Like Bees to Honey

We spent three days this weekend in Lagos, Nigeria, mostly in training meetings. On Sunday we enjoyed attending church before returning to Accra. When the block of meetings was over, Elder Stoker pulled his iPad out for a minute and the children quickly gathered around him. They don't have many opportunities to see the electronic devices that our American children are so accustomed to. It was fun to watch them quickly figure out how to play the one game Elder Stoker has on his iPad. We came home exhausted after a long, hot afternoon in the airport and the delayed flight home, so we will post pictures and write more about our interesting trip to Nigeria next time. 

Keta Fort

Last Saturday we traveled with several couples to the eastern coastal region of Ghana near the Togo border to observe a Ghanaian durbar, where beautifully adorned kings, queens, chiefs, and their elders appear in public procession amidst intensive drumming, singing, and dancing. Unfortunately, we never found the celebration, but we did enjoy some spectacular scenery on our search for Keta Fort, a former slave prison in the Volta Region. On the map below, there's a small body of water that juts inland between where the Volta River empties into the Gulf of Guinea and the border of Togo (bottom right hand corner of Ghana). We enjoyed driving through fishing and farming villages in this area. 

Liberia

We had an interesting experience in another West African country last weekend. A new Church Public Affairs Director in Liberia needed training, so we flew there and spent a couple of days getting acquainted with Konrad and helping him become familiar with his responsibilities. A senior missionary couple provided our transportation once we arrived, helping us see and do as much as possible in the short amount of time we spent there.     

  

Our plane arrived in Accra from JFK, refueled and restocked
supplies, then proceeded to Liberia with hardly a vacant seat.
We wondered the whole trip why so many people go to Liberia.

Photos through an airplane window aren't the best quality, but
I really wanted to get a picture of this congested street in Accra
as we took off for Monrovia, Liberia, early Friday afternoon. 

Cleaning Day

The Africa West Area administration building is located on the temple block in Accra. It has four levels of offices, conference rooms, a large room to hold devotionals and similar meetings, a lunch room, a mail room, and several big storage rooms. When the new Director of Temporal Affairs arrived about four months ago, it didn't take him very long to decide that this ten-year-old building needed a good clean-up-and-clear-out day. All Church employees and senior missionaries serving in the office were assigned to come to work one Friday in jeans and T-shirts for a major cleaning day. Everyone was asked to start by cleaning out their own desks, offices, and cubicles. Whatever was not needed or wanted was placed in a central location on each floor or lined up along the walls in the hallways. When the individual offices were finished, the storerooms were emptied. This is when things really started looking like a war zone! Extra shelves, whiteboards, partitions, tables, chairs, filing cabinets, old computers, hundreds of binders and folders, boxes of papers, large posters and banners, pictures, Christmas decorations, fabric -- it all came out.

         

  

Trying to get down some hallways was a major
undertaking. This is outside our office on the first
level. Venturing out took some skill and coordination. 

An unwanted item in one office became a valuable
find for another area. It felt like a giant garage sale,
except everything was free for the taking.