September 6-16

The zone leaders meet the first Thursday every month with the mission president to review the past month and discuss goals for the coming month.  The Ghana missions are very good at adding growth to the church with each one having about 100 baptisms each month.  Some of the zone leaders are "enjoying" a Ghanaian meal at the area office cafeteria.

  

We went to Ho once again to visit some missionaries apartments and to see the Kente festival.  Here we are taking an off road short cut to avoid a traffic jam at the Tema traffic circle.  The cattle on the road are part of the fun!

We stayed 3 nights are the empty couples house in Ho.  We stayed with the Paces and took turns providing meals.  Some very good eating took place.

There was some lush foliage along the way to the missionary apartment in Hohoe along with some very bumpy roads.

 

We attended the Kente festival which is centered around the brightly woven cloth call "kente" cloth. 

  

Elder Graham Nash of the Area Presidency and his wife had seats of honour. The white man sitting beside them is a chief because he took great efforts to promote the Kente cloth. He is a member of the church from Utah. Although very colourful, there seemed to be very little action and any drumming or dancing that did take place was difficult to see because all the seats were level with the field, making it hard to observe anything occurring.

Before leaving Ho we picked up a missionary who had finished his mission and needed to be in Accra to catch a flight back to his home in Nigeria.  He phoned ahead and members turned up in Tsito, a town along the way, to say goodbye to him.  He had previously served a number of months in Tsito.  Amos, in the foreground is a member of the branch presidency and he had all the other well wishers loaded in his pick up truck.

These returning missionaries have their scarves and are ready for a farewell at "The Lord of the Wings" for about 100 cedi person ($33).

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This took place September 12 which is Meg's birthday.  She was surprised with a flaming piece of birthday cake and all the waiters singing Happy Birthday.  Early that afternoon we had a birthday lunch at a place called Pinocchios.  Two good meals in one day!

Meg had some Ghanaian clothes made and the seamstress made some matching ties.

On September14, a meeting was held for the Ghana Accra and the Ghana Accra West missionaries -about 300 were there to hear Elder Gary E. Stevenson of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles talk to them on how to do effective missionary work. He was previously a mission president in Nagoya, Japan - the same place where I served during 1972-1974.  We all shook hands with him and I said "konnichi wa" which he and his wife seemed to appreciate.