June 24

June 24, 2011

We are sort of getting a day time routine down.  We head off to the office at 6:45 so we can miss most of the traffic which can be pretty awful some mornings, although it doesn’t necessarily mean we always miss it.  This morning took us almost 40 minutes when it usually takes us about 10 and we left the same time we usually do.  Go figure. 

We then spend the day trying to get as much work done as we can, then head home about 2 or 3 to beat the traffic then.  But the afternoon still usually takes us about an hour.

This morning we worked on taking inventory of which medications we have in the office and what they are used for and if we needed more of anything.  We then did our first trip to the pharmacy by ourselves!  We have a map with the pharmacy marked, but none of the streets are marked so it makes it a little difficult.  So you try to count streets, but then some of the streets aren’t on the map!  So it makes it pretty interesting.  My job was navigating and Todd’s was to avoid being hit.  I thought at first that I knew where we were on the map, then suddenly we were on a major road that wasn’t on the map and I was totally lost and confused!  We were starting to maybe panic a bit but then we drove by the temple!(which is where we had started) We can come a complete circle and didn’t even know it!  I was SO not where I thought we were on the map!  So we tried it again and again got completely lost! I’d think I might know where we were and then no, I didn’t, so we just kept driving around thinking we might know where we were occasionally then we turned a corner and BAMM!  There was the pharmacy!  We were not even close to it on the map by the way!  There was definitely some Divine intervention going on today, that is the only explanation!  But we managed to get all the medications we needed AND make it back to the office.  What a red letter day!

We also had quite a few people stopping by the office today to see the Dr. Including one asthma attack that was pretty severe, but we got her all fixed up and back on her way.  So it turned out to be quite a busy but fulfilling day. 

June 25, 2011

We took the Pages out with us to the MTC today to meet the new group of missionaries.  There are 46 in this group and about half don’t speak English so it was an interesting experience and my French is not holding up past “hello and how are you?”  very pathetic!  If I had more time, I’d work on it, but as of right now we are pretty dang busy just trying to keep our head above water!

We had an idea to try out for immunizations today and it worked like a charm!  We discovered last time that they LOVE to have their picture taken, they call them snaps.  You pull out a camera and instantly you have 10 missionaries all huddled in a group wanting their picture taken.  So we decided to run a contest to see who had the bested and worstest faces while getting their shots.  Turns out they are so focused on getting their picture taken they mostly ignore the shot!  It worked really well, I think we may be onto something!  Sister Page did the polio drops, Brother Page ran the camera and Todd and I did shots, it worked out pretty smoothly. 

After the MTC the Pages took us to what it called the Pit.  Mostly it’s a large crater that is filled with tons of the little hut kiosts.  So we spent a few hours wandering from shop to shop looking at all the pretty stuff for sale.  Lots and lots of carvings, all of them hand-done.  We got a little bowl, that is probably my favorite right now, it’s got a little carved giraffe drinking out of it, it’s so cute!

June 28, 2011

We spent Sunday and Monday frantically trying to get our MTC health lecture ready to go for today.  We are doing a power-point presentation, which is good.  And we had 3 or 4 previous power-points to kind of pick and choose from, which is good as well.  It’s just took us some time to decide what we want and which one of us was going to do what.  But we finally got it all put together late last night.

Our presentation went really well I think, we might change a few things here and there but for the most part it went well.  Todd put together a personal introduction at the beginning that showed a bunch of pictures of North Dakota in the winter, as most of them have never seen snow.  They found that part pretty entertaining I think!

The second set of shots went really good as well, we are slowing coming up with a system to seems to work.  This time we didn’t have the Pages, so we used missionaries.  We had one running the camera and another running the paperwork, which worked out really well.  Last time we had a missionary get two of the same shot, one from me and then one from Todd, he didn’t want to miss out on anything and didn’t understand that we were both giving the same shot!  Poor kid.  So this time we had a missionary in charge of making sure each one got what he needed but no more!  Again the pictures worked like a charm,  what a simple solution! 

June 29, 2011

Today we went with a humanitarian volunteer to visit one of his schools.  We weren’t really sure where or what we were doing, but thought it sounded like fun.  And it really was!  Chris is a graduate student from BYU and he works with this company called Empower that takes merry-go-rounds and swing sets and sets them up in very rural schools that don’t have power.  The equipment is set up with windmill generators that create electricity!  It’s an awesome concept! 

So we drove for like 2 hours then stopped in this little village, which we walked through to get to the beach.  We then got into a boat and drove about 15 minutes up-river to what they call an island village.  The boat ride was very beautiful.  The villages main economy is clams.  They take like rota-tiller motors and hook them to like a garden hose somehow then use the hoses to breathe underwater while they are hunting for clams.  We saw lots of clam diver boats on the river, very creative! 

