Christmas activity, no one helps, but the party we can't even go to people go all out for...) But Sister Vicente and I stopped by to teach someone in Soraia's house and everyone was putting together pizzas, russois, and other delicious things that I can't remember the names of and we got pulled into the work. People are still surprised when an American knows how to knead pizza dough, but that's all right. I saw how they make their pizzas--which are delicious and we wrote down the recipe and made it on New Year’s when we were trapped inside the house to safely avoid all the drunken partying. :)

Anyway, but it's something I really enjoy when we're able to serve the members or the branch and Soraia was super stressed so it was good to be able to help. And it's always fun to be part of some productive chaos with several dogs and many children constantly underfoot—literally. Their poor little puppy must have gotten stepped on by everyone at least twice.

We helped them transport the trays and trays of food to the church where we found the entire relief society making more food there and we had a good forty-five minutes to help/steal food before we had to be home for the night.

But seriously, the pizza is really good. (And it was about the first day I was able to eat real food since Christmas...so I especially enjoyed it. Haha. Hey, the Lamanites fight like dragons.)

Oh, and we also went to Sao Vicente on Monday. The training was great and, as always, I left feeling like the world's worst missionary but with lots of new goals and help to improve. President gave us all a copy of Elder Bednar's talk to new mission presidents about being a 'Preach My Gospel Missionary.' I honestly need at least one more mission to put all the great things we learned into practice.

But everyone was still in the Christmas mood and Sister Oliveira brought us all presents (popcorn balls, cookies and a bracelet--the bracelets just for the sisters).

Well, things are going well here. We're going to be doing a lot of contacting this week because the holidays seem to have drained quite a few of our investigators, but hey, there's nothing I like better than talking to strangers! Actually, I am kind of looking forward to it. The area is full of little neighborhoods that I haven't even seen yet! It'll be a good week.

Anyway, I love you all lots, tell the kiddos not to stop doing cute things before I get home! And maybe you could send Lucas over for a visit. He'd find lots of great things to put in his mouth here...

Be good everyone! :)

Love (and Geronimo!),
Sister Brooks