Blessing the Rains Down in Africa: Hambergoff and Regrets

5/13/2019

Familia Dearest,

Alright, it´s been a while since I´ve sent home a decent email, still, I make no promises but I´ll give it a try today, haha.

So, I left Palmarejo and I cried like a baby. My last night there we'd planned on having a family night but it ended up that we didn't have time to plan it, so we decided we'd just go say goodbye to a couple of my queridos. But then that night when we showed up at Diana's house she´d put together a family night and my queridos were already there and it was just so sweet and amazing, so yeah, there were tears. So that was pretty hard but Monte Sossego is great!!! São Vicente is super clean and beautiful and the beaches here are unreal! I'm really excited to get to know the Island better :) We´re teaching so many amazing people right now too, it's really cool in this mission how we get to move around to islands different to get to know different kinds of people. The culture is different on every island, and the creole! Oh my, the creole. I've been speaking roughly the same kind of creole my entire mission (badu) because there isn't a huge difference in the creole of Santiago and Fogo, but now the creole is sanpajudu (don´t know if I spelled that right) and it's been a little bit of an adjustment, but we´re getting there, haha. But It's been really cool and Sister Nascimento is a really great missionary, we´ve already had so many great lessons and I'm super excited to see everything the Lord has planned for us here.

In other news, I usually do all of my studies in portuguese because I've realized that depending on the language, you kinda see and understand things differently, so besides the fact that I become more and more immersed in the portuguese language daily, I feel like I´ve also come to know the Book of Mormon a lot better. I find myself thinking about the way things are said and comparing the translation and it's cool to see how things stand out differently. Claro, every time you read the BOM you're bound to learn something new, but it's really interesting crossing that with also reading in another language, so y´know, if you speak another language, I encourage you to try it out.

Anyways, it's been a week of firsts, and lasts, hello´s, goodbyes, laughing and crying and I guess that's just how the mission is. But the Lord has been good to me and I'm hyped to see what He has planned for Sister Nascimento and Me here in Monte Sossego.

--Sister Bradley