Porto Novo!

The moment youºve all been waiting for...

...or I have, at least...

I think Iºm going to accidentally throw in more portuguese words now in my letters home! I realized a while ago that my mind translates English experiences into Portuguese and my Portuguese experiences into English. Except, now it isnºt translating as much of my Portuguese experiences into English right when I think back on them... :)

Anyway, Iºm here and safe and I did half of my email time on Tuesday because I didnºt get into Porto Novo until 5 or 5:30 on Monday. So thatºs why you guys got random little notes. :) But I also ran out of time, so thatºs also why Iºm not sure if all of you got notes, and why they were really short. :)

Okay... where to start...

Oh! The boat ride. I took anti-nausea medicine, and I was fine... but Iºm not sure if I needed the medicine. The ride was pretty smooth between Mindelo and Porto Novo, so Iºm going to take some with me but not take it until I start to feel sick next time we go to Mindelo. Our zone conferences will be in Mindelo, so it should be within a month or six weeks, more like. But when I could first see Santo Antao, it had been kind of a crazy, stressful day already and I was a bit frazzled. Then I saw Santo Antao, and it felt like something that had been slightly unaligned inside me just clicked together, and I felt like I was going home. It was such a tender mercy! I was really surprised to feel that way, because it was all crazy, and I didnºt have that experience when I landed in Sal. It was a tender mercy of the Lord, and at the very least, for me it was a reminder that everything would be okay. That this was part of the Lordºs plan, not a last-minute adjustment for Him. And I felt so excited to get out and meet these new people and help them come unto Christ.

Then I met Sister Pina. Man, she is awesome! She is so fun and humble and obedient. I now have a new goal: to learn as much as I can from her, and hopefully be like her by the end of my mission. She reminds me of my friends from High School, especially Emma. Iºm not exactly sure why, but even on Monday she reminded me of Emma. Itºs been so fun. She is just so good at being easygoing and loving everyone and having fun, but also buckling down and working and striving to become better all the time. Like I said, I really want to be like her by the end of my mission. :)

Apparently missionaries stay really long in Santo Antão, which Iºm really excited for because already, these people and this ward have my heart. But missionaries are supposed to stay really long in Sal, too, so weºll see. But honestly, I feel like if I served here for the rest of my mission, I would be happy with that. But wow! This ward is awesome! And maybe itºs the difference between a ward and a branch that makes it so awesome. But they have a chapel, and there is so much more structure and order to things. And they have family history classes every Sunday and Wednesday! Even though almost no one has their own computer, and a lot of people donºt even have a modest skirt or a white shirt to wear on Sundays, they have family history classes! The people are just so open and kind and loving. There are so many people who are so willing to help us, too. I already love it here.

Anyway, this week has been such a good week. It reminds me of Christmas break: school had been crazy and hard and I had learned and grown a lot, and then I had a break, a breather, a time to refocus and prepare and a bit of a rest. Then it was even harder, in different ways, the next semester. But right now, I feel like I did over Christmas break. Iºm refocusing, resting a bit from all the craziness that happened over the past nine weeks... and in the MTC too. And itºs so good. Iºm a little worried about what  that might mean for the "semester ahead", haha, but Iºve just decided not even to think about it.

Sister Pina always offers to cook, so I always clean up, like Amy and Jordan. Oh, and itºs just the two of us in our apartment. Thereºs another dupla of sisters in Porto Novo, but they are in a different apartment. I guess there used to be four elders and two sisters in Porto Novo, but now thereºs just the four sisters... in two separate apartments (ours only has room for one dupla, really). But Iºm eating a lot of Caboverdian lunches now. Lots of rice, with different beans or vegetables or meat mixed in. Itºs really good. Iºm going to get some recipes for Sister Hill so she can try it :)

Also, our apartment is right over the storage for our dom da casa´s minimercado (the guy who owns our apartment has a food store... and we live over the food storage for that store. Oh! grocery store, haha). So that means we have LOTS of ants, some beetles, and cockroaches will appear. Mostly small ones, but theyºre so gross. I havenºt seen any of the big ones, but itºs probably just a matter of time. And Iºve learned that Sister Pina wonºt kill them. Sheºs too afraid, she says. So itºs war between me and the cockroaches, because my imagination doesnºt let me live with them in my house. :)

Yep, itºs awesome here. Sorry, I´ll try to tell you more about our investigators and menos ativos next week. But one cool experience happened when we were doing our weekly planning session.

