Grandma's Eggs

My grandchildren have been dying Easter eggs. I thought they would like to see my eggs. They are always brown. Grandpa and I buy eggs at the grocery store or at the fruit and vegetable stand. They are never refrigerated. We bring them home and wash them in a solution of water with a small bit of Clorox and let them sit in that water for 2 minutes. We then take them out and dry them and put them in a container in the fridge. When I use them in cakes or cookies I cannot lick the bowl - anything with raw eggs can make us very sick - so I reluctantly (because I love uncooked batter!) keep my fingers out! Once the eggs or egg batter is cooked it is all right to eat. The heat kills any bacteria.

Today is Easter. The people in Ghana do not celebrate with Easter eggs and baskets like we do, though I did see some candy eggs in one of the grocery stores - Western civilization is trying to take hold here in Accra.(prounouced a-Kraw with a short a at the beginning and emphasis on Kraw)) Most people cannot afford to celebrate lavishly with their children. Each day is a day of survival for many - how do I find food, will I earn enough to feed my family. Many others are more well to do and could do these things if they choose.

Easter is about the Savior here. Our Sacrament Meeting centered on talks about Jesus: His resurrection and His atonement for mankind. It was in a way refreshing...and yet I love watching the smiles and the laughter of my grandchildren hunting for eggs in the grass and the bushes. That mind picture will have to wait 2 years for reality!

The Chicken Coup School, a welfare project

Sometimes we wonder where our dollars go that are contributed to the humanitarian fund listed on church donation slips. Many good and great things are done with that money to bless peoples lives. The beautiful thing is that all the money goes to help people. The personnel who administer the funds are all missionaries doing volunteer service. Our friends the Knudsens and the Binghams are some of those missionaries.

In West Africa one of the projects was to help a school in the small village of Kusi. The village of Kusi has no running water or electricity and the dwellings are very basic. ( however not the mud huts seen in many villages during the 3 hour drive from Accra to Kusi)

The only place available for a school in the village of Kusi was a large chicken coup. David Awuku wanted to teach school and a local farmer wanted his children to attend school, so the farmer donated his chicken coup for a school in 2005. The outside of the building is cement and there is a cement floor inside the coup and windows were added to the outside walls and the inside is divided into 6 areas which are used now as classrooms. The rooms are divided by, what else, chicken wire. Therefore, the lessons in one classroom can easily be heard in the others. One section at the back of the school is used as a kitchen with a coal fire pit and a large black pot for cooking lunch for the children. ( you can see the bonku which is like a heavy dumpling made of corn flour and plantains.)

There are 275 students and 14 of them are orphans which live on the premises. You can imagine the noise with all those open classrooms. The teachers each held a switch in their hand and we saw one student get his hand hit with the switch. ( is that why the students are well behaved?) The teachers are inovative. Bottle caps are used to teach math. No calculators here!

LDS Charitites donated the school desks and recently a mill for the community. The community members can bring their corn and beans to the mill and for 20 cents have it milled into flour. The flour is used to make food for their family and food to sell. The earnings from their sales comprise their income. The miller gets one dollar a day and any extra money goes to the school teachers who before were working only for room and board.

The school children noticed that they could see their reflections in the car door of the LDS Charities missionary couple, so they entertained themselves making faces and posing in front of the car. (Girls and Boys look alike - all with shaved heads. The girls can be identified by their pierced ears). Then they discovered if they wiped off the red dirt ( caused by the dirt roads) they could see themselves even better. Many handprints were left on the car along with some names written in the lingering dirt.

Community members expressed their appreciation for the mill and the ability to support their families with the flour milled for them.

Sunday's Adventure

Sunday we went to church with Elder and Sr. Bingham. This is in a ward where they are doing some experimentation under the authority of the Brethern.

Sunday School was divided into two classes, as well as the investigator class and the Literacy class (learning English). The ward has been divided into "pods" (I think they have another name for it) - these are neighborhood groups. At home it would be like organizing groups by the street you live on. These groups have a leader - a ward mission leader who works with the people in his area. He visits them regularly, gets to know them well, helps them with any needs, invites them to FHE, encourages them to do their family history work, and become worthy to attend the temple. So in Sunday School, one group of "pods" was sent to the RS Room and the other stayed in the chapel. We elected to watch this process and stayed in the chapel. The class consisted of families and was taught by the Bishop. I'm assuming the other class was taught by his counselor (his only counselor).

The Bishop was a great teacher. In school the ghanian people I was told after church are taught to learn by rote - so when he or someone else said something important the Bishop had everyone repeat it. I have seen this on TV with some ministers (so I kind of chuckled inside - not knowing at the time that this was how the people learn over here). Our lesson was on 2nd Nephi 26-29. The Bishop told of getting a wedding invitation and how honored he was. He then compared it to the Book of Mormon which he said was an invitation given to us to Come Unto Christ. We used 2nd Nephi 26:24-33. The twenty-fifth verse reads: "Behold doth he cry unto any saying Depart from me? Behold I say unto you Nay; but he saith Come unto me all ye ends of the earth, buy milk and honey, without money and without price.....He hath given it free for all men; and he hath commanded his people that they should persuade all men to repentance. ...all men are privileged the one like unto the other, and none are forbidden." They felt they were literally a fulfillment of this scripture. He then talked about laboring for Zion and not for money. He pulled out some tithing envelopes from his pocket that he had received that day. He said, "Do I labor for these?" "No these are not for me." "These are for Zion...I labor for Zion not for money." The Bishop in our church (in fact no one who labors in the ward) receives any wages or compensation --only spiritual blessings. All have regular jobs that support their family.

