Dear America,
This week was transfer! The last time I'll have to deal with it during my mission. It was crazy as usual. On Monday we were preparing everything for missionaries to depart on Tuesday morning. We spent hours trying to help the sister missionaries get their luggage below the weight limit. After we took them to the airport, there was a district leader training and we took their companions out proselyting with us. We split up and found several former investigators who we never knew about before. Then in the early afternoon we went to pick up the new missionaries from the airport. We always take the new missionaries to street contact for about an hour on the way to the mission home. It's a lot of fun to see how enthusiastic and innocent they are.
Wednesday was up and down, up and down. On transfer day, President and the assistants are always in meetings so the office elders are in charge of making sure that all of the missionaries get where they need to go. At one point in the day, we ended up dividing our companionship with some other missionaries so that we could take two cars instead of one. The missionaries from Tamale arrived at the bus station during the most hectic part of the day, but we were able to pick them up in the middle of everything. The best part of transfer day is watching everything click into place because the Lord really helps things work out. We always start out with a plan, but then it gets messed up over and over again. But I'm learning to be more patient with it because those mess-ups always come together to provide a way for us to deal with everything.
On Saturday we woke up to the sound of a wedding engagement party right next door. Our landlord's daughter was the one getting engaged and they were making big preparations that morning. These celebrations are a huge deal in Ghanaian culture and usually involve a lot of food and dancing. We noticed that they were preparing fufu in the morning and we offered to help pound it. We did not know what we were getting into. They made the most fufu I have seen in my life with the biggest mortar and pistil. We took turns pounding but after my first turn I was finished paa. Then there were fifteen more cycles like that. I've never been so sore from pounding fufu before, but it really helped us be good neighbors. There was one guy there who pounds fufu in a chop bar for a living, so he made us all look like wimps. My muscles are still sore from that.
After the fufu ordeal, we took some chicken noodle soup with rice over to Jessica and her family. They are very poor, but whenever we come in the evening time they feed us out of their own food. It always makes me feel terrible to accept food from people who have nothing else, so we told her that the next time we came we would be the ones giving food. I don't know if they liked the chicken noodle soup--Ghanaians are very picky eaters--but it made us feel a little better.
Conference was awesome. I got to watch almost all of the sessions live at the mission home, with the exception of the women's session and the last half of each afternoon session because they were broadcasting in the night. I loved the Saturday morning session. Maybe it was fantastic because it was the first session I saw, but I loved the speakers in it. The gospel just makes sense. I thought that the themes of service, continuous gospel living, and hope were really well pronounced by many speakers throughout the sessions.
Love,
Elder Nelson
Also, Elder Motloung taped my head while I was talking on the phone.
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