Mail from US

Dear America,
I got to go on exchanges again this week. Elder Antwi is the district leader, so I get to go on exchanges a lot. It's fun to see how different missionaries go about the work. This week I was with Elder Lawson from California. Being with another American is always interesting. I think that two white men are more intimidating than one. Little kids aren't nearly as quick to call us out for being freaks. Haha it's kind of refreshing. 

This week was also the first baptism of my mission. Raymond Sekyere is a young man that was taught almost entirely by the missionaries before us. But I got to baptize him and it was nice. I know I should be sending pictures of stuff like this, so you'll get a whole bunch of pictures when I'm able to go in to Kejetia (hopefully next week).

I got some mail this week from friends and family in the US. It was really fun to read their letters and be reminded of home.

 I didn't hear about Martin's cove until now! But that's neat. (Keith and I got called as Ma and Pa for our Stake Trek in Aug)

I'll answer some more questions now: 

Plantain recipes: Either you fry them (super unhealthy) or you make fufu with cassava. I recommend fufu in the extreme. (I bought plantains and asked for a recipe)  

Vanilla beans? No. No vanilla at all. I get a lot of red pepper, ginger, garlic, groundnuts, red pepper, shrimp bullion stuff, red pepper, and tomato paste. Mostly food is appreciated for its quantity, which I'm totally fine with. (Wondering whether to send him vanilla beans or vanilla extract that he asked for) 

What impact has keeping a journal had on your life? To be honest, as soon as I came on a mission I started seriously keeping a journal every day. I'm doing my best to write about things that really matter and are interesting, but right now it's basically out of blind faith. I'm sure blessings will come eventually. But I'm probably not the best person to ask about the blessings of keeping a journal. Sorry. Although I have to say that it's been a nice stress relief at the end of each day. It's kind of like I have someone to talk to every night.(Sadie is giving a lesson about journals at FHE tonight. She e-mailed Isaac about his journal keeping. See article in New Era "Holy Smoke") 

Best wishes, Elder Nelson 

 I'm going to give credit to Elder Neville and make a correction to my past letters. "Hammer time" is really "Hammatan", but it all sounds the same when the Africans say it. Either way, it sucks. 

Sorry again about the pictures. They're coming. Eventually.

I Really Like Fufu

Dear America

I was happy to hear from Porter in his email last week. I hope that wasn't a forced assignment;)

This week has been great. The new year is more celebrated than Christmas. People stay up all night partying and going to church revivals. They set off fireworks and play music really loud. Even louder than they usually do. One great benefit of the holiday season is that the power was on every night for a week in between Christmas and New Year. That was super nice.

In other news, I really like fufu. Like more than my Ghanaian companion. It's becoming an addiction or something, haha.

I'm truly grateful that I've been raised to have a testimony of the Book of Mormon. It carries a powerful witness that Jesus is the Christ, Joseph Smith is a true prophet, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only true church on the earth today. I love the plain, straightforward manner that it teaches us how to be happy. The Bible can be trippy sometimes, but I can always count on the Book of Mormon to strengthen my testimony. Everyone here believes in the Bible, but very few (including members) have taken the time and the effort to gain a similar testimony of the Book of Mormon. Sometimes I feel like we really have to work to pull pure truth out of the Bible verses. But with the Book of Mormon, truth is sitting there in the open. No weird explanations needed. Elder Antwi loves to use the Bible; I love to use the Book of Mormon. Both of us know that the other guy is right. I'll be pretty good with a Bible when I get home.

I'll have time to answer those questions today, so that's good:

Have you seen any wildlife yet? Yes. Lots and lots of lizards, lots of goats, and very, very few mosquitoes. But the bites are always there. 

Do you always email from an internet cafe? Yes. I think the Bishop has a computer, but I haven't ever seen one in somebody's home. And the missionaries most certainly don't have one. So we always go to the cafe and pay for time on the computers. There's on cafe in Kejetia that all the missionaries call Kofi's place. It's the hub of all missionary activities on Mondays. Missionaries from all over the mission converge there, usually about twenty or thirty on any given Monday. So you can see pretty much anyone except for those in Tamale there occasionally. 

What else do you do on p-day? We soak our laundry, go to pull our sub from an ATM in town, email, finish our laundry, teach a few lessons, and buy/prepare our food for the week in the evening. 

