Our work is beginning to wrap up here

This was our last Sunday in Dolo's Town Branch.  This is the branch president's wife Sister Mulbah.  She is the primary president. Each week Cheryl goes to primary and plays the music using her smart phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It really helps.  

This is Branch President Mulbah.  He does a good job. He served a mission and knows church administration quite well. He is a kind and loving man who does a good job ministering to his branch. He runs a transport service to and from the airport. He has a Toyota Corolla station wagon with air conditioning.

The Dolos town branch is in a rented building that is not well suited for a church. They thought they had another piece of ground to build a building on but that fell through. In the short term they have decided to rent for a while longer and so the landlord is doing a few improvements on the building. You can see the new ceiling tiles that have gone in.

 This hopefully was our last week grocery shopping. Groceries have been unexpectedly good here. This butcher shop is excellent. We buy sliced cheese, bacon, ham, hamburger and chicken breasts. All of them are the same quality as what we get at home. That's our shopping cart in the picture. You can see grapefruit in it. The grapefruits here are better than in America.

Driving conditions are very poor in Liberia. Everyone's vehicle is in very poor condition. Roads are horrible. No traffic enforcement. They drive on the wrong side of the road all the time. But they love their registrations. This is what is displayed on our front windshield. They are vehicle registration, revenue certificate and an insurance sticker. Some people don't even bother taking the old ones off and they just plaster the windshield with all these stickers. There's lots of checkpoints here and so they'll get you for not having the right sticker or not having an inspected fire extinguisher. We've never been stopped.

We inspected more non-working baptismal fonts this week. This one in one of the stake centers, does not drain. When the water gets too old they just use a bucket and bail it out. No one can figure out where the drain pipe is and so they can't fix it. They've been looking for the blueprints for a few weeks.

This baptismal font leaks. If they fill it up before the baptismal service by the time they get to the baptizing part there is not enough water left in it. It is an above ground baptismal font and no water leaks out of the sides so they're thinking it's going down through the bottom. They've retiled it once and it still leaks.

Overall there's about 10 baptismal fonts in the country that don't work. The church has been baptizing a lot of people so this is really inconvenient. Sometimes they just go into the river or the ocean to baptize.

We have 10 days left on our mission so we are starting to wrap things up. We're trying to get all of our projects closed before we leave.  It looks like our solar project at Redemption Hospital will not be finished. The hospital needed to build a secure room for the solar batteries and they have been slow doing it.

As we reflect back on our mission things have gone incredibly well. We've been able to complete 17 projects and they've had a pretty big impact in this country. We have substantially improved four of the countries largest hospitals and one large health clinic. We've done substantial remodeling of 5 schools. We've put in about 20 new wells in rural villages and trained the villagers how to maintain their wells. And we've been able to do training for about a 180 farmers and give them equipment and supplies. We also substantially remodeled an orphanage.

These were just the projects generated by Cheryl and I. The church has done an even greater volume of projects through large Humanitarian organizations that are funded and supervised through the area office in Ghana. The church is one of the largest contributors to humanitarian efforts in the country.

We feel good about the contributions we have been able to make here. We have been blessed by the Lord. So many things have gone well.  It has been time well spent here. I just wish it wasn't so hot.