Welcome Elder and Sister Clements

This week we were very pleased to welcome Elder and Sister Clements to the Ghana Cape Coast Mission.  They will provide member and leader support for the four branches in and around Tarkwa and Axim and will live in Takoradi.  

We spent a delightful evening getting to know them, then sent them on to Takoradi after breakfast.

The Hanlons picked them up from the airport and gave them a short tour of Accra and Cape Coast.  I am afraid we are going to wear Elder and Sister Hanlon out.  They will make that trip to Accra six times in the last four weeks of their mission.

Speaking of breakfast, we were alarmed to find a ring of flour with a few creatures wriggling around one of our big bags of pancake mix.  We make a lot of pancakes at transfer time and the mix is difficult to find here.  We buy it when we see it.  We had two and a half bags on hand and checked them all for critters.  The last bag had a puncture in the bottom and looked like this...

The creatures were well fed and very lively.  We were sad.  Between the moisture and the bugs, the pancakes were unsalvageable.  

While we are covering healthy eating, Sister Stevenson was so happy to find these elders buying vegetables, she had to have a picture of it.

Good job!

I went out to Saltpond on Tuesday to do a baptismal interview.  The congregation started there earlier in the year.

They have been meeting in this school, but their own meetinghouse will be ready in the next week or two.

We stopped by to check the progress.  This is the beginning of the baptismal font.

It will be very nice for them when it is ready.

We continued our missionary interviews on Wednesday and Thursday.

Somehow the Bakano elders slipped in and out of interviews without being photographed, so we are sorry for that.

On Friday, we had our follow-up training with the new missionaries and their companions.  

The new missionaries in this group have been with us for almost four weeks.  They all seem to be doing well with their trainers.

Rise up (Servants) of God!

The "How to be happy on a mission graph" with an embedded watchman on the tower.

Friday was the 38th wedding anniversary for Sister Stevenson and me.  We celebrated on Saturday when things were a little quieter.  

I was invited to perform the baptisms for some of the people that I met a few weeks ago when I spent the day with one of the companionships in Bakano.  

Signing the baptismal record.

After the baptism, Sister Stevenson and I drove out the the Elmina Bay Resort to celebrate our anniversary as has been our custom in Ghana.  (I like the food better at the Coconut Grove, but Sister Stevenson is big on tradition, so Elmina it was.)  Unfortunately, there was a huge dump truck and backhoe working on a sea wall directly in front of the restaurant and the diesel fumes and noise made a romantic dinner impossible.  So, we HAD to break tradition and go down the coast a half mile to Coconut Grove. 

Happy Anniversary!

On Sunday, we went out to visit a new group of the Church in a village called Agona.  It is about 15 minutes off the highway between Elmina and Kissi.  They have been organized for about a month now and we have missionaries working there.  (We actually had missionaries out there for a few months about two years ago, but delays in the organization of the group made it necessary to bring them back closer to a chapel. I hope those missionaries are still reading the blog and are happy about the progress!)

It's another pretty drive.

Can you see the fifth child in this picture?

Primary.

In Sunday School, the teacher gave everyone a seed and said, "If I gave you this seed and told you that it would produce a large tree and delicious fruit, what would you be willing to do in order to see if I was telling the truth?"  We then had a nice discussion of Alma 32 from the Book of Mormon.

I haven't seen so many vultures on a golf course since...

Seriously, there is a water hazard on this course called the crocodile pond.  There is about a three foot wall surrounding it.  I haven't had the nerve to see if it is literal.