Two Months Anniversary

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.