We were trying to decide what day to remark with two girls we teach named Lara and Nadine. They basically have all the lessons, but they both feel unprepared/struggle with really believing that they can be forgiven. I kept feeling like it should be October 11 that we should remark with them for them to be baptized, but because I didnºt really know their situation super well I waited for Sister Pina to suggest a day. But she couldnºt bring herself to suggest a day, either, so I finally told her I felt like October 11 should be the day. She told me that was what she felt, too. It was a date of faith, pretty close to now, and so she felt hesitant. But we realized that the Lord was telling us both the same thing, so we wrote it down. Then we suggested it to Lara and Nadine, and they both agreed right away! It was amazing. The Lord was preparing all of us. It was just a simple experience, but a good reminder that the Lord really is directing His work and sometime we just have to get out of the way and let him do His work.

It was like that with contacts, too. Pres. Mathews and Elder Moreira challenged us to do 10 street contacts, at least, every day, and Sister Pina and I have really been working on figuring out how to do that and just going forward and doing it with faith. We´re also supposed to focus on finding families and working with families, and they promised us that if we would do these contacts we would find families, already married families, which is a SUPER rare thing out here. Well, it has been amazing: we have found at least two families that are definitely married, and two or so other families who may or may not be married... Iºm not exactly sure. Itºs been so amazing! Man, I love this work. I love these people and I love the miracles the Lord will bless us with if we will just act in faith.

Love you all!

Love,

Sister Zimbelman

Also, side note: I feel like Iºm writing the small plates, where Moroni says that not one hundredth of all the things that happened could be written down. I donºt know if Iºve told you guys that before, but thatºs what these letters feel like. Love you all!

Goodbye Sal!

Yep, apparently Iºm being transferred to Santo Antao... an area called Porto Novo. My new companion will be Sister Pina. She is Caboverdiana, and apparently really nice, and obedient too. Iºm a bit nervous, but Iºm so excited! But Iºll miss these people!

So Sister Garcia is going home because her mom has cancer and they prayed about it and everyone felt like she should be there with them. Weºve known  for a few weeks, but she gave me permission to tell you guys today. She leaves today for Praia, then flies home tomorrow. So our area will be closed down to Sisters for a bit... probably just until the actual transfers in three weeks. I have to be at the airport in 15 min, so weºll see how much I can write about my week... then hopefully Iºll be able to write when i get to Santo Antao with what is left of my internet time.

Iºll be flying to Mindelo, then Iºll take a boat to Santo Antao. Apparently everyone LOVES Santo Antao and wants to serve there, but itºs also the hottest island. But Iºm excited. :)

So this week, Sister Garcia has been sick... she might have a parasite again. So we spent quite a bit of time indoors. Santos hasnºt been drinking, and we were so excited for him, but then he came to church yesterday and he was so drunk. It was so sad! Itºs so sad to see someone keep choosing things that are so harmful and that donºt allow God to bless and help them!

Also, our Special Training with Elder Morreira of the 70 was so awesome. He is so funny... he reminded all of us of Gru from Despicable Me with his little mannerisms and his Portuguese accent. I will send pictures from Santo Antao if I can. I learned a lot though. Oh, and Pres. Mathews now wants us to do 10 contacts each day, along with getting and contacting 10 references each week. Iºm really excited to be able to start doing that... with Sister Garcia being sick, we didnºt go out much, especially toward the end of the week. But he wants us to look for families, too, who are already married. Iºm so excited to try and to exercise my faith to find those families. Itºs going to be great.

