Dust Town

Dear family and friends,

I officially made it to my third area. Techiman has been a really sweet place already. It is way smaller than Kumasi but super similar. The buildings and the way the city is set up reminds me a lot of Kumasi. There is a main downtown area with banks, office buildings and then a huge food market and then the city goes out from there. It is so much hotter, sunnier, drier, and dustier than Kumasi. We are farther up north and Harmattan is twice as bad up here. The dust is so bad! You walk five minutes and you look down and your shoes arent black anymore they are straight red. I have given up on trying to polish them because as soon as I step out the door my shoes are dirty again. Polishing shoes out here in Techiman is just a waste of time and polish so I just take my brush and clean my shoes off and call it good.

The Kumasi mission is so big that we have 11 zones and take up three quarters of Ghana. There are 6 zones in Kumasi and then the other five zones are in Obuasi, Konongo, Sunyani, Techiman and Tamale. And all of these places are spread out and far apart from everywhere. So, here in Techiman I am one of 16 missionaries for miles. We get super close to everyother missionary in the zone because they are the only other missionaries that we see. In Kumasi I would see over half the mission every week. Kumasi was a lot of fun and I missed it for my first couple of days. But, now that I have been out here in Techiman for a while I have really come to enjoy it so much!!

Another powerful thing about Techiman is the fact that the Mente Brafo problem isn't bad at all. In Kumasi they love speaking Twi way too much. If you walk up to someone and start speaking with them in English, they won't even talk to you unless you mix some Twi words in. Others only understand How are you and then when you go farther than that they competely shut down and say Mente Brafo!! Which means basically "I don't speak English." It was a super serious problem for us missionaries. It was very rare to find someone that spoke good English and understood it well enough for us to teach them. Most of the time we had to coordinate with members to come out and translate for us which was a complete hassle because many members had no time or didn't care to do missionary work. But, here in Techiman many, many people love speaking English and when you start speaking with someone they will speak it back to you which was a shock when I first came here. Even little kids can speak super powerful English which was completely new to me. The farther north you go in Ghana the more English they speak.

We have a lot of progressing investigators that we are meeting with right now that we are preparing to baptize. We are planning for two at the end of the month and two more at the beginning of March. Many of our investigators have some minor concerns that we are addressing right now and hoping to help them overcome so that they will feel ready for baptism. From what I have seen already up here in Techiman the work is a lot slower than in Kumasi. There are many, many Muslims and the people aren't as religious here as in Kumasi. But, compared to other parts of the world the work is going very well!!!

I would like to share a story to end my letter this week. This last Saturday my companion and I were just leaving a hotel where one of our investigators works to take a taxi back to our apartment when we saw a lady walking her motobike up a hill. We asked her if she needed help starting it or walking it back to our house. She wanted us to try and start it for her. My companion hops on and tries to kickstart it but nothing. After a couple more minutes the investigator Edmond and his brother Richmond (member) come out of the hotel and start to help us. Richmond gets on and asks my companion to help push the bike to try and jumpstart it. Well... they ended up getting it going but Richmond accidentally hit the gas and the brake wasn't working so he ran it right into a concrete wall. Luckily he was completely fine but the bike wasn't. The plastic body cracked and the steering alignment was completely off. We offered to walk it home for her but she said that she didn't want to worry about it tonight and just left it at the hotel. My companion and I felt so bad afterwards. We told the lady that we were really sorry. We were trying to be helpful and found a service opportunity but the whole thing backfired and blew up in our faces.

I hope all of you have a wonderful week. I encourage everyone to find service opportunities this week. They can be big or small. Just go out and brighten someones day for them!

Love,

Elder Ordyna

We went to a members house yesterday after church to visit with her small. Her husband just passed away and she doesn't see her children a lot so we have been asked by the branch president to visit her a lot to see how she is doing. Yesterday was amazing. We were sitting and talking small to her when she said "Hold on I'm Coming!" She went behind her house and came back with a really long metal pole. My companion and I were wondering what she was going to use that for. We followed her over to a coconut tree and she started banging the pole on some coconuts to knock down a couple for us to eat and take back to our apartment. Then she goes over to a mango tree and starts knocking some down for us. Let me just say for the hour that we were at her house it was pure paradise. We were eating coconuts and mangoes! She even gave us a bunch to take with us. The picture is of the one of the coconuts. The biggest coconut I have ever seen in Ghana. I have officially been in every kind of apartment in the mission. I started in a four went to a two man and now am in a six man. The six man apartment is my favorite so far. It is absolutely a party every day in there!