As you walk down the street in Ghana you may hear "Obruni, wo ho te sen?" or "e'te sen?" for short. You won't know how to respond except to just smile and say "hello" in return.
Soon you will learn that "Obruni, wo ho te sen?" means 'white man, how are you?" and you may even find yourself responding "me wo eye" or just "eye" (pronounced eye-yeah) which means "I am fine".
The fact is that you will be hard pressed to find a Ghanain who is not fine. Try stopping a begger on the side of the road (you know, the ones with tiny feet curled up under them as they push themselves around from car to car on a skateboard); say "e'te sen?" and you will always get the same response, "eye--I am fine"--usually acccompanied by a big ol smile--even if you don't have any pesewas to give.
Life in Ghana for us this month has been, you guessed it--JUST FINE. In fact, things are going pretty swell. Yes, we are getting anxious to be home (and I am just plain trunky).
Our mission this last month saw us traveling to the brand spanking new Ghana Kumasi mission--just weeks old. We stayed at the mission home, fixed the new mission president and his wife (president and sister Holmes) some scruptious sweet and sour chicken and had a great time with our good friends the Zolls and the Thanynes. We met the new office couple as well--Elder and Sister Palmer, and even managed to get some health training done.
We say a lot of different things while on out little trip, including this snail farm from Asinofo.
We did our normal stops along the way as there are always missionaries in need of something or other. We spent a couple of hours in Nkawkaw with missionaries trying to track down some medication.
Michelle gets snap happy whenever she sees a cute kid...like this one we found at the snail farm. By the way, anyone need a few thousand pictures of cute African kids?
The Zolls took us to the kente weaving village just outside of Kumasi. Here, African artisans weave long strips of kente cloth all through the day. Then sell it for just a few dollars to anyone who looks in their direction.
Here is Michelle trying her hand at weaving.
As you can see, the weaving machine is pretty basic. Each foot pedal controls half of the fibers, and so alternating them causes a weave in the fabric.
The real highlight of the month found us Asuom for Hannah's baptism. We met Hannah a month or so ago with the missionaries who were teaching her. Check out one of the previous blogs. We were very happy to hear of her baptism and even happier to hear that she asked us to come back and do the baptism for her. Needless to say, we were excited to go.
Here you see the whole branch turned out for her baptism. There were 7 people baptized, including Hanna and her mother. Here in this tiny little branch smack dab in the middle of Ghana in the tiny little village of Asuom it is not uncommon to see one or two baptisms a week. Its the same in every little branch (and even the wards) throughout West Africa.
I was fortunate enough to baptize five people on this particular Sunday. The branch president introduced me as John (for John the Baptist). Here is Alice, Hannah's mother. The font of course is a portable font brought in so our missionaries wouldn't have to travel all the way to Abomosu for each baptism.
Finally, here is Hannah...
You can't tell by the picture, but she had a big grin on her face most of the day. Michelle and I brought her a new set of scriptures--she was very excited. We were so thrilled to be part of this special day as this is the part of missionary work we often miss out on.
Anyway, as you can see, all indeed is FINE here in the mission field.
...Once again,
Elder and Sister Fife