We got to this little village finally, and I’d tell you it’s name but I can’t pronounce it quite yet, let alone spell it!  They took us on a tour of the hospital there first.  And the one word Todd and I both came up with afterward is APPALLING!  I was expecting very basic what we saw should have been condemned 5 years ago.  The roof was literally falling in, in most of the rooms.  It was very dirty.  The patient rooms had a couple of metal bunks with two inch mattresses which were very filthy and nothing else.  The maternity rooms had a bed with a wooden crib, with no mattress at all.  Just plywood.  I could not imagine giving birth in these rooms and having anything survive!  Our little brains are whirling trying to figure out how to help. 

We then got to visit the school and it was so fun!  There are about 200 kids in this school and we got to see the elementary part of it.  The classrooms were very simple, a chalkboard, and student desks, but it was very clean and such a relief to see after the hospital!  The children there were very excited and happy to see us, especially after Todd pulled out his camera!  They LOVE to have their picture taken and they especially love to see it afterward.  So we got lots and lots of great pictures that Todd will have to blog for everyone.  We had a lot of fun with the kids and got to see the merry-go-round and swing set which were pretty cool.  Then back into the boat and back to the mainland.

We stopped for lunch on the way home and I tried the bangko.  Which is very similar to the foofoo.  They make bangko mostly out of corn.  They boil then mash it into some kind of sticky, white, hot dough.  You take a pinch and dip it into different sauces, pop it into your mouth and swallow it whole.  No chewing allowed!  So you learn to take smaller blobs, the bigger ones get harder to swallow.  The bangko itself is fairly flavorless, they use it as a filler, the stuff hits your stomach and sits there like a ton of bricks for the rest of the day.  That way they can just eat once a day and feel full for the rest of it.  Hey-  I bet it would be a great way to lose weight!  It wasn’t bad, but I think I want to try some different sauces, (they call them stews) I had a tomatoey one and a fishy one.  Chris, our tour guide for the day, says his favorite is one they make out of the local peanuts. 

All in all, it was a great day!  We really enjoyed getting out of the city and seeing the real Africa.  Looking forward to doing more of that in the coming months.

June 13

June 13, 2011

I got to talk to my kids today!!!  Well, actually, we cheated and called Parker on Friday.  We tried to call the girls yesterday, but missed both of them.  It was a sad thing.  But today was great!  We got a hold of both of them.  They all sounded really good, which was such a relief.  I know they’re adults and can handle life without me, but I’m still the mama I guess and I need that weekly confirmation that indeed they are doing fine without me!  I miss my kids, I think this is going to be the hardest part of this whole mission. 

We finished up the MTC today with a bang!  I got to hear Sister Ann Dibbs speak in Relief Society and she was wonderful.  The whole second half of her talk was called “My Dad, the Prophet”  (Her dad is President Monson, current President of the Church)  it was really neat to see a personal side of this amazing man.  I forget sometimes that he’s just a regular person like I am.  I love his smile!  It’s probably one of my favorite things about him, and I noticed that Sister Dibbs has his smile.  It’s a great thing!

We spent most of the afternoon repacking all the bags for our trip tomorrow. We then hauled them all down the stairs to weigh them, and then hauled them all the way back upstairs!  But they are in a nice neat pile and ready to go.  I am ready to go, this MTC experience has been good, but I am past ready to just BE there!  Not that I’m really looking forward to the travel bit to get there, we have a 5 hour flight to JFK, then an 11 hours flight to Accra.  Not that excited to survive that part, but lets get it over with.

June 15, 2011

We are in AFRICA!!  We got here yesterday afternoon.  Rather warm and toasty, with a little bit of sticky thrown in, but sooo beautiful!  Everything is so green with flowers everywhere.  I think I can get used to this.  I stood out on the porch this morning and the birds were singing and the flowers were smelling and the sun was just coming up, what a great way to start the day! 

We spent the afternoon with the Maughans yesterday.  They met us at the airport, which was really nice.  They seem like great people, but I think they are ready to go home today!  We spent the afternoon running here and there meeting people and places.  I don’t think I remember a single name this morning!  Elder Maughan made up a whole book though of who is who and where they can be found and pretty much everything that we’ll need to get our feet underneath us, which I’m sure took him a lot of time but is going to be very well used by us for a little while!

