Monday, September 7, 2009

Everything has been going pretty great for us this week. We had Zone Interviews on Tuesday which kind of always throws a little randomness into life. Makes you feel like you are playing catch up sometimes. I don't know if I have mentioned her but we are teaching this girl named Felicia who is blind. More or less we look at it as planting a good seed since she is 1. blind 2. and going to school outside of our mission in about 3 weeks. It is really cool to teach her, I've noticed how much we actually use sight in our lessons. It is a lot more then I would have ever thought. She has a braille frame that she can listen and take notes with. Since we don't have any braille literature we are hoping to leave her with small things using that. It is sweet to watch her basically punch it out and write certain things out. Another one of our investigators Kojo read something about the Articles of Faith somewhere and was really curious about it. Luckily Elder White had one of the pass along style cards with them on it from home. He told us that he has been praying and really wants to get baptized. Beautiful music to any missionaries ears. This week I went on splits with our new district leader Elder Osondu from Nigeria. It was a pretty routine day but go figure. He is a pretty cool guy. He actually asked me about going to ASU. He doesn't want to school in Nigeria and is I guess branching out. Though he said most likely he will stay somewhere in Africa. We are finishing preparing a girl named Lois Okorno, the 9 year daugther of a member, to be baptized. Friday we couldn't have a serious discussion regardless how hard we tried. We went in the morning and none of us could stop laughing. Then we said we would just have to come back and still she couldn't stop. It was all good though. Her father said he would talk to her and that is basically all we need since she is 9 and has already been going through primary. Another invesigator Gladys Wiafe, whose husband is a member, told us that she likes the church but doesn't feel comfortable since she doesn't have friends and her English is very very limited. I don't really know why or how I'm going to do it but I asked her if she would mind us trying and help her learn English. Hopefully we can make it work, I am thinking of using a member's help who is really into educating Ghana. You could say it is somehow his personal mission or something. So of course Saturday was my birthday, awesome, especially since it started out with a baptism. The guy who was suppose to baptize them didn't show up so I got to do it. It went along pretty fine till the last one a little girl. She is from the other missionaries and definitely wasn't ready. She was almost in tears as she got into the water. The witnesses and I calmed her down a little bit and thought everything was okay, boy were we wrong. After saying the prayer I brought her hand up to her nose and she plugged it but she let go as she was going into the water and had a big freak out. She reached up and grabbed my shoulder and flaied around a little bit. I almost thought of just submerging myself to get her all the way under but better judgement prevailed. As we came up she was just in tears and yeah bad situation. She went and met her mom, the missionaries, and me coming in the rear in the hallway. We couldn't calm her down and so she'll have to wait to be baptized. Anyway it was a pretty good baptism save for that little bump. The rest of the day was pretty normal, though it was unexpectionally hot. Must mean Christmas is getting closer since that is the hottest time of the year. I did find a sweet birthday surprse for myself. Walking down a street I spied what looked like a box of chewy granola bars. They weren't quite that amazing, instead they were some kind of French knock off. I will say it probably wouldn't compare to a real one but dang chocolate covered chocolate chip still tastes good, at least to my current expectations of taste. Something pretty creepy I learned on Saturday was exactly how Ghanaians believe in witches. I knew that hey were very superstious but it became so much clearer as we went to have a lesson with a recent convert and ended up watching a bit of a documentary about witches in Ghana. They basically think that if anything goes wrong or bad in life it is a witch that cursed you or blah blah blah. If you are accused of being a witch and aren't beaten to death they have literal witch communities that your relatives can take you to and drop you off. It is a lot more predominat in the North but it is still crazy to think about how it is very deeply rooted in their society. Though no big surprise, even in the church we have to deal a lot of stuff with them basically reverting back to the traditions of their fathers but guess there is a little bit of that everywhere in the world. On Sunday a man came from the United Kingdom of one of my recent converts in Ashaiman. It was sweet to talk to him and meet the man who basically did our missionary work for us. He was the one who introduced his family to the church and through phone calls, emails, etc. worked on his Dad accepting missionaries and being baptized. Plus he brought one of his sons, Clinton, from Britain and wants him baptized in Ghana. It will be sweet because I think as of now he is the only one of the family that is above 8 that isn't baptized. That is pretty much the excitement for the week here. Love you guys!

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