The Trapani's in Liberia

This was our most comfortable run in the entire 6 months we have been here. When it rains hard the temperature drops way down, but it's still hot enough that it feels good to be wet. We hopefully have four more months of this kind of weather. About every 3 months all of the young sister missionaries gather together at the mission home and they have some sort of life skill training and fun activity. All of the senior missionary sisters join in. Almost all of the young sister missionaries are from Africa . They have started sending sister missionaries from Fiji and Tonga here. I guess they feel they are hardy enough to survive the environment. This is a project where we're adding a new school building, a new bathroom, and a water pump.   The school kids will use this water pump to fill up their water bottles and wash their lunch dishes. Hopefully they'll also wash their hands. It will be kept chained up so the community does not use it and wear it out. Because the pumps are s...

We traveled to Accra Ghana to escort some members of the church to the temple. The church has a program were they pay the travel expenses for members of the church who are of humble means to obtain their temple blessings. The church pays all of the travel and lodging expenses if they have to do significant travel. In this case the church paid their airfare, motel fees and provided food. We went with a group of six. For all of them it was their first time on an airplane. They appeared to have a wonderful experience. There was a family of five where the parents were sealed in the temple and then had their children sealed to them for eternity. The other person was a single individual who received his individual Temple endowment.  It was a very sacred and spiritual experience. This is the father and two of the children. The girl on the right was pretty frightened during the takeoff. The boy in the middle was just fine. This is the family after they were sealed for Time and Eternity. He...

 One of the unexpected difficulties of our humanitarian mission has been the amount of paperwork and procedures involved. A great deal of effort now goes into making sure we have proper contracts so that there are no unexpected lawsuits or misunderstandings. We first fill out a contract template giving the basic information of the humanitarian project. The attorneys in Ghana then process that into individual contracts. We then have to give input into those individual contracts. At last a final contract is produced. It takes about 30 days minimum. Then the contracts have to have signatures and witnesses. We finally received a contract for one of our middle size projects. To our Delight the entire company who we are dealing with was at our apartment complexes pool in view of our apartment. After we called and asked them if we could come over.  We went down and presented the contract to them. They were so excited. Some of these companies don't have much to do right now and so a c...

We were on a muddy congested road driving through a marketplace. We had to squeeze between a stopped motorcycle on the right and on coming traffic on the left. We were close to the motorcycle but passed by without any problems. The motorcycle then passed us and stopped horizontally in front of us. The driver in the occupant got off and walked toward my window. I rolled it down about 2 in. They requested that I roll it down the entire way. I did not. They said that I had knocked them over into the mud with the truck as I passed. They wanted to go to the nearest police station to settle the dispute. I had verified through my rearview mirror that there was no contact, nor did they fall over as I passed by them. They wanted us to follow them off the side of the road to talk about the dispute. So they got out of our way and went over to the side of the road.  I just drove away. We drove about two blocks to our destination and got out of the car and started walking through some village h...