Ten people in our pickup truck cab

This is the Weisseh family. We took them home from church today, mother, father, grandmother and five children. They also have one on a mission. He works security for the rubber plantation and cannot always afford transportation for his family to and from church. Because there are so many of them they need to rent three motorcycle taxis which costs about $4 round trip for all of them. They missed church the last three weeks because they could not afford the trip.

This baby was blessed today on fast Sunday. The baby's outfit was interesting because it was about 85 degrees inside of church today.

One of the schools we are working on wants benches instead of single desk chairs. They plan on putting four students on this bench. They have ordered 200 of them.
 

The foundation is almost done for the Wein Town public school new building. This building will have five classrooms and two offices. As soon as it's done they'll fill it up with new students which currently do not go to school at all because they cannot afford the private schools in the area.

We have a project where we're bringing water and sanitation to 10 villages. We went out to check on the progress.  I made some buddies.

These are the bathrooms we're building for the schools. Each of them has three stalls. One for the boys and one for the girls. The tank in the middle catches rainwater from the roofs for flushing and hand washing water.

We are putting in a few new wells but mostly we're just refurbishing old wells. We also help them establish a money collection program so they can pay for future repairs. To go inside of the pump area women have to have a head cover and cannot wear shoes. Violation brings a fine.

This is a hand washing station. They manually fill up the tank from the well. It's not finished yet so the faucets are not in place.

The most challenging part of our mission continues to be working with the African staff in our area headquarters. They just see the world different than Americans do. Little inconsequential details can hold up our projects for weeks. Luckily the contractors we work with are used to this system and don't seem to get to upset when things get delayed.  The problem is that things seem to go well for a while and then you get caught off guard when some payment or approval gets delayed for weeks. They haven't discovered the principle of follow up yet.

We were reminded that the church is still very new in this area and there are some rough edges. Today a young man bore his testimony about how he was able to bless his classmates by sharing the answers on his test.  There was another instance where a young man asked if he needed to pay tithing on the items that he has stolen.  Fortunately the branch presidents are good at quickly correcting these interesting viewpoints.