Hoping that these days close to Christmas are fun for you all. We have been busy this past week with 2 days of Zone Conference (a day for each of the two districts, and we are part of both) and 3 nights of house guests--the sister missionaries from the nearby island of Santo Antao, and the mission nurse, my good friend, who came from the island where the mission home is. President and Sister Neves also came for the two days. The sister missionaries come on the ferry boat that goes between our island and theirs, so they came on Monday night and stayed till Thursday morning. We had a full house but it was lots of fun, and late nights!
I finally got a sewing machine from the church district for my own use, so I made a white skirt today to wear for the choir Christmas concert on Christmas night. The machine will mostly be used for the Clothing For Jobs program, which is a "store" like DI where they receive shipments of clothing from Salt Lake, sort through it for the single mothers without jobs to take and sell. Some of the clothing is not sellable but the fabric is still good, so the ladies and I decide other items that can be made from it for sale, and do it. Larry is the financial advisor and also helps them be more efficient in their sorting and selling. This job is for probably two afternoons a week.
We are also buying the school supplies for the school kits, and will enlist the help of the Young Single Adults to help us assemble the kits and deliver them. The Church wants to have a ceremony whenever a project of this sort is completed, and have the newspaper, TV, etc. coverage so that the Church gets known for being helpful in this country.
We also have some 300 "Mormon Helping Hands" yellow vests for 4 clean-up projects in 2010--clean up a school yard, a beach, parks etc. on four holidays during the coming year. This project is for all of Cape Verde, and we are in charge of the 4 northern islands.
The Dengue Fever plague has almost ended entirely. The Church in SLC sent mosquito repellent and spray, since we could not buy any here. Right at the start of the plague, people bought out all the repellent, and there was none left, not enough to go around, so the Church sent some more.
This city is beautiful with all the Christmas lights, on buildings and streets. We spent an evening just walking around to see it all.
When the mission nurse came, she brought me some baking things from Praia where the mission home is, that I could not get here: molasses (actually black treacle), ginger, and cream of tartar. So we made gingerbread cookies--it was great to have that smell and taste at this time of year. We also had made my Christmas bread, "Stollen", a few weeks ago. Here is a photo of our little tree, and we also have lights around the front window inside. We are reading a Christmas story every night that we got from the Church magazines on the Internet, and we also got the text of the three talks given in the First Presidency Christmas Devotional which we will be reading also. The young people really enjoyed Larry's teaching them to cut fancy paper snowflakes, and they made over 100 to decorate the Cultural Hall for the district Primary party today. Some of them are exceptionally artistic, very beautiful.
Our 2 packages are still in the Mission Home, but they said they would put them on a plane to send here before Christmas. We hope also to get the shipment of Gospel Art books which the mission president ordered for each missionary as a Christmas gift. He used our idea, so we came up with another as our gift to the missionaries--a lighter to light the stove and oven so you don't burn your fingers on the teeny short matches they have here.
Tonight we are going to take the city bus to the other chapel about 5 miles away and attend the Young Women's Night of Excellence. They have made some beautiful things, like cross-stitch, fancy crepe paper flowers, yarn toys, and other really neat things.
Guess that's enough rambling. We miss you all extremely, and hope to hear from each of you in an email for Christmas. We cannot call internationally on our phone, so any phone call would have to be from your end. Our number is 238- 993-2444. We wish you all a very happy Christmas. Please let us know some things about the grandchildren especially. Hope Matt delivered your gifts from us.
Love, Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, Elder and Sister Goff
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