Elder Morreira talked about a lot of stuff, mostly about our need to repent and change and to continually do so if we want the people we work with to do the same. It was so good, and he talked about really studying PMG and the scriptures instead of just reading it. He also talked about Abraham and when the Lord asked him to sacrifice his son, and asked us what Abraham had to overcome/give up for that trial. Then he told us about how that trial was really Abraham overcoming Abraham, not Isaac, and talked about how we all need to overcome our natural man and completely give ourselves to the Lord.

Anyway, it wasreally good. Iºll hopefully be able to email you all personally soon. Love you!

Love,

Sister Zimbelman

Note from Karen - I've attached a few pictures I found on line of Santo Antao.

Little Miracles Every Day

Well, hello again!

Let’s see… this week was great, as always. A member of the quorum of the 70 is doing a mission tour this week, and our zone will get to meet with him for some special training on Friday. And apparently I will be playing the piano for it! I’m a little nervous, but I’m sure it will be fine, and definitely worth it. I don’t like playing in front of people, but if it means we get to hear from a member of the 70, I’ll do it. :)

Well, this week has been full of miracles, as every week seems to be in the work of the Lord. I was having a really hard time on Sundays… every Sunday I felt so exhausted and dreaded going out to teach, even though I love teaching these people. I think it was made worse, too, because I LOVED Sundays before my mission, and now they were just the days before P-day and I felt SO ready for a bit of a rest… or a different type of work, as P-days always are. I didn’t want to dislike Sundays, so I felt bad about feeling that way, too, so I was basically just miserable Sunday afternoons until we actually left the house to teach. So, I asked for a blessing, because I wanted to love Sundays and not feel so stinkin’ exhausted and unmotivated to go out teaching. That blessing was such a tender mercy. It actually addressed a lot of other stuff, and I think it will help me a lot in the future, too. But one thing he told me was that the Lord will help me to keep going, to have the motivation and energy to do what He needs me to do.

Knowing that if I wasn’t careful I would have a bad attitude about teaching Sunday afternoon, I prayed for help and I just told Heavenly Father how much I really just wanted to love Sundays like I used to before the mission, when it really was a day of rest for me. Obviously it wouldn’t be the same, but I wanted to love it the same way I loved it before.

Let me tell you, even with small things, God really does answer prayers. He helped me control my thoughts so I didn’t think about P-day being tomorrow, or how tired I was, and He just helped me focus on the moment, on teaching and loving these people and following the Spirit. It was something so small, and a challenge that I could have lived with for the next 15 months, and that made it even more amazing to me, because it was an attitude change that probably didn’t affect the work very much (since I only felt that way for the two hours of lunch before we went out), but it was important to me. God really does care for us, even in the small things. He really is our Father, and He really loves us and will bless us with so many things… sometimes He is just waiting for us to ask for those blessings. When we ask Him, we are showing our faith in Him and we are showing humility and trust in Him. Then He can bless us with what we need… but a lot of times He can’t do it until we ask.

Also, this week is probably going to be one of the hardest in my mission. We have a lot of people that we visit, but they just aren’t progressing… especially with going to church. And some will only go if we pass by and pick them up for church… so they go more for us than for the Lord or because they have a testimony, which isn’t good. I’m hoping we could get some members to help our investigators, too, but that will probably have to wait a week because our focus this week will be to decide who to drop and who to keep visiting. And we’re going to try to get more references from members to help us find the people that are ready to accept the Gospel. It’s going to be hard, but both Sister Garcia and I feel like that’s what we need to do to help Sal progress and to find the people the Lord has prepared for us to teach.

This week we have really focused on helping out less actives here… partly because our investigators just aren’t really progressing. But there have been some serious miracles as a result.

