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!