We have been out for over 2 months. I suppose the time has gone by fast, but in
some ways it seems like we have been here forever. I would like to talk about a few of the
things we have learned in our first 2 months.
Some of the things many of you will laugh at because they are simple
things that many of you already know. We
learned that it isn’t such a big deal to be at an international airport, board
a plane and fly across the ocean. We
flew to Hawaii several years ago, but it seemed simpler back then. We had to learn all about missions, like what
district meetings, zone meetings, zone councils, zone activities, and zone
conferences are all about. We learned
about the driving in Ghana, the food, shopping for food. Shopping for food is just like a big farmers
market. It is every day in Kumasi, only
once or twice a week in other areas. We
have learned where to get what we need.
We learned that the people are very happy, friendly and considerate and
we love them for that. We are still
trying to learn to understand their accent better. Elder Reiss is better at it than I am and
that surprised me because I was sure I would do better. We learned to buy our power with a power
card. We know what “lights out”
means. We kept saying the power is off,
but it is simply “lights out”. We had to
get used to the hawkers at the stop lights.
Now it doesn’t bother us.
Sometimes we even buy a thing or two from them. We learned what President Holmes expects of
us, so we are continually working on that.
We have got the apartment stuff worked out and we are working on the
leadership training. We have found the
clinics and hospitals and are working with sick missionaries on a regular
basis. I have got the management of the
internet referrals figured out and we almost have the recent convert tracker up
and running. A lot of our assignments,
even the apartment visit schedules are on spread sheets or tables, so we
learned the difference between a spread sheet and table. We are getting pretty good at setting them
up, but still have a really long way to go on that. Both of us have learned to text. The missionaries use texting a lot, so we had
to learn. We loved meeting the Area
President, Elder Dickson. The zone
conference was inspiring and a lot of fun. Even though we have had a lot to learn, we are
very grateful for the opportunity to serve here.