Do you remember Arlindo? We visited him again this week, and instead of saying he has faith that someday he will be active again, he said that he will go to church! He told us he prays a lot for help getting to church, but something would always come up. They way he said it, we could tell that he was thinking that Satan is stronger than he is. But we had a great lesson with him about how if we trust in the Lord, Satan will have no power over us, and how we all have our agency and that God will ALWAYS provide a way for us to do the things He asks us to do. It was really good, and he came to church on his own, dressed in a white shirt and tie, and stayed for all three hours. It was incredible!

I don’t think I told you about Santos last week. He is a returned missionary who served in Cabo Verde in 1995-1997 or so, but he hasn’t been to church in YEARS. We had heard of him (an RM who now was less active, had dreads, and drank sometimes), and my first Sunday here we had tried to find him, but we couldn’t find him. Then, last week, we were having a pretty rough day. I was having that allergy-enduced asthma that I would get in the fall in America, so I was super tired and just feeling off, and Sister Garcia was really struggling too. We were on our way to our last lesson of the day, and we stopped to talk to Andrea (Bia’s less active daughter), and we had this guy come up to us. He was a little drunk, but he had a Bob Marley hat hiding his dreads, and he told us he was an x-missionary and then walked away. Sister Garcia got super excited and we stopped him and ended up talking to him for an hour or more.  He told us that he saw a lot of missionaries pass by him on the street, but that we had something different, which is why he showed himself to us. Anyway, we’ve been teaching him. He still has such a strong testimony of the church… he could be such a strong leader in the church once he gets active again! But he has been working to stop drinking and smoking, and he came to church with us on Sunday. It was so amazing. He wants us to help him become active. Wow.

Anyway, that’s about it for this week. I love you all! I have really been learning how much God loves each of us, and how much He will help us and bless us if we will just trust in Him and continually try to be better. But He has so many blessings in store for each of us. It’s just so incredible. And a lot of times all we have to do is ask.

Love you all!

Love,

Sister Zimbelman

Apparently Cockroaches Fly...

Well, this week has been great. I’m not really positive why, but it’s been so good.

At District Meeting this week we made some goals and talked about where we want to be as a district by the end of this transfer. It was really good and we talked about a lot of concerns that we had. We really were struggling with being united, and it was mostly with being united between the Elders and the Sisters. So we talked about that, and about what we could do to be more united. A lot of it came down to obedience, actually, so now we’re all working on being more obedient/more exactly obedient. It’s been really good.

We have also started to do some zone activities. For example, we just got back from playing kickball (with a soccer ball) on some sand dunes just outside of Santa Maria. It was super fun! Hard, but so fun. And, oh… the feel of sand on bare feet… it was heavenly, until the sun came out and the sand got burning hot in about .2 seconds, haha.

It was so fun to just play in the sand, and we tried to see who could jump the furthest down the sand dune. It was so fun, and I feel like we became a lot closer as a zone in this past week and especially in this one activity than all the time we spent last transfer. I think this increase in unity and trust will help us help Sal, too.

Our district leader challenged us to pick a Christlike attribute to strive to develop and we would report on it, or something like that, next district meeting. So, this week I have been working on strengthening my hope. It’s been really good to study it, and I have really learned that hope comes from faith and trusting in the Lord and in His plan. It is about looking forward with faith and gratitude, and being optimistic in spite of challenges. I think the Lord was really encouraging people to have hope when He tells them to “be of good cheer”/“lift up your heads”. It is always paired with faith and charity, but I feel like hope kind of gets glossed over. But when we have hope, we are looking at things with an eternal perspective. We are focusing on the Savior, and remembering that God has a plan for us, and that all our challenges are part of His plan for us. He loves us, and our challenges are what we need to grow and to become our best selves. I have been praying for help having hope, especially because things are still really hard for my companion and it would be really easy for us both to go teaching without the Spirit, just feeling/acting exhausted and stressed. But with hope, you have to have patience. You trust in the Lord, and you don’t worry about how everything is going to work out… you just go forward, trusting that it WILL work out.

