Mountains

Dear America,

Well from what I can tell, Tamale is doing fine without me. One of the investigators that we were really working with just before I left got baptized this Saturday. That was great to hear about. Elder Maddox was left in a threesome with the other missionaries in the apartment, but the real transfers happened this week and that all got sorted out. I haven't seen any lions, but I have seen a rhinoceros beetle. He was fat and built like a tank. My companion is Elder Nuamah, a Ghanaian who comes from Takoradi. Where Elder Neville used to be. Sorry I haven't taken any pictures of the new apartment yet. I'll try to remember this week. Right now I'm practicing how to be a good learner. Elder Nuamah is the first companion that I've had in a while who feels like a senior companion to me. I'm learning a lot from him. The food down here is much cheaper, especially fruits and vegetables, because things grow here. Nkawkaw is fairly populated, but the city isn't as nice as Tamale. The people in the north are more sensible, so their cities are slightly closer to developed. But here you still have a strong influence from the Ashanti tribe, so everything is pretty meh when it comes to community improvement. Haha if you want me to write in an African accent then I can try. But I'll have to spend some time thinking about how to do it first. It's actually weird because I'm having an increasingly difficult time distinguishing accents and skin colors. 

One thing that I love about Nkawkaw is the mountains. Before I left for Nashville, Dad told me that I would miss the mountains. He's right. The first day I came, I just kept looking at the mountains and smiling as we were proselyting. It's great. I didn't know if there were any actual mountains in Ghana before I came here--I suspected that they were just hills. But I'm happy to report that they are real mountains. Extremely small ones, granted, but they still fall under the definition of mountains.

I'm back in the land of Twi. When I bore my testimony in Sacrament meeting for the first time here, I told them that the little Twi I had before had fallen out of my pocket and gotten lost in Tamale. They all laughed because it's true. Almost nobody uses Twi in Tamale, so I got used to speaking English and my Twi dwindled. But now that I'm back, I'm kicking things into gear and learning Twi with vigor. When I arrived in Ghana, it was a little bit overwhelming and then I moved to Techiman and Tamale where people don't use it as much. But now I think the conditions are right for me to learn more quickly.

I didn't even remember that you had videos of my memory lapse. Haha makes sense.

Have a cool week!

Love, Elder Nelson