May 28, 2012 {Email}

This week has been wet! The rainy season has come and every morning it pours rain! I love the rain but it really puts a damper on the work. The whole town shuts down when the rain comes ha even the library! It's really funny. The other day we literally watched a huge rainstorm creep in from the ocean and make it's way towards us. It was crazy, i will try to attach a picture so you can see. It was just like this huge battle front crawling towards us and we could hear the rain on the rooftops like an elephant stampede ha. Not going to lie it was intimidating. It came and blasted us and then it left. It has really helped to keep the days nice and cool, which i love! To me it's like a cool spring day, but the Ghanaians don't like it at all though. They all put on jackets and hoodies ha.

 

The work is going good! We are still taking time with Ema because we can't seem to get enough time to sit down with him. It's been frustrating but we just gotta have patience and we will get there with him. We are preparing two others for baptism on the 9th of June! I don't know if you remember the family we were teaching a while ago, Justice and Efua? Well anyways we stopped by there to say hi to them the other day and Efua was way excited! She told us that her oldest son, Victor, had returned from school. He just graduated from High School so he will be around for a while. He was the reason we met the family in the first place. He was preparing for baptism, but had to go to boarding school. Now he is back and says he is ready to be baptized!! It was so sweet! Hopefully it will spark his family to gain that desire again. They have kind of lost it because Efua can't seem to stop her Methodist church. We will keep on keeping on with them :) The other person we are preparing is Eric. He is 26 years old and is a sweet guy! He is into all that cultural dancing and stuff. By the looks of him you would never know but he can't speak English. So we've been having translators help us and he is really accepting the message. So on the 9th they will be baptized. We are praying we can get Ema prepared by then too. 

 

Just so you all know we sadly had to kill the scorpion this week... Ha it actually isn't all that dangerous as long as you don't act dumb around it. We played with him a little and then Elder Ametewee had to kill it. Sad day. Mom, i would love to have a pet monkey but yeah some of the monkeys i send you pictures of are pretty vicious. The ones in Kumasi were ok but down here they use them to show to the tourists so the monkeys aren't happy. Maybe i'll find a tame one and take it home with me. But yeah, everything is great!! I love Ghana. Hope you all have a great week!

Elder Rogers

 

May 21, 2012 {Email}

We are working with Ema right now. We are not yet sure if his baptism will be this week or the coming weeks because he has been very busy and we haven't been able to sit down with him for a while. He is still really excited, we just need to get all the preparations done before he enters the water.

One crazy thing that happened this week is one of our roommates is keeping a scorpion as a pet in our apartment. After Stake Conference, the assistants came up and warned us that it had been done by him in previous apartments so we were to look out for it ha. Yeah, that made me real comfortable in the apartment... We ended up just asking him if he had scorpions and he said yes. :/ So we went to his room and inside a box was this black scorpion the size of my hand!! I have been sleeping in the same apartment with a scorpion for 3 weeks! He has to set it free though. He loves scorpions haha crazy guy! I hate those things. He is now considered the Scorpion King.

We are still working with some of our investigators that have run into that brick wall. It's not easy to help them past their challenges, but this work is on the Lord's time not ours. We just have to be patient. When they are ready, they are ready. This work is awesome! I love you all and hope you have a great week!

Elder Rogers

Cape Coast and Abura zone at Stake Conference

Our food! :) hot dogs and rice. With a PB&J on the side.

 

 

Our creepy pet scorpion!

 

May 14, 2012 {Email}

This past week was a busy one. We had zone leader council on Tuesday and then on Friday we went on splits to Moree and Yamoransa, which is always fun. We are gaining another focus in our mission and that is how we can better involve members in our missionary work. Not just in getting referrals but having them stay involved and be a part of the investigators progress so that they can have somebody there to help them when they have questions or concerns. That way they are building their foundation with the members in the ward they will serve in forever and not with the missionaries who will come and go. It's definitely going to take a lot of effort to get them involved and at lessons, bringing them to church and other stuff but it will be worth it. This past week we had Enoch (our ward mission leader/recent convert) come with us to Ema's place. He is learning about the restoration right now and we told Enoch about him before so he could know what we were going to discuss. Enoch bore a powerful testimony afterwards and Ema got way into it because he related to Enoch. We even ended up giving Ema a goal to be baptised on the 26th of this month! Members bring the spirit so much stronger!

Other than that not too much else happened this week... JUST KIDDING! I got to see my amazing family and talk to them for a bit! I love them so much and am so grateful to be a part of their family. Happy Mother's day mom! 

Have a great week!

Elder Rogers

Millicent's family

Saying goodbye to Elder Gibson

New companion Elder Saili

May 7, 2012 {Email}

Everything is just fabulous here in ghana with Elder saili. We have been having so much fun going around and meeting all the members and investigators. It's crazy to be showing ANOTHER companion the area. The members seriously love him. The work will keep going on here in Cape Coast! It was a fun week though doing the transfers and getting to see all the missionaries going there separate ways. Our zone had changes in every companionship except for one, so we got tons of new faces here. Today we had a powerful fufu feast so we could all get to know eachother. We've got a sweet zone! We met with Patrick again! He is improving on his "bad habits" but he is still really busy to be coming to church every week with us. It was great to see him again and to be able to help him out a little bit. We also found out this week that our Bishop has found Emmanuel's record number in Accra so he is officially a member and doesn't need to be baptized. That doesn't mean that we will stop working with him, we have got a sweet chart made up to help him overcome his "bad habit's" too. He is excited about it and ready to try again. It's just a gradual process and he is definitely improving. Elder Saili was so shocked when i introduced him to Emmanuel, "That's him?? He's huge!!" haha. But yeah things are going great! We finally got to see General Conference yesterday which was awesome! I love Elder Holland's talk! Well that's about it.. i can't believe this week is Mother's Day! Happy Mother's day to all you powerful Mother's out there! 

Elder Rogers

May 1, 2012 {Email}

This week was full of Elder Gibson saying goodbye to everyone. It was awesome to see how much they have appreciated all his hard work and love he has put into this area. He will definitely be missed by them and by me. He is a great missionary. So we were pretty busy doing that and trying to see our investigators. The serious investigators were very busy this week so we didn't get to much time with them. Hopefully this week when my new companion gets here we can get things going better with these people.Josephine came to church and we listened to Elder Holland's talk on the Lord of the Vineyard. She loved it. She is really enjoying her time at church. She will be in Accra this week so we have to wait until next week to see her again. Our zone had a powerful week of baptisms, we had 15 total. Our monthly goal was to get 26 and we only had 7 by the end of last week. Miracles do happen though and 5 out of the 7 companionships accomplished their goal left only with a couple that were just a little bit short, including ours. It's really cool to make these goals and have something to target for and then to have something to measure at the end. 22/26 is really good! It makes everyone pretty excited. 

My new companion is coming down from Kumasi today! His name is Elder Saili and he is from America Samoa. If i'm right he is coming up on 10 months in the field soon and was trained by Elder Hair. My apartment will be him and two other of his MT's ha. I hear he is a way sweet guy and he likes to play basketball and stuff. We will have fun. It's possible he could be my last companion. Well, i hope you all had and will have a great week!

Love,

Elder Rogers