Some of the youth participated, but most of the children just listened - I did notice many of the children marking their scriptures as points were made. I asked several of the youth afterward if they liked having SS class with their family or if they wished they could have it with their friends who were their same age. Everyone of them said "We like it with our family best."
I think its interesting because they get to hear the opinions of their parents and others in the class. How often do we talk in depth about our feelings of the gospel to our children. I remember when I was old enough to attend gospel doctrine with my parents and I discovered my father was a great scriptorian and loved to talk about the scriptures. He never talked to us at home about them. Hopefully we have scripture reading with our children daily and talk a little about how we feel.

After SS I attended Young Women. All of girls 12-17 are combined for class. They are beautiful girls. They radiate the Spirit of the Lord. I told my grandsons the other night on Skype that it is hard to tell the girls from the boys when they are little as their hair is very short and they look alike except the girls have pierced earings. Usually when the girls graduate from school they grow their hair out. You can see in the picture that some of them have elected to grow it out before graduation. The second picture is of two in class (I think there was another girl) who were in Ghanian dress.

In class we talked about the fact that they were choice Children of God and we spoke of how we need to live for Christ by obeying His commandemnts. They were asked what is hard for them. Not unlike the youth in US, what was hard was dressing modestly when invited to parties and keeping the word of wisdom when all their friends and some of their relatives drink and do not understand why they do not. It again re-affirmed to me that we are not that different.

The Accra Ghanna Batik Factory

One of the charms of Ghanian women is their brightly colored clothing - usually made of batik prints. I love watching the women in their dress. They are over-whelmingly modest - long skirts and tops that have sleeves. The women are very beautifully dressed.

I recently went to the Batik Factory here in Ghana. The process is done the same as it has been done for hundreds of years. White fabric is marked with wax and then died with dies made of plants (but I think today they use commercial dyes). Then more wax is applied and then more dyes. The results are beautifully color fabrics that are made into dresses, skirts with matching tops, and housecoats or mumu type dresses to wear in the house - I don't know what they call them here. Skirts for little girls here are called skits (they cannot or do not pronounce the "r's". The batik material is also used to make men's shirts. I love the Ghanian clothes, yet I watch the youth and they are more and more adopting the "American or Western" style of clothing. It's sad because they are loosing their Ghanian identity by doing this.

The first picture you see here is of the men laying the finished fabric on the rocks to dry. Next you will see a plain piece of white fabric that is stamped with it's first wax impression. The next picture is a lady preparing the dyes. Another is of a man stirring the fabric in the dye and then stirring the fabric in very hot water to melt the wax. Next a man who is stamping the next wax pattern on a piece of material that has already been dyed once.

It is amazing to see this done and realize the process and the materials have not changed for a very long time. I love looking at fabric and have bought several pieces, and hopefully soon I will become an adopted Ghanian!

The Cake

The first day we moved into our apartment, Steve moved everything up and I unpacked. He went back to work while I continued to put things in their place. He came home for a small break and said, "I was just hoping it would be like the movies, and I would come home, everything would be in it's place and a hot meal would be on the table waiting for me when I got home."

Well how could I not try to please my "prince charming". I had no way or time to prepare a hot meal, but I thought, I will at least bake a cake. After he left, I mixed up a cake mix and went to set the oven temperature. To my amazement and puzzelment the degrees on the dial started at 70 and went to 240. Eek! What do I do? I turned the dial all the way up, put the cake in the oven, ran down to the laundry room to put a load in the washer, came back to smell something burning in our apartment. I quickly opened the oven door to find a black topped flat cake and smoke pouring out of the oven. It was then that I finally put on my thinking cap and realized the degrees were probably celcius. Well I knew that the speed limits are 120km/hr - meaning about 60 miles an hour so I decided celcius must be about the same ratio. I stuck a knife in the cake to find the batter under the char broiled top was still wet, so I closed the oven door and turned the temperature down to just over 150 degrees. It baked for 40 minutes, rose up and was just fine for eating except for the top. That night we had lemon cake, ice cream on top with berries! YUM!! Lessons were learned! It was another adventure in Africa.

Our "day to day" Life

Our missionary life is pretty routine. I always dreamed of being a proselyting missionary like my children but instead Steve's call was to work as executive secretary to the West Africa Area Presidency and I was also to work in the office. So for five days a week we work an office job from 7:30 till 6 most days. Steve has been working at documenting processes, processing requests for changes in church leadership, preparing agendas for and minutes of Area Presidency meeting, reading patriarchal blessings before sending them on to Salt Lake, etc I have been working on missionary applications (from the West Africa Area), and several huge statistical reports. We are both to learn one another's jobs so we can complete them quickly and focus on future assignments We have both been answering enquiries from Church leaders and asking for information that the Presidency needs. I am learning fast the workings of Excel and as I work hour after hour with numbers I think of my son Matt who is gifted at this, but once told me "I don't want to sit at a desk all day working with numbers." I could easily identify with that, Matt! But, it is interesting work because we become aware of what is happening all over West Africa in the church.

