We got to meet a lot of the new government Ministers

We had dinner at one of the senior missionaries apartments for mothers day. We have two new senior missionary couples. The second and third women from the left are Sister Allred and Sister North. The 4th sister from the left is Sister Montoya. She is Hawaiian. She bought a flower for everyone's hair.

Our supervisor Ezra, on the right, was in town. He will be taking over for us because there are no senior missionaries immediately coming to fill our position. We attended meetings with the Ministry of Health, Education and Water and Sanitation. With the new president and his party in power all of the leadership of the government ministries have changed. They're always interested in meeting with us because we fix a lot of things for them. This is the Ministry of Education. All of the meetings went very well.

Ezra wanted to see some of our projects. We took him to Tubmanburg Hospital and then we took him to the multi village water project that we just finished. Here is one of the wells.

Before our mission we had expectations of what we thought our mission would be like. This is exactly one of the expectations we had of walking through the jungle. We had to walk because there was no bridge over the stream.

We had a dinner at the mission president's house. Here is the whole group of us. The two new missionary couples are the front row on the left and center.  Elder Allred who is in the center must be about 6"10". Africans generally aren't very tall.  I'm often the tallest one at church. He will be noticed.

We were asked to evaluate a past project the church had done. We went to the 7th day Adventist Eye Clinic. The church had donated some equipment. When we got there we found the equipment we had donated and happily it was still in use. We noticed that there was other equipment, donated in different years, that also had church stickers on them.  I think we have equipped the entire clinic. You can see the Latter Day Saints charities sticker on the machine close to the operator's right hand.


We had the turnover ceremony for Pipeline public school. Once again Cheryl was the ribbon cutter. On both sides of her are representatives from the Ministry of Education. On this school we gave them a new roof, new doors to the classroom, put electrical lights in each room, put tile in the kindergarten room floors, increased the height and put barbed wire on their security wall and gave them a lot of chairs and desks.

They gave us a gift. It's a nice bouquet centerpiece made out of artificial flowers. Our apartment doesn't have many decorations so we can use it.

The grocery store has a lot more items that are common to us than we had expected before our mission. Although you can tell we're in a different part of the world because everything's just a little bit different. Here's our dish soap and you can see that it's rated the number one in Lebanon.

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