First time in the Cotton Tree and Barclay Farm Branches

We attended church today in the Cotton Tree and then the Margibi branches. They both meet in the same building.

Here is a link of a sample of what librarian English sounds like Liberian English .  Yes, she is speaking english. She was answering a question in Sunday school class. At best we can understand enough words out of each sentence to piece together it's meaning. We are told that we will get used to it.


They don't get very many visitors here that look like us. The little children are always real curious.


Here is the chapel. He got a little toasty inside. No fans or air conditioning. The 9:00 meeting was okay but the 11:30 meeting was pretty sweaty. It was a Sunday fast and testimony meeting. The testimonies were wonderful. Even though these people live in a different economic and cultural world their testimonies of the savior, the prophet and the church are very clear concise and powerful.


The building on the left is the church building. The first floor is the chapel. The second floor is the Sunday school, Relief Society and Primary rooms. I didn't notice any plumbing in the building.


We visited quite an unusual humanitarian project this week. It is one that was started by our predecessors. It involves piping water from a city water source to three storage distribution tanks throughout the village. What's unusual about this village is that it's made on reclaimed land inside of a bay.  The villagers manually dig up mud from the bay floor and create a home site. All of the newly formed islands are connected together by wooden foot bridges. The project will bring their water source significantly closer to the different clusters of houses.



It's not so easy walking on those boards. They're not secured very well. The villagers go over them quite casually. For us it was frightening.

Not too much to report this week. We spent most of the week in a video training session with the area humanitarian leaders. The humanitarian program is substantially changing. Before we were given a budget and generally did smaller projects. Now they are decentralizing the process and we will be handle both the large and the small projects. More training to come.

 




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