The Trapani's in Liberia

  This was our last Sunday.  This is the Harbel branch president Darius and first counselor Toe.  We like this branch because it has a generator and fans in the chapel. This is the Kerkula family.  Anna, Nancy, Naomi, David, and Johnson. Elder North is on the end. They have been members of the church for over a year. I have been teaching them the temple preparation lessons. Their understanding of the temple and its purposes is quite good. On the right is Nate Tollefson.  He is from Montana. He has a son on a mission in Liberia. He is a very successful developer and property owner. After getting reports from his son about how much poverty there is here he has decided to finance humanitarian projects here. He has an existing humanitarian organization. He along with other contributors plan on donating more than Cheryl and I have spent of the churches money here in Liberia. Him and his partner Paul are here in Liberia to interview the contractors and NGO's that I have recommended and a

This was our last Sunday in Dolo's Town Branch.  This is the branch president's wife Sister Mulbah.  She is the primary president. Each week Cheryl goes to primary and plays the music using her smart phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It really helps.   This is Branch President Mulbah.  He does a good job. He served a mission and knows church administration quite well. He is a kind and loving man who does a good job ministering to his branch. He runs a transport service to and from the airport. He has a Toyota Corolla station wagon with air conditioning. The Dolos town branch is in a rented building that is not well suited for a church. They thought they had another piece of ground to build a building on but that fell through. In the short term they have decided to rent for a while longer and so the landlord is doing a few improvements on the building. You can see the new ceiling tiles that have gone in.  This hopefully was our last week grocery shopping. Groceries have been unexpe

  On Monday afternoon we traveled with 16 Members from the Cotton Tree branch to the temple in Accra Ghana. All of them, except for the branch president we're attending the temple for the first time. They were there to receive their temple endowments and for the different families to be sealed together for eternity. We along with another missionary couple, the Blanchards, were assigned to be their escorts and guides.  All except for one of the Africans had never before been out of their country or on an airplane. We had to show them how to do basic things such as entering and exiting an escalator. With the one exception none of them had ever been inside of an airport. When we got to the apartment accommodations by the temple we had to show them how to operate their air conditioners and how do control the hot and cold water for their showers. They were all intelligent people it's just that they have not been exposed to much of the modern world. Fortunately they were at the templ

We had dinner at one of the senior missionaries apartments for mothers day. We have two new senior missionary couples. The second and third women from the left are Sister Allred and Sister North. The 4th sister from the left is Sister Montoya. She is Hawaiian. She bought a flower for everyone's hair. Our supervisor Ezra, on the right, was in town. He will be taking over for us because there are no senior missionaries immediately coming to fill our position. We attended meetings with the Ministry of Health, Education and Water and Sanitation. With the new president and his party in power all of the leadership of the government ministries have changed. They're always interested in meeting with us because we fix a lot of things for them. This is the Ministry of Education. All of the meetings went very well. Ezra wanted to see some of our projects. We took him to Tubmanburg Hospital and then we took him to the multi village water project that we just finished. Here is one of the we

 The contractor we are using to install the solar system at the Redemption hospital is Lebanese. during a meeting at their office they shared lunch with us. It was some pretty unknown food. I'm eating some sort of meat. I made sure not to ask what it was. It actually tasted pretty good. The stuff in the closest bowl was called "fool". Some sort of beam dip. These are the North's. They are a new couple that will be working in the mission office and taking over for us visiting the Harbel and Dolo's Town branches on Sunday. I felt sorry for them. At Harbel this week, for the first time, the generator went out so there were no fans. They sweat quite a bit. They were good sports though and seem to be in good spirits afterwards. They are from Alpine Utah. This is their second mission. Their 1st mission was at BYU Hawaii. They've noticed that Liberia is a little bit different than Hawaii. They are looking forward to us leaving because they get our pickup truck.  Ther

This was a handover ceremony for the project we had at Tubmanburg Hospital. This is a rural hospital that is run by the government and provides medical care free of charge. It was in pretty poor condition. We replaced a lot of the roof, a lot of the floor tiles, doors and windows. We purchased a lot of beds cribs mattresses and all sorts of medical equipment. A lot of the contractors and local church leaders are in this picture. They always have some sort of ribbon cutting as part of the handover ceremony. Cheryl always seems to be the official ribbon cutter. Here is some of the medical equipment that we donated. We always try and put a sticker with the name of the church on the equipment so when the church comes back in a few years and audits the effectiveness of the program they can identify which pieces of equipment were donated by the church. We had another finishing ceremony this week. All of the women on the right of the picture are single mothers with a baby. This program teache