Ghana 2011 - Happy New Year.

Well, just Alex...

Well hello, hello family. Happy flippin New Year. Wow. My long year in Ghana has just begun. All of 2011 is Ghana! Woop woop! (Do it twice) As for mail this week... the post office was closed for a long time so a bunch of elders have a ton of stuff coming. Hopefully it all gets here. We have interviews on Thur so I'm sure mail will come then.

As for the week here in Ghana, things are going just swell. This week we spent a lot of time helping members. I didn’t feel like we did too much teaching but it was very productive. Tues was our wards Christmas party so we spent all of Tuesday helping with that. It was cool cuz Grace Bonsi was in charge of all the food (she’s a caterer and a recent convert. ... do you think it's weird I find caters to teach and baptize... hmmm). Anyway, we show up to Grace's house and 15-20 people from the Relief Society were there and helping. Then over the morning other Young Men and Women came to help. There was a big line of fufu pounding and others doing stuff for different types of rice and stews and all types of stuff. It was really cool to really WORK for them like that. I felt like that’s the first time they all got to see the missionaries really go at it. We all left there with blisters from pounding fufu and soar arms from fanning fire. That was a lot of fun.

Then from there to the church to set up and enjoyed ourselves at the party .

(Elder Darrow entertaining the members at the Ward Chirstmas Party)

(Elders' Mathesen, Newbold, Thompson, Darrow and Haderlie)

After that e Thompson and Yapo baptized a family of 5. A husband, wife and 3 of the 5 kids. They have 5 girls all under 13. How sweet right. Ya it was a powerful meeting cuz the whole ward was there. The rest of the week with the holidays a lot of people were busy all the time (including Marsha who we went to see twice but always busy...not like "Oh I'm busy today." but like we meet her with 4 people running around the kitchen with her and she’s WORKIN).

So we did a lot of hanging and helping members. I really love that. I have gotten very close with some of the people here. I feel like letting the members know how much we love them and want to help them, pushes the work along faster then anything else. After all, 2 years from now we all go and the members are the ones who help them over the conversion so they have to have friends to push them.

This New Years...didn’t do anything CRAZY, (you gotta remember we still represent Christ) but we did have fun and make noise etc. You know me. I find a way to have fun.

On Sat there was a huge party at the stake center with the whole stake. Was very fun. Had volleyball and soccer and basketball. It was fun show the Africans 'how I be' on the blacktop. (Unfortunately they didn’t have any golf fun so all I had was b-ball) but we enjoyed on New Years Day.

No need to worry about anything. I'm safe and staying healthy. Love you guys big big time.

Thanks for all that you do.

Xoxox

elder darrow

(What up Santa?)