Elder Eric Weiss is serving in the Cape Verde, Praia mission. He has been out for 5 months. He is currently serving in the area of Sao Filipe in the capital city of Praia.
Greetings Granite 8th Ward from Cape Verde!
Cape Verde is a group of 10 islands off the coast of west Africa. The people here are very humble and everybody just likes to have a good time. The people also live in very humbling circumstances. Many of them just live in small little concrete houses. Most have electricity but not everyone has running water and they have to get it from wells usually. Oh and everyone here loves soccer.
The Church has been in Cape Verde only 20 years. The mission used to be part of the Portugal, Lisbon mission. The CV mission was opened in 2002. There are only about 60 missionaries in CV and they are on four islands. About 30 percent are Americans, 30 percent are Brazilians, 20 percent are Portuguese and the rest are Cape Verdians.
This place is very different from America but there are a few things that are the same. One of those things is the gospel. The few members here have to rely on a lot of prayer and faith. Tithing is sometimes a big thing to ask from the members but the spirit and the blessings are the same. The people love the Lord and rely on him for everything and they are such great examples. This gospel is true and the members know it.
This is an excerpt from Eric's email from July 12th.
We have a baptism this Saturday so that's sweet. I don't remember if I wrote about him but here is what I have deciphered out of the Portuguese about how e. moreira and his previous companion found their family. So i´m pretty sure they were knocking doors in the area and the area they were in is like a gigantic apartment complex delio. There's like a little area in the middle that is kinda like a little park and it´s enclosed in by all the apartment buildings around it. They were knocking doors and it´s an apartment complex so when they knock a door its not like a persons house door. It's to get in to the place where there doors are. Anyways. They were in one of the areas and they knocked on the door of this kid (Jwilson) and his family. His mom answered the door and i´m paraphrasing here because I don't know Portuguese but she said something along the lines of "oh you have the word of God don´t you? Enter enter." And they did and started teaching this family and they are really sweet. Jwilson is the one being baptized this Saturday and he´s 15ish I think. But Jwilson is the man. He comes to church every week without us needing to remind him. He´s already living the law of fasting and last Sunday he brought 2 of his brothers to church and the other week he gave us 3 references of people to contact. And he´s already working on the goals in the aaronic priesthood pamphlet and on Saturday he taught a lesson about repentance to his family and we gave them the For the Strength of the Youth pamphlet and his dad (who hasn´t been in any of our lessons) really liked it and almost read the whole thing while we were there lol. Yeah, so this week is his baptism and in 2 weeks his 2 brothers that he brought to church have a date scheduled along with another 1 of our investigators. So yeah we´re gonna be busy this week.
We decided in district meeting that the members need more activities so we're hosting 4 activities every week for them. One is like a family night for the whole branch, 1 is essentially mission prep, 1 is how the members help us with missionary work and the last is just like a group social night. So hopefully we can get members and investigators to these as well.
Well this week we´ve been working on building our area back up since we lost a lot of investigators last week of the transfer. So we were knocking doors and some guy invited us in and we asked if we could start with a prayer and he said no. That´s like the first time that's ever happened. And also we asked him if he would rather live with god in eternal happiness or with the devil in eternal misery and he said whichever.
Well I love you all and I miss you but as someone in my zone in the MTC said "I get to spend eternity with my family and if I go home from my mission I could be taking that chance away from someone else"
Love always
E. Weiss
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