Helicopter Ride

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 is a school teacher in the small town of Greenville. She does the cooking for the Catholic priests at a parish there. In order to get to the airport in Liberia they had to take a 7 hour motorcycle ride on a dirt road. On each of the motorcycles there were three passengers and a suitcase.

The temple is part of a large Church complex where they have a mission training center, Stake Center, Africa West Regional Offices and housing for Temple patrons. This is the courtyard of the mission training center. It functions just like the one in Provo Utah only it is smaller. Everyone who is serving in Western Africa goes to the mission Training Center here including those who are coming from the United states.

While we were there one of the 12 apostles, Elder Gong was in town and did a meeting with all the missionaries. Here he is shaking everyone's hand before the meeting.  He seems to be tireless. He has visited several African countries and had multiple meetings every day. This is in the Stake Center building that's in the temple complex.

While in Ghana we met with the man that we report to for our humanitarian work his name is Ezra Taft Otto.  Here we are participating in a zoom meeting with one of the organizations that are going to run one of our humanitarian projects.

Today we did leadership training for the Harbel branch. We divided into smaller groups and they discussed questions that each group then answered.  I hope it was helpful. It's so hard to tell when you teach people in a different culture. At least we brought good snacks.

The McGlochlin's which are two of our fellow senior missionaries in the country have been staying with us. They went with us to the temple. Today they wanted to go down to the water so we walked down to the beach. The surf was heavy and the tide was high. It's the rainy season now and the temperature has gone down about 5°. It's nice.