It isn't teaching the gospel to the people. Our only "come close" experience with that is on Sundays when we attend Ward or Branch meetings. I LOVE Sundays. Each one is a new adventure. We have been asked to visit all the wards and branches around us, then when we have done that go out a little further and visit in that radius, then continue going out further and further. Sundays will be wonderful adventures each week. When we are out and about shopping or dining we bump into people who ask us questions and that is always fun. What can I say....I have always loved teaching. Most of the other Senior Missionary couples are assigned to help a specific Church unit. President Snow, thus far, just wants us to observe what is going on, what's working and what can be improved. We think assisting in improving many things may be part of the reason we're here.

We thought you might enjoy seeing our apartment, so you you could envision our life here. We live in an apartment building called the ancillary building. We are on the 3rd floor - actually called the 2nd floor because in Ghana the numbering of building floors starts with "0". When I first heard "Africa" I thought we would be living in a pretty humble dwelling place, but to our surprise and delight our apartment is not unlike what we would find home in America. We have a one bedroom apartment with a very small kitchen and a living room. You can see by the pictures that it is pretty nice. On the same floor as our apartment is a laundry room - free of charge - with 5 washers and 6 dryers. I love that because in a little over an hour I can wash and dry all our clothes for the week!

We buy most of our food from 3 grocery stores: Koala, MaxMart, and Shoprite. When you see something on the shelf that you like: BUY IT! The next time you come it may not be there. Groceries are expensive - for most things almost twice what you would pay at home. Gasoline for the car is about $1.13/liter. So not much different than home. We buy a lot of our fruits and vegtables from stands. Ruths is a popular one over here. The stands are much cheaper than the grocery store and I think fresher. When we bring fruits or vegtables home we are to soak them in a clorox/water solution for 2 minutes to kill any bacteria on the outside. I use Sunrider's Fruit and Vegtable Rinse and love how well it cleans the dirt off everything, far better than clorox. I bumped into this product a few weeks before coming here...I count it as another "tender mercy".
When we wash the dishes we rinse them in Clorox and water and let them stand in it for 2 minutes. When we brush our teeth we have to use bottled water to rinse our toothbrush and rinse our mouths. We have a cooler in our apartment and water is delivered to us once a week.

The power here is intermittent. You can expect it to go off for a few seconds or minutes several times a day. The complex has generators that click on when that happens so that we have some light if it goes out. Water is good between 6am and 8:30am but sometimes seems to be turned off or at least the hot water after those hours - not everyday but occaisionally, and also at night we sometimes loose water.

The other Senior Missionary Couples are great. We are making what we believe will be life long friends. More than half the couples live just a few doors or a few floors from us. Invitations to dinner are frequent--we'll host our first group this evening. We get together to go shopping, walk with them, go to the temple, meet together for family home evening and just to visit. For missionaries living in the bush this gift would not be available. We had a new couple arrive this week, so we are not the greenest couple any more. It has been fun showing them the "ropes" when we barely know them ourselves.

Another Witness of the Restoration

Today we went to Contements Ward - it is located in the temple compound. (so just steps away) It was fast and testimony meeting. There were probably about 200 people there. It began a little slow. The member of the bishopbric conducting had about 15 minutes worth of announcements. But when the testimonies began I was so impressed with them. They were spirit filled and deep in faith and knowledge through the Holy Ghost that Joseph restored the Church to the Earth. They were not speaking because someone told them to, or forced them to. They spoke with the spirit. It was one of the best testimony meetings I have every attended. Our Sunday School lesson was on Isaiah and 2nd Nephi 11-25. (also Isaiah). It was so well taught and the African saints having never been to Salt Lake City had a different interpretation of 2 Nephi 12:3 or isaiah 2:3: that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted about the hills; ....And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths.... We would normally think of Salt Lake and how the people from all over the world come to Salt Lake to be taught by prophets of God. They not knowing of the geography in Salt Lake talked mostly about temples. How Moses went to the top of the mountain - his temple. How Joseph was impressed that he had to go out of his home into the grove to step onto a private place and learn of God. They talked about the temple here in Accra and how we must exercise more faith to step out of our home and climb to the top of the mountain ( the "temple"). That it isn't that easy to get there, we have to climb with our faith and obedience to be able to enter the temple (mountain) where we are taught by the Lord (and he will teach us of his ways) through personal revelation for our own lives. It was really a deep and beautiful analogy...something I had not previously thought about. To see that these people have experiences in the temple similar to my experiences. That they find peace, and strength, and direction as they attend the temple. To me the whole day was just an added testimony that the gospel of Christ is upon the earth, as the Holy Ghost inspires and teaches each of us wherever in the world we are. The Gift of the Holy Ghost has been restored, and I was witness of this today. What a blessing to be here.