March 9, 2015

Dear Family,

Well another week out here in Ghana. Got to say it was freakin hot for one haha, the amount of sweat i put on my shirts is ridiculous haha. Anyways it was a really good week this week. On Tuesday we were proselyting and i got a call from our office elders but it turned out to be Elder Smith, Erickson , and Poulson from Liberia. They were at the temple sight doing there last little things before they went home and they ran into our office elders. They wanted us to come up since we are really close to the temple but we didnt have a chance to but it was still cool to hear from them before they went home. Wednesday was just a normal day. This week was affliction week so what we did was just bought some beans and made a big pot of beans and ate beans and rice all week haha. Anyways, on Thursday we had MLC at the Presidents house. It was pretty good. I honestly aint to tight with any of the ZL’s there but i know a few of the guys there pretty good so it was pretty good. Different from the ones that we had in LIB but it was still good and the best part of it all was that we got fed Hamburgers for lunch, so that made it all worth it. Also on Thursday night we had to switch companions, we did an exchange with some of the elders from our zone. I went with Elder Kouame, he is from Ivory Coast and has only been out for 4 months so he is still working on his english. I had a really cool experience with him though. Friday morning we went and saw this woman who had been meeting with missionarys in the past and said that she had a concern with the Book of Mormon. So we went in there trying to help her gain a testimony of the BOM. Well she was just totally set against it and was all about the bible. When people do that i get so like frustrated and like so idk how to explain it. I was like out of my seat trying to show her different things and just doing all i could in my power to help her see the Book of Mormon could bless her life. Elder Kouame just kept his cool and he just sat back and said he wanted to share a scripture with her, its the one in Ezekial 37:16-17 and very simply in his broken english he shared the scripture and bore his testimony and the spirit was there. It was just a good lesson to me that its not me out here doing the work, its the spirit and i got to keep my cool a little better so that he can be with us a little more. We had a really good day that day though and i learned alot from him. Saturday i had to do another small exchange with Elder Vandehei , he is the one in our apartment. His companion hurt his knee and they werent able to proselyte all week long so i went with him for half a day so he could be able to see some of his people and then went out the rest of the day with my comp. On Sunday we were scheduled to have our Baptisms on that day but we had a little problem. There was no water being pumped by the city and we didnt have any in the poly tank. We had been trying since Saturday to get something worked out but nothing came out. Finally we just started calling all the wards around us to see if they had water in there fonts. I think we tried 4 other wards but there was no water flowing there either. So we tried a few water truck numbers to see if we could get them to bring some but nothing panned out. It was a little frustrating, we tried about everything we could but nothing panned out so we are going to have to do it again this Sunday. An update on the guy i bought that Collin Kaepernick jersey from last week, he came to the church like 3 times during the week and loved it and we taught him and he wants to be baptized. He didnt show up on Sunday though so we are going to have to follow up on that with him but i have high hopes for him. He is really prepared. We are really working with some good people right now in our area and i hope that it keeps up.  I sure do love you all and i hope that you all have a good week. Love Elder Bowring