“Not again! Sherri is going to kill me!

Happy birthday Britton!

Wow! You’re getting big now, a big number 9. Ha-ha that’s almost 10. I can’t believe that it has been 10 years since 9/11. Sorry about last week, we were having some technical difficulties with the power. They are doing some major road construction in our area around the junction called Mallam which cause the power to go off.... so they say, but anyways other then that we had a really good and interesting week.

On Tuesday I had a small futbul accident. We were walking from an investigators house when we ran into these small boys, maybe like 13 years old playing ball. They started yelling at us saying things like "broni de no play ball how!!" (Which means white man you don’t know how to play ball) so about that time my competitive nature took over and I was like..."ahh make I go show" (which means oh you don’t know I will show you) So I started to score these kids and they were a little shocked that this white boy had game. But then like 10 minutes into it, they were about to score and I wasn’t about to let that happen; however, I found out real fast that my legs aren’t what they used to be because in the process of playing tuff defense I ended up on my face.  Ha-ha! So there where like 15 Ghanaians and my companion who were laughing at me.  The good news in all this is they didn’t score!

After the wreck I had some blood and I was a little sore, but when I got back home I took a look in the mirror at the mess I made of my face and I thought to myself  “Not again! Sherri is going to kill me! First Mason's razor blade elbows and then the bottom of the Modersitzki’s pool and now this. Great!"  But after I cleaned myself up everything is okay. I got it all taken care of and now you can’t even tell it ever happened. I will try to put some pictures up next week of it.

That same day President Judd called to ask me if I would train a new missionary this up coming transfer. We are getting like 20 new missionaries in our mission, so on Friday we had to go to Accra for a training meeting.  I wanted to beat the traffic so I talked my companion into riding our bikes to the area office, so we road our bikes all the way to Accra. It wasn’t that far but it was way faster than a car.  It only took us about 50 minutes but I almost killed my companion.  I think he will be glad to get rid of me.

At the meeting President Judd introduced to us to the new training program for new missionaries.  He only gave us bits and pieces and then told us to go figure out the rest. The biggest change from when I was trained is that we now have to have 2 hours of companionship study every morning and they are going to give us a DVD player so we can watch the MTC’s training videos.   So the next 12 weeks will be interesting, but I should learn a lot from this experience. I am really excited about it, and maybe President Judd will split our area back into two areas again otherwise I hope I get a greenie that loves to work hard.

After the meeting we had to bike back fast, because we were having a baptism at 4 o’clock . We made it just in time and everything went though as planned.  Sister Philomena Achonpong (22) was baptized. Then on Saturday we had two more baptisms for Patience Boteng (23) and Harriot Mensah (17). The baptisms were really good. We just got a new ward mission leader this week, so we were training him on how to do his job. He was a little scared to conduct the baptism but everything work out and our two sisters were baptized. After the baptism there was a huge wedding at the church for one of the members, so we got to hang around and see how the weddings are here in Ghana. They are really different from back home. Weddings here are a BIG deal. Not that they aren’t back home but here it’s like a huge party. So anyway it was interesting to see how it weddings are here.

The most interesting part about the wedding was the grooms pastor conducted the wedding and at the end he called on the Mormon ministers (ha-ha, missionaries) to give the closing prayer, so Elder Nielsen went up to give the prayer and right when he started to pray there was a completely different feeling in the room. The whole time the pastor was on the mike he was just like shouting and saying amen, amen and halleluiah, but when Elder Nielson started to pray the correct way to Heavenly Father the spirit in the room completely changed.  I doubt that pastor will ask the Mormon Missionaries to pray again or he might be out of a job.

Well I only have 5 minutes left, so I got to say good-bye for now. I hope I can come back later and put up some pictures for you to see.   

Thanks so much for everything,

 Love you guys!  B bear