General Conference Sunday

 

We save a lot of money on our mission because there's not much to buy here and anything you want to buy has to be able to fit in your suitcase to bring it home. Cheryl did find these cute dolls to give to our children. You can't see it but on the back of the women is a baby that's carried in a traditional wrap. These dolls were custom made for her. They're about 10 in tall and cost $10 a piece.  The lady who sold them to us must have thanked us at least five times for the purchase. She was really grateful to make a sale.

The other thing we buy, and the church reimburses us for it, are signs that we put on our projects when we are finished. The wording is meant to convey the message that the recipient is in charge of the maintenance. The signs are made out of aluminum and only cost $25. We will fasten them to the side of the buildings that we either remodel or build.

Our other expense is about $140 a month for groceries. Grocery shopping has been a pretty good experience here. The market is close to shopping in an American market. It has a very good butcher area and the produce isn't bad. It's run by Lebanese. It doesn't have a huge amount of choices but it has enough so you don't feel deprived. The quality especially of the meats and cheeses is as good as we get back home. This makes living here so much easier.

Today is our nine month anniversary. We have finished half of our mission. Overall it's been hard. We work about 6 1/2 days a week.  The weather and the traffic are terrible. What makes it worth it is the large number of people we are able to help. Most of our projects will make substantial improvements in at least 500 people's lives. Sometimes it's in the thousands.  We have been able to experience God's comfort and influence often. Those moments remind us that our discomfort here is worth it.

Today was General Conference Sunday. We went to the Harbell branch to watch with them. The other branch that we minister to, the Dolos Town Branch also attended there because they have no electricity at their building. Technical electronics in Liberia are not very dependable. We brought our laptop computer, and auxiliary speaker and our cell phone just in case. Come to find out things were not working and we had to stream the conference from my cell phone to their tv.

The attendance was remarkable. Hardly anyone has their own TV or computer so no one could watch at home so they all came to the church. The reverence during the 2-hour broadcast was remarkable. The children would just sit reverently and the adults watched the conference without chatting with each other. This is pretty remarkable because I'm not sure how much of the conference they understood. Even though it was in English it was not Liberian English and the speakers spoke at regular speed. For them to understand me I have to speak at about 1/2 speed. I'm sure some of the English as a second language speakers were not understood at all. They all gathered for this picture afterwards.  We are 6 hours ahead of Utah so we watched the recorded Saturday afternoon session.

Our project at Zappia Public school is going well. We haven't opened the remodeled classrooms yet so the increased students are all squished together. The weather was about 85° and 100% humidity outside. Inside this classroom it was terrible. Hopefully a week or so and the conditions will improve.  Conditions were so bad that we modified our project to include fans in the classrooms.