How is laundry? Actually pretty relaxing. I listen to hymns or talks and just sit there and wash by hand. Depending on the week, it takes half an hour, an hour, or more after I've soaked the clothes. My hands haven't cracked or started bleeding from it yet, but I've heard that it sucks. 

How many missionaries are in your zone? How large of an area do you cover? The zone is probably 24 missionaries or so. Our district is really big (5 companionships) and Elder Antwi is the district leader. I don't think our areas are too huge in comparison to other missions, mainly because we only walk. But they're still big enough to keep us plenty busy, considering the way the population is packed in here. Probably five miles from end to end. It takes us about an hour to drive to Bantama, the zone headquarters.

Here's something to be grateful for: the power just went out, but my email was saved automatically. So be glad that happened, or it would only be like a sentence long for this week.

Happy New Year!

Elder Nelson

I was going to take a risk and send pictures this week, but it didn't work. So pretty much you'll get pictures on the occasion that I make it all the way in to Kofi's place. Sorry. But at least I have electricity right now.

Christmas in Ghana

"Ye who do God's work receive God's pay"

Dear America,

It's getting close to Christmas. We've gotten free meals several times this week, including the ward party on Friday and two (huge) meals on Sunday evening. This week's fun foods include goat intestine at the bishop's house. It's good meat, with a nice flavor. I enjoyed it. But it looks like and has the surface texture of a towel. In fact, the Fante call it "towel". It's all bumpy like that. I also got to have part of a goat heart at the ward party, which wasn't too bad. I'm getting used to eating anything without question. Probably the hardest one this week was the fish head that was looking back at me while I ate it. And it was big. And it was good, if not creepy. I can honestly say that it tasted better than the rest of the fish. There are less little bones to chew.

Starting on that great note, I'm enjoying myself. Being a missionary isn't easy, but it is divine. I've really seen the Lord helping us this week. It reminds me that "Ye who do God's work receive God's pay". I've been using strength all week that is not my own. It's fun to work hard, even though the blessings I've been seeing aren't really direct results of my work. I try really hard to do my best, and something amazing happens that I have no responsibility for. So it makes my work feel useless but my faith all the more important.

Investigators here suck at progressing. The ones that are moving towards baptism come to us already prepared. Let me tell you a little about Kwasi, a man that we met with just this morning. He had avoided and avoided the missionaries while he lived in Accra. All of his family is SDA (I strongly strongly dislike this church). He kind of became less active SDA when he moved to Kumasi and his wife let the missionaries into the house. He came home to them teaching her. He was interested, and became a powerful investigator. He's smart and asks very good questions. Like questions that a long-time church member still wonders about. This morning, we explained about the Abrahamic covenant, patriarchal blessings, and that LDS doesn't stand for the Church of America. Which is something that is hard, because it pretty much is. Haha I'm joking. But he wants to learn everything about the church that he can before he joins because when his family finds out, they're going to attack him for it. And he wants to be able to defend himself and teach them. They already want their oldest son to serve a mission. He is about 16 years old.

A lot of investigators showed up at the ward party (where I ate the goat heart). Everyone loves a good party at the end of the year here, even though a lot of people don't actually celebrate Christmas (refer to where I said I dislike the SDA church). So we were able to get the ball of member friendshipping rolling. Happy day. I really enjoy working with young men, because I feel like I understand them a little better.

Thanks to everyone for their emails! You're all doing great, including Pace for giving the talk on Sunday.

Best Christmas wishes,

Elder Nelson

Read. Your. Scriptures. Every. Day.

I'm going to apologize right from the beginning because I won't be able to write a lot this week. I've spent a lot of my time sending Christmas letters home. So be looking for that in a couple of weeks.

What can I write about really quickly? I had the opportunity to give a talk on Sunday. They assigned us to speak on Christmas in relation to missionary week, so Elder Antwi talked about John the Baptist as a missionary and I talked about the wise men and how we can help others come unto Christ. It went decently. It's interesting to go to church because not everyone here is as sound in the gospel as I have been raised. There are some doctrinal misunderstandings that would never happen in the US. If anything, it's just helped me have a more solid testimony of basic doctrines.

Read. Your. Scriptures. Every. Day. Book of Mormon, specifically. It's painfully easy to tell who does and who doesn't. If you do, you're a solid, humble person who is not easily swayed by every wind of doctrine. If you don't, you often don't even know when you're a really stupid, arrogant fool. So do it. Start it when you're a teenager. I want personal letters from every member of my family telling me that they've had personal scripture study every day this week.