June 17th, 2011

We made it through our first week at the office!  It had been mostly good with some frustrating thrown in.   The internet is very slow here and has just plain been out for most of the morning.  So we took some time off and had the Pages (the public affair missionaries who's office is right next to ours and are awesome) the Pages took us exploring a bit more and showed us some different stores.  I found some postcards, which apparently are very hard to find here for some reason!  And I found a giant map of Africa to hang on the office wall.  Which was a very exciting and traumatic experience!  They have street vendors all over here, which walk up the lanes of traffic selling everything from various foods to sauna belts to well, giant maps! So we slowed to get this map, but we didn't have the exact change and he couldn't make change for a CD20, so we were arguing with him as he's running in traffic with us, and finally found the exact change.  But he still had our original CD20 which we had to argue to get back and finally did, only to find out as soon as we pulled away that he had given us back a CD2 instead! The little sneak!  So we got taken but I have a great map of Africa and we had an authentic African experience:)

June 19, 2001

Happy Fathers Day and Happy Birthday to Parker Day!  We got to call the kids today and it was really great.  We pulled Parker out of church, we kind of forgot about the time difference, but had a great visit anyway.  I feel really bad we didn’t get his birthday cake baked before we left.  All the stuff is sitting in the cupboard and we told him to make it up, but it just isn’t the same and I doubt he’ll do it.  Poor kid, he’s so neglected!  I also got to talk to both my girls and my dad-  what a red letter day!

We went to church this morning and it was a neat experience.  The chapel is on the second (or rather the first floor) of the stake center and it is lined with tall windows down both sides.  They are just glass slates though and they are open to the outside, no screens even, just straight outside.  There are trees along the whole way, and we are high enough up that we sit right in the branches.  Which is very pretty to just see, then the wind blows and you feel this cool breeze, and you hear the leaves moving and the birds singing (and a few horns honking) but it is so neat!  It’s like having church outside!  Very, very awesome.  I’m going to find churches in the states very boring after this I’m afraid!

June 21, 2011

Last night we got to go to the MTC, for our first time.  We only got a little lost!  But it is a beautiful building.  We met all 38 missionaries, all of which will be leaving this week.  They were so fun to met, a lot of them had names they had to help me pronounce but they had a hard time with our name as well, mostly they wanted to call us Elder or Sister Fee-Fay.  We had dinner with them and it was a totally delightful experience.  Maybe a little warm though as most of the building does not have AC. 

They had a farewell meeting Monday night which was a treat.  The different districts had prepared songs to sing between the speakers, and I was so ready to be wowed with their awesome singing talent, as I assumed all African were naturals.  To my surprise they were awful!  Well maybe not awful, but definitely not all on key!  But their enthusiasm and vigor in their singing was a delightful.  They had a lot of fun making fun of each other and their awful singing.  It was truly a choice experience.

On Tuesday we gave them their last set of shots and I was very much surprised in their response. They are truly terrified of shots!  Not just didn’t really like them, but terrified of them!  We are still trying to figure out why.  We tried to make it as quick and easy on them as we could, but it was a very traumatizing experience for most of them.  There were a few I wasn’t sure were going to be able to sit still long enough to get their shot!  We had more than one in tears and quite a bit of wailing and hollering!  It was almost kind of funny in a terrible sort of way.  I got some great pictures though, Todd is going to blog them as soon as he gets time.  There are some really funny ones.

All in all, I’m in love with working at the MTC!  The missionaries there are amazing.  A new batch comes in on Friday and we go out on Saturday to meet them, give them a health lecture and their first set of shots, (most of which will get more than one).  We are working hard to figure out a better way to help them through this process. If anyone has any suggestions, send them our way!  By the way, this next group is mostly Congonese, which means mostly French speaking and I am not ready!  I have a lot of work to do in the next couple of days!

MTC Time

May 30, 2011

Today was our first day at the MTC.  I’m sitting here at 7:40 in the evening totally and completely spent and wondering if it’s too early to just crash.  Boy, I am such an old person!  Todd and I got a lot of comments today on how young we were but I’m really not feeling it right now.

We got our missionary name tags this morning.  It was pretty awesome to pull them out of the bag and see ‘Sister Fife’ (me!) on a missionary name tag.  I promptly pinned it on and viola I looked like an official missionary!  I’m not real sure I feel like one yet though.  I was doing my homework tonight (yes!  They gave us homework the first day!)  reading in Preach My Gospel and it said that as a missionary, I am an authorized representative of Jesus Christ.  Wow~  not just a representative of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints but of Jesus Christ.  I think I had better start shaping up a bit more!   We have been so busy getting the house ready to go these last four months and gathering all the ‘things’ that we would need for the next 18 months and packing and seeing family and the list goes on, that I feel I have kinda slacked on my spiritual preparation.  I’m mostly there, but not quite ready.   Not quite as ready as my bags are anyway!  So I really want to take these next two weeks and just let the world slide into the background for once and let my Savior take center stage.  I am so ready for that.

