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| Elders Peters and Pohlsander at the Accra Temple. |
Dear family & friends,
Sometime last week I got a call from sister Munro that I needed to arrange a trip for some elders in my zone to go and renew their non-citizenship cards in the mission home on Thursday, and that Elder Pohlsanders long awaited package was there in the mission home and the elders could come and pick it up and take it back to him. So I called up Elder Fryar and elder Ngoy and told them the travel plans and then asked them if they could retrieve any mail that they find in the mission home and they said they would. I told Elder Pohlsander about this and he was so excited, maybe a little too excited.
On Thursday when they were coming home elder Pohlsander insisted that we call them and meet them where they were planned to drop and meet their companions (who would be on exchange together until they came back from the mission home) so he could get his package into his hands as soon as possible. This package was sent in June and sat in the post office for a really long time because it was a box and they had to do an inspection on it so he was SO eager to get this thing. After we got a call from elder Fryar telling us that they were on their way to meet their companions elder Pohlsander took off, and I chased after. I found out later that Elder Ombaka and elder Christopherson saw us at one point and they thought that we had received an urgent phone call that someone was dying and requested a blessing in the Korle-bu hospital because we were in such a rush. (There is a hospital in Korle-bu) eventually we got to the taxi that Elder Fryar was in and he handed a huge sack of mail, that contained the package, to e\Elder Pohlsander, and Elder Ngoy handed me his sandwich (that guy is so awesome) and refused to let me not accept it. At this point I had to catch up to elder Pohlsander who was biking like mad to get back to our apartment to open his package. I caught up and we crossed this really busy road and then we got on a more rural road that goes to our apartment that was once paved but is now peppered with potholes. Elder Pohlsander was holding the sack of mail with one hand and placed the remaining 1/3rd of the sack in the front basket of his bike so his bike was really front heavy and he was starting to lose control in the potholes swerving back and forth. I called out to him, "slow down small, take your time or else...” PHBSWHOOSH!!! The sack flew over the front of the basket and explosion of mail and his boxed package scattered in front of the bicycle and some got smashed under his tires as he rode through. He threw his bike to the side of the road and screamed, "I HATE HIM!!" I sheepishly asked, "Who?" and he muttered, oh nobody. We gathered up the mail (none of it was lost) and rode calmly back to our apartment. I went straight to the fridge to get some water cuz it was blazing hot that day. Then I went into the other room to see what was in the long awaited package. On our kitchen table was 576 penny size Pokémon toys and a bag of skittles, Twizzlers, chocolate, and some other candy. Later that night after we came home it was light off and Elder Pohlsander had disappeared for a while so I started to look for him and found him with his entire upper body in our freezer. I took a video asking him, "What are you doing?" he pulls his head out of the freezer and says, "I was pretending I was eating a Hershey’s bar in the winter." every day is an adventure with Elder Pohlsander
We had a pretty good rainstorm on Tuesday, but the rest of the week has been HOT. You know it’s hot when you can get sunburned at 7 AM going to get breakfast for 10 min.
Rita and Margret are going to be baptized this coming Sunday, by then we will have transfer news. I kinda think that I will be going, which I am really sad about because I had this really awesome inspriation that I wanted to talk with our stake president about which is to have a missionary finding activity stake wide 5k. We would be able to talk about the word of wisdom and addiction and cool stuff like that and it would be a great thing for people to invite their friends too and an awesome way to get a huge stack of phone numbers of people to find. So that's my new mission quest
Elder Pohlsander had helped me figure out how to put videos on my flash drive and play them on our DVD player and it has been really cool to use it when I was teaching Margret this week. There is a really good one called, "chastity, what are the limits?" that helped us teach the chastity lesson really well. Ghanaians and everyone really are very good visual learners and so the videos really help them a lot.
President Simpson has challenged the mission to read all of the book of Mormon by the end of the year and we are to read 2 chapters a day and so far I have kept up pretty well. I keep telling myself that I will read the other standard works and I am but I have never found the fascination that I find in the book of Mormon with the stories and the lessons from the lives of the people who wrote it. The book of Mormon rocks.
So I slipped and opened part of my package because josh told me to find his letter and I thought it was in this one rolled up present, but it was the Jared Ward posters, those are so cool! Thank you. I love those a ton! I have them hanging up on my white board next to my calendar for the month. I will give Elder Perry’s to him at our mission conference with Elder Stevenson on sept. 14. Today I just finished playing basketball with my son (elder Herrod) and it was really cool to see him again. He is tearing it up out in Kasoa, but he has been there as long as I have been in Lartebiokorshie so he thinks he will be transferred. He told me that he is praying we are in the same zone or district or something like that. I would be really happy about that too. But like I said earlier, I would love to stay here in Larte'b with elder Pohlsander too.
Saturday was one of the coolest days of my mission. Our ward had planned a temple trip and we were hoping to have some recent converts going but Dominic and Dorinda's son is really sick and they haven't been able to come to church for the last two weeks so they haven't been able to get their temple recommends. Leslie’s mom was planning on getting endowed at this trip and asked us if we would be there so I felt like it was ok to go. I was kinda uneasy about it at first because I knew it would take up most of our day on Saturday and as we got into the tro tro I found out that Princess wasn't able to meet with the stake president and so she would just be doing baptisms so I was kinda like, dangit now we are gonna waste a Saturday, but the tro tro had already left by then. As we rolled through the gate of the temple compound I muttered I hope I run into somebody I know. and as we got past the banana leaf tree's I saw elder hon. I was super excited at this point because I knew that elder hon is serving in the Kasoa 2nd ward. I got out of the bus and after greeting a few people brother Archibald came out of the front doors of the temple and told me that they needed my help with the baptisms which I was really excited about because I ran into Abel Osei who was going in to do baptisms. I got pictures with the obi family, the Oware family, the Appong family, and Emma Mensah. I got to see a lot of people that I had only hoped that I would one day see again and I got to participate in doing temple ordinances with them. I bought Abell a CTR ring in the distribution center (that sucker is 5 cedi’s!!!) and he was really excited about it. I’m so glad that he is strong and preparing to serve a mission. I asked where Simon Nortey was and I guess that he has traveled to do some sort of a music thing, but has also been active in the ward. I was SO HAPPY at the temple that day. It was awesome!
On Sunday I got to teach primary again. the primary president came to me last minute and told me that the teacher wasn't there and asked me to take the class so I walked into a bunch of spastic 8-11 year olds that were just happy to be out of fast and testimony meeting. they cheered when I walked in, but then I left to find a marker and I was digging through this filing cabinet looking for a marker and I found a ton of these individual gospel art pictures portraying scenes from the book of Mormon and old testament and came up with a genius idea of how I was going to teach the primary class. I went back in to the class room and got everyone settled down and handed everyone a picture. I told them they had 5 minutes to find the scriptures that talk about their picture and then they would tell the class what was happening in their picture and where they could find it in the scriptures. I numbered the board based on the kids and drew a line next to the number. As each of them found their story in their scriptures I was pretty impressed with how well they knew their scriptures. I had to help some of them find the scriptures that matched their picture but it was a really awesome lesson. there were three boys in there who weren't members of the church who came with their families for a baby blessing (that's a culture thing btw when somebodies baby's adoring is happening the entire extended family goes to the family of the baby's church that Sunday) it was a really cool primary lesson and I had a lot of fun with it.
I love you all a ton!
Love, Elder Peters
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