So that's all I can write for now, but thanks for the letters. This week has been great for me. Elder Antwi made me the temporary senior companion this week. So that was interesting. And we didn't get a lot done because we had a lot of meetings in Bantama and Offinso. But he's really preparing me for life beyond training. I'm really grateful for him.

Love,

Elder Nelson

P.S. One of the pictures is of the sketchiest bridges I've ever walked across. Ever.

Hammer Time

Dear America,

They call it "hammer time" here in Ghana. The (relatively) cold, (relatively) dry season. For me that pretty much means that it's slightly less hot and wet. A great dusty haze has come across the valley. Elder Antwi refers to it as African snow. The weather will be this way for three months.

(From Wikipedia The Harmattan is a cold-dry^[1] and dusty trade wind, blowing over the West African subcontinent. This northeasterly wind blows from the Sahara Desert into the Gulf of Guinea between the end of November and the middle of March (winter).^[2] The name comes from or is related to an Akan cognate.^[3]

The Harmattan blows during the dry season, which occurs during the lowest-sun months, when the subtropical ridge of high pressure stays over the central Sahara Desert and when the low-pressure Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) stays over the Gulf of Guinea. On its passage over the Sahara, it picks up fine dust and sand particles (between 0.5 and 10 microns).)

This transfer, Elder Antwi and I will take charge of the entire Kronum area because we simply do not have enough missionaries to keep two sets here. So we'll have plenty of work to do. This week I've really made a special effort in discerning the needs of our investigators/ ward members. The Holy Ghost is a special resource available to missionaries to discern others' thoughts when needed, like Ammon did. I saw it really guide us this week. The sword of the spirit is on of the most useful tools any of us has.

I finally found baking powder here, so I made cobbler. It was pineapple banana cobbler because that is what we had. The pineapple made it super sweet. Baking powder is hard to come by, so I bought a big tin to use for my whole mission. I don't know how much I'll actually use it, but I didn't want to have to search for it again.

There's always music on the streets here. I think it's pretty neat. And you can almost always see a child dancing to the music. They love to show off their skills. You'll find big groups of them dancing on the street. But it's really funny how they don't care and they just want to show the whole world.

Missionary work here is a lot different than it is in the States. Sometimes I just watch "The District" (missionary training videos) and laugh and laugh because it's so inaccurate. As I think about it, though, missionary work represents in a lot of ways our mortal life here. Alma 34:32 and D&C 4:2 are directly related. With regards to the rest of our life, missionary service is very short. It is the time given to us to prepare ourselves and to perform our labors. Jeffery R. Holland said that there is not one aspect of his life that has not been affected by his service as a full-time missionary. Just like mortality, it is a time of great testing and great reward. Our dedication on a mission cannot be replaced later in life without tremendous effort.

This week I learned not to take doxy on fast Sunday. Seriously. The only thing worse than the malaria medication is malaria.

Sorry my emails haven't been super super super long. I'm using all the time I can. I'm glad to hear about each member of the family every once in a while. Your letters have been great.

Love,

Elder Nelson

Caution on Mailing Packages

Dear Parents of Missionaries;

Sending boxes or envelopes (other than the one included in this email) results in Customs charges that are prohibitively expensive. Your missionary may not be able to afford the customs fees, which can range as high as two weeks of a missionaries subsistence.

Many times these packages sit for weeks while the missionary saves up a few extra Cedi’s to pay for them. In addition customs opens every single package that they quarantine, and any wrapped packages inside as well.

The preferred packages are flat rate padded white USPS plastic padded envelopes that you can stuff as full as you can for a flat rate and the bonus…. they are not stopped and opened in customs and charged horrendous fees, (and your missionary gets ALL the goodies immediately).

Click on the following link, or copy this link to your browser address bar and you will see exactly how to get these envelopes. Please click on the attached picture as well.

https://store.usps.com/store/browse/uspsProductDetailMultiSkuDropDown.jsp?productId=P_EP14PE&categoryId=mailing-envelopes

Thank you for sending us your Missionaries!

Elder Halladay

Financial Secretary

Ghana Kumasi Mission

1802429-FIN@ldschurch.org

michael@mhalladay.com

0243-500-262