November 21, 2010

My Family,
Well this week was another good one. They all just seem to run together and every week somehow just feels like the same thing over and over again, but I guess that is because I am doing the same thing over and over again. Go Figure! The week was good teaching wise, we had about 37 lessons or so this week and some new investigators. We had zone conference this week and it was pretty insane. Here’s the down low on the Ghana Cape Coast Mission........ Okay so they opened up Suanyani a city more north past Kumasi and right now it has only 6 missionaries and a couple. There are three different "groups" that are meeting together for church right now that just started. They purchased really big apartments so that they can have church in the missionaries apartments on Sunday. And right now it is growing and there are about 70 people going to church in Suanyani, but very few are members I believe. So they are really trying to expand that area of the mission and work there and fast. The city is big like well over a million I think. Now for Kumasi. It is the same size as Accra at least pretty close to it. But Accra has 5 stakes and Kumasi only has 1 stake and there are like 40 chapels in Accra, an only 8 in Kumasi and people won’t go to church a lot in Kumasi because they have to travel so far. So what they are going to do is purchase a whole bunch of big apartments in Kumasi for missionaries and a few more in Suanyani so that they can have church in them like the others. And President is going to send a bunch of missionaries to these new areas that haven’t been opened and we are going to establish "groups" all over the place, which will then turn to branches and districts, and then to wards and stakes. It will give people many places to go to church so that they don’t have to travel so far. They have 20 areas picked already for the groups to be established and they have already purchased a few more apartments. So in the next year and years coming look out! This mission is going to blow up!!!
Now the reason why we are able to do this is because of the amount of missionaries in the mission. We have tons of wards or branches where there are 4 missionaries serving in the same ward or branch. And tests show that 2 missionaries in a ward get the same number of baptisms as 4 missionaries. They just split the baptisms. So they are going to take all of the missionaries that are 4 in a ward and put them in these new areas to start groups, and the work is going to double we hope. President Snow said " the Ghana Cape Coast Mission has the power to baptize thousands". President Sabey is taking that serious and we are striving to baptize over 2000 people in the next year. It’s not our focus, but he says if we do this and we work hard, it will happen. Now how is that for where this mission is going!! But at the same time there is still some few problems with disobedience in the mission and laziness, but things are improving. Anyway that is a shortened version of what we heard in Zone Conference. Its gunna be interesting to see.
Well here is a summary of the rest of the week. Tuesday as apart of our district meetings when we finish with the instruction side of things we take 30 min to do something "cultural". This week we went and Elder Katoa taught us how to climb palm trees. Man its fun, but not easy. My goal is to be able to climb one all the way before I go home. So every week we do a cultural activity as a district so that we can learn more about the culture and also have more unity in our district. I think it will be cool to see, our district is so awesome. This week we are making fufu from start to finish. Saturday I went on splits with Elder Mortensen to Yamoransa. It was cool to see what the work was like in a different area, but man did I miss Moree. We did a lot of contacting because the ward there doesn’t hand out referrals like Moree does. I am so grateful to serve in the Moree ward, the members are awesome. We actually ended up teaching a couple girls and a 9 year old kid who thought he was a thug haha. He had a big chain, baggy pants, nice phone, and a few bills to flash.... But when we asked him where he got the money he said that his mom gave it to him haha. He had a picture of 50 cent on his wall. He said that 50 cent is handsome, but he doesn’t like his character haha. The kid was so funny. Then at the end we met a deaf kid who was like 4. He will never be able to communicate his life because nobody can teach him sign language. He will never know his own name either. Pretty sad huh? It was my first time going on splits though, so it was pretty fun. Stake conference was Sunday. It was one of those televised ones and Elder Oaks, Sister Dibb, Elder Golden, and President Packer spoke. They talked a lot about temples and some other pretty normal church stuff, but Elder Oaks really targeted the cultural issues that are conflicting with the way the church is run. Such as the bride price that they pay when they get married. WAY TO MANY people here don't get married until middle aged because they can't pay the pride price. So they pretty much said that has to be done away with. They also talked about funerals and how we shouldn’t spend our life’s saving just to bury someone, which is something they really do here. They go into debt like crazy over funerals. But they also talked about they have really strong family ties here and praised them on a few other things. It was really sweet, and the week was a really good one.
I love you guys and I am so thankful for the examples that you are to me. Thanks for the great emails, and I hope you have a good Thanksgiving. Love you all and take care.

Love Elder Adams.