The Work is Progressing

Elder Shirley with some youth

Elder Shirley and his companion with the 5 youth who were baptized this week

The pig selected for the Tongan pig roast

Preparing the pig for the roast

Roasting the pig

** This week we didn’t hear from Elder Shirley until today (Tuesday). He said they didn’t have power yesterday so they were given permission today to email before they went out for the day. 

October 16, 2018

What a week!! This last week was a really good one! So last Sunday the stake president met with the missionaries in our stake which is about 18 and he told us that we needed to establish a new unit in an area! He told us that he would send us into the area on Tuesday and Friday for 2 weeks and then after those 4 times we would hold a baptism for all those who were ready to be baptized! Man this sounded crazy to me that we would convert people in 2 weeks and start a unit with those people!

So this last week we went into the town on Tuesday and Friday to start teaching those people in a town called Kuntanasi. These people have never heard of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints before but there was so many people just running up to us wanting to know what we were teaching! It was super cool! Just imagine a bunch of people in white shirts and name tags walking down a street that no one in that area has ever seen before, they all wanted to know what was going on. haha. We will continue to teach them this week and hopefully we can have some people ready to baptize this week or the next!!

Also this week we had our baptisms! We had 5 baptisms for me and my companion then the other missionaries that we stayed with had 2 baptisms and 1 other pair of missionaries that live close by had 1 baptism and I got to be the one who baptized them all!! Way cool! My first baptism I got to baptize 8 people!! Everyone that we baptized looked super excited and that was such a cool experience for me!!

Last cool thing that we did this week was yesterday for P-day we had a huge feast! We have 4 people in our district that come from Tonga and back home they do pig roasts over a fire where you spin a pig on a stick! Man that was a cool experience for me to watch them prepare a pig from it being a live to eating it! They killed it, gutted it, skinned it, seasoned it, and then cooked it over the fire! It was super good! We had a bunch of rice and stew and bread on the side and it was a really good meal!

Anyways that is it for me this week!! I hope everyone's week was great! Love you all!!
~Elder Shirley

Questions and Answers:

Q. How did you get the opportunity to perform all 8 baptisms? Did they all chose you to baptize or did the other missionaries just give you that opportunity?
A. The other missionaries gave me the opportunity because they said that they have all baptized plenty

Q. Where do you baptize at... a font?
A. Yes, it was at a font.

Q. Do you anticipate that they will stay active in the Church?
A. I hope they all stay active and I think that they will! They are all kids but they are loving coming to church so they should keep coming .

Q. How many people do you have attending church? Do you and your companion do a lot of responsibilities each week? How do you like the bishop? Do you work closely with him? And do you have very strong relationships with the ward members?
A. We usually have around 35 people come to church but this last week we had a lot more like 90, I think it was because we had a baby blessing though so lots of visitors. The bishop is nice, pretty old but we do not work super close with him. Things are just a little different out here in Ghana haha. We have some members that we see but not like any super close members. We try to see some of them to get a stronger relationship. We haven’t had any dinners from members yet.

Q. Can you give us some more details about your work in this new area that you are opening up?
A. Ya so we went two days last week and we had to first get permission from the chief in that place at his palace so we had a big meeting with a bunch of members and the stake presidency and he gave us permission. We have not been able to teach much to them yet but we are going again today and Friday and we will see how it works. We have about 16 missionaries over there each time we go so there is a lot of help over there. We had like 12 people come to church from that area this last Sunday.