Oh yeah, and wow, it’s been crazy. We have really been working on using the BOM more and bringing peoples’ concerns back to the BOM (if the BOM is true, the Church is true, etc.), and there have been so many opportunities to teach people that this week. Or to re-emphasize the importance of going to the BOM to answer any questions, or to teach how the BOM is such a key to gaining a testimony of this church and to coming closer to Christ. I have just loved it. And we’ve started doing teaching more 50/50, where I teach or start discussions half the time, as if I weren’t in training. It’s been hard, but really fun. Especially because we kept having opportunities to teach the BOM. It has been so great. Wow, I just love the BOM, and it is just so important!

Well, that’s really what has been happening this week. Oh yeah, and we have started teaching an Adventist named Ravy.  He is great. He has a lot of questions and ideas about God, and it is really challenging to teach him because he asks so many questions and has these strong notions about who/what is God, but it is so interesting, too. We have just kept pointing him to the BOM, and have told him that that is his prova… his evidence. Everything depends on whether the BOM is really the word of God. But it has been interesting too, because I’ve been studying the Bible really well, and finding stories and seeing how the two support each other and help us understand God and the Doctrine of Christ more clearly together. I love it.

Oh, and Bia and Francisco are doing well. Our main challenge is to make sure they really understand how vital it is that they read the BOM every day… even if they only have time to read a few verses. Man, I just love them. They are so amazing, and Bia really wants to get a testimony… she hasn’t really put much time into reading the BOM, though, because when she isn’t at work, she is home, but her house is crazy busy with lots of little kids, so she is exhausted by the end of the day. I hope we can really teach her how important this is.

Well, we didn’t end up training as many members as I had hoped this week. And we only trained a few to help our investigators/less actives. Hopefully this week we will have more success with that. It’s been tricky though, because Sister Garcia is sick again… and super weak this time. I don’t think she has a parasite this time, but I guess we’ll probably get it checked out if she doesn’t get better soon. Haha, the house is very organized because of the time we’ve had to spend inside as she tries to recover. Apparently that’s what I do when I have excessive time on my hands and need a break from studying. Well, that’s about it. But please, keep Sister Garcia in your prayers, especially. She is really being faced with a lot of challenges right now.

Love you guys! I am doing great. Wow, it is amazing how much it helps to be focusing on having hope. I think it was President Packer that said hope is an anchor to the soul. That is so true. Hope is a small, strong trait that can keep us anchored to the rock of our salvation, Jesus Christ. Satan can’t toss us way off course and into reefs if we are anchored to Christ through hope. Man, it has been such a blessing to study it and to refine/strengthen/refocus my hope.

I just love being a missionary. I love being out here serving these people. I love learning so much about myself and about the Savior and about His plan for me. I love learning to trust in Him and to keep a smile on my face and in my heart because of His plan for me.

I love you all! Things can be so hard, but they are always opportunities to come closer to the Savior. That’s what I’ve really been learning/gaining a stronger testimony of. ALL these things work together for our good. It is just amazing.

Oh, one last story. I saw my first Caboverdian cockroach in our house this week. I’ve seen them before, but just on the outside wall of Dirce’s house when she was moving from it, and once in the street at night. And I learned that cockroaches fly, but they aren’t as hard to kill as I thought they were. They just fly, so you can’t dump them off the balcony unless they’re already dead. Also, just a word of advice… make sure you are holding onto the actual part of the dust pan when you through them off, and not just the plastic piece at the end, because if you try to chuck dead cockroaches off the dust pan a little too enthusiastically, the dust pan will go with the cockroach, haha. But it was broken anyway. :)

Love you all! Have a FANTASTIC week!

I can feel your prayers with me every day. 

Love,

 Sister Zimbelman