We came in with a group of about 70 other senior missionaries.  Not all of them couples either, there are about 6 single senior sisters that are going out as well.  It was really neat to hear where everyone was from, where they are all going and what type of mission they will be doing.  The Lord needs us in all the corners of the world and for so many reasons!  We spent a lot of time chatting and getting to know people.  They are all so nice and fun to talk with.  At dinner one sister looked around and commented that of all the hundreds and hundreds of people there that they were all smiling and happy.  And it was so true, smiles and laughter everywhere.  This is a place of joy and I am sooo happy to be here!

We ran into Jonathon Bahr from back home today.  It was fun to see a familiar face.  Sometimes the world is a small place.  (Laura-  he looked happy and really good~)

June 1, 2011;

Today was number 3 at the MTC.  We spent most of yesterday in smaller groups learning how to be missionaries.   We spent a lot of time studying the manual Preach My Gospel and going through how to handle different scenarios.  Mostly we just learned how to talk to people.  Today however, they had us put our new skills right to the test.  They brought in volunteers from the community (most of them already members, thank goodness!) and they would pretend to be investigators and we would go and meet with them for a 45 min appointment.  Some people really got freaked out about this!  Not so much Todd and I.  We studied and prepared but didn’t stress too much and it went pretty well.  We had a very nice young woman from Hawaii that was here going to school and we had a great visit.   Challenged her to pray and read her scriptures and she excepted both invitations J

The food here though is going to be a problem.  It is too good!  We are finding that we are eating every time we turn around and not just a little bit!  We are going to have to start going to the gym if we aren’t more careful.   Or maybe we’ll just quit worrying about it and enjoy it~  because once we get to Africa I think the food situation will probably take a sharp decline!  (I’m not so excited to try cane rat)

We finally got a early evening tonight so I think Todd is going to try to get the blog set up and running.  I am excited to share our adventures with friends and family.  (even if it’s not very excited yet)

June 5, 2011

Saturday was our first ‘P’day and it was a great day!  We slept in until like 7 o’clock, we would have slept later but breakfast only runs until 7:30!  But it was still really nice.  We’ve been getting up about 5:30 just to get everything done before breakfast and it’s never enough, I’m always running short of time and have to skip something.  We did a temple session after breakfast at the Provo Temple.  It seems really kind of odd to walk to the temple, but very enjoyable.  Afterward there were at least 3 families in the front, all dressed in white with children running all over-  it was so neat to see!  There was even a wedding party doing pictures, it was quite the happening place!  Very busy.

We then ate lunch (again with the eating!  Always eating here!) then had to take a big long nap-  VERY much enjoyed it!  Afterward we walked over to the BYU campus and they were having a big book festival with tents everywhere and big puppet people (Kelsey would have hated it J) we had a great time just wandering through the booths and shopping.  It seemed kind of weird to be out in the real world though, like we were wandering in forbidden territory or something!  It was a great day.

Sunday was fast and testimony and frankly it was such a relief not to be eating for a few meals!  We got to church in a small branch of about 30-40 missionaries, mostly ‘juniors’  they love to bear their testimonies and a lot of them finished in the mission language.  It was really neat to sit and soak up their spirit.  We had a fireside that night and it was a great fireside, but in the beginning, Sister Nalley, (the wife of one of the Mission President Counselors) led us all in a great version of Called to Serve.  She showed us a picture of the 2000 stripling warriors then asked all 2000 missionaries to put themselves in their place.  Imagine we are marching into war.  There is a large hill we are behind, so for the first verse we sang very softly, like we were far off.  Then we crest the top of the hill and the second verse gets louder, by the last line of this verse we are singing loud-  Children of Our King-  We all stand at ‘King’ and the last verse we sang with mucho gusto- all 2000 missionaries on their feet!  It was very moving and inspiring to look up and see this huge sea of white shirts and ties marching as to battle.  Way too cool.  J  

June 7, 2011

Today was a day of big highs and big fears!  I started this beautiful day off with my first French prayer!  Todd and I have been studying our French pretty hard since coming to the MTC and on Monday we got all the church materials for language training.  It contained a whole chapter on prayer language!  So all Monday night we studied and this morning I said my first French prayer!  It is so cool to say that first prayer in your foreign language, it finally means I can carry on a conversation!  It might be very one sided, but it’s still a conversation and it’s so cool to share this awesome moment with my Heavenly Father.  So great start to a beautiful day!

We then sat in lectures ALL day.  I mean ALL day!  He let us have a half hour for lunch and 2, 5 min. potty breaks for an entire straight 9 hours.  It was a long day, we learned a lot of great stuff, but then in the afternoon he started in on all the tropical diseases and bugs and parasites that are prevalent in foreign countries.  Africa, by the way, has almost all of them!  So we heard lots of graphic stories and saw lots of graphic pictures.  By the end of the afternoon I was not really sure I wanted to continue on this little adventure of ours!  I know, these are worse case scenarios and we probably won’t get any of them, but some are really freaky and disturbing just the same!