What Happens When Your Trainer Leaves You...

November 5, 2019

Hope y'all had a good Halloween!! No, they do not celebrate it over here... (but I just think that it's because most everyone already celebrates it every day here😉) They do have a day for all the saints who are dead here where the kids get out of school for and it is the day after Halloween so maybe that counts! This week I said goodbye to my father, Elder Bullock, who went to be the Zone leader in Kbakpota and I said hello to my new companion elder Mungongo! Like I said last week he is from the Congo Kinshasa and was baptized 4 years ago. He has had a really hard life but through the help of the members over there and a lot of hard work he has made it onto a mission. He is a really cool guy and I'm going to learn a lot from him. 

Moi and Elder Mungongo

Right now we are teaching a bunch of kids between 9-12 which is a ton of fun and they are getting ready for baptism! Haha, it has been crazy this week because as soon as the switch happened I had to be in charge of knowing all the houses of all the members, current amis, and somehow finding the houses of new amis. Our sector is LITERALLY a maze and it took me a whole transfer just to figure out how to get back to the apartment! The best part is that now I call to make most of the rendevous that we have! Most of the time I can understand what they are saying but the other most of the time I either have no idea what they are talking about or they mostly just speak ewe so I just end up saying "ok so Friday at 5:00?" And if they say "Oui" I write them down and if not I just keep on going with times until they  "Oui" 😂 It actually works pretty good-until we don't know where they live! It is literally impossible to find anyone's house unless they meet you somewhere but the problem is that I don't know the name of all these random little boutiques and things so we either tell them to meet us at the church, the soccer field, or we just ask people the general direction of the place until we get there! 

As for the French, it is coming along really good and for the most part (with the exception of phone calls) can follow stories, questions, and can respond! (nothing all too fancy of course) Now I'm starting to feel comfortable with missionary life and how things work here! 

Frere Koukoupbe

I want to tell one quick story of this member that we found! He came to church this Sunday and I had never seen him before. We took his contact and decided to visit him that night. His name is Frere Koukoupbe and He is a very old man and can't really walk. He has the cane but has some disease that makes his feet swell up huge making him unable to walk. After playing that game "hot and cold" with directions until we found his house we started talking to him! He started talking about his life and all the places he has gone, things he has seen. He remembers World War 2 and when the French still occupied Togo and Benin and how everyone would hide from the soldiers. And he even remembers all growing up when Ghana, Togo, and Benin were all one country and there weren't borders between them!! He said that that Sunday was the first Sunday he has been able to come to church in over a year. He was extremely sick, near death, and that was when this disease came upon him practically paralyzing him. He bore to us an extremely strong testimony on the power of prayer and says that because of prayer he has been healed enough to be able to hobble to church. He got ahold of a book of the teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley and has been reading from that and studying his scriptures for the past year and is a really great example to me of how when hard things come into our lives we have the choice to either turn to God or away from him. You are going to make it through it, that is a fact, you will always ride it out somehow, but in that decision as to which way we turn will determine whether we grow from it, or get destroyed from it. God lives. His gospel is on the earth again. So make it know. Love yall hope you have a great week!

Elder Briggs 

Alright, this is a good pic to show how mangevous work! That bowl of water gets passed around and everyone washes their hands and then everyone just goes for it. You grab a handful of the sticky patte and dip it in the sauce until it's all gone.

Answers to questions:

No the one(church distribution center) in Ghana is by the temple but there is one here too real small at a church house. And there is one in Benin. Ahh, new comp. Africans are definitely.. different? I've heard enough stories that I am thankful for the African that I got. He is a cool guy but is super loud spoken probably more than most preachers with everything he says and can talk forever just whatever opinions or anything comes to his mind. (good, bad, critical, nice, everything) He is more zealous than the rest of the Africans so that is really good, he complains a lot but if we have a rendevous scheduled he has no problem going which is good. He teaches really well and knows the scriptures insanely good. He comes from the congo and had a really hard life growing up. He is the only child. His mom died when he was 12 and so he lived with his aunt and then his dad died when he was 16. He got treated really bad at his aunts so he left and would do just whatever odd jobs he could find on the street to get food for that day. He finally got a job washing dishes at a restaurant and the owner would let him sleep there. He earned some money and started going to school again. This family would pass that lived right behind the restaurant and would always be super nice to him and invite him to dinner etc. Pretty soon the missionaries started passing to see this family and they introduced him to the missionaries. Then the mom who was really nice to him died and he lost his job, things got really rough but he ended up getting his job back and took the lessons, was baptized, got pretty much adopted by a member in the ward into 9 other kids, worked, graduated his school, and with the help of that family and the bishop he is on a mission. I'm going to learn lots of patience and unconditional love this transfer that is for sure but I can't ever really judge him because his life was NOTHING like mine. 

My old comp is the zone leader now. He was good. I learned a lot of good things. I thought we could have been working harder but now I realize he is one of the harder working missionaries and he was really patient with me, my french, pride, etc. He is a really good guy, love him a lot. haha, we email from a cybercafe in our sector. Everyone has pretty cheap phones here and the reception is down a lot of the time but they are not expensive. We have this little phone. I will send a pic of it and our cyber. And laundry I forgot to send that haha sorry! 

Where we sleep

Our laundry

Our phone