Kent and Judy

Sunday March 3, 2013

Hi Everyone, I can't believe we have reached March. This has been a very busy week at work. We have had several Wards and Stakes, especially in the Cote d'Ivoire and Liberia, request to make new wards, branches and stakes. It means that everyone needs new maps for boundaries and new leadership positions filled. This means lots of work for Kent and me. We have not been getting home from the office until after 6:00 at night. That is a very long day. We have also had a very interesting week.

Monday

We went to the Makola Market. The Makola Market is one of the most renowned markets in the world. It was constructed in 1924 and was the main wholesale and retail market in Accra. It is filled with so many people and pathways that it is extremely easy to get lost.

Can you imagine shopping in this!

Brother Sono-Koree is the area Family History person. I work with him, when I work on the Area History. His wife owns a material shop at the Makola Market. He has wanted me to visit her shop - but we needed a time when he could come with us and show us how to get to her shop. So on Monday, Sister Curtis, and Sister Sitati and myself went with Elder Sono-Koree to Makola Market. Kent drove us.

This is Sister Sono-Koree, she has owned this small shop for 32 years.

This is Kent and Elder Sono-Koree

Me with Sister Sono=Koree, Sister Sitati and Sister Curtis
check out on the brightly colored fabric. We had fun picking out pieces that we liked.

While we were picking out he Fabric, Kent stepped outside and took a picture of the path we followed.
We past hundreds of pairs of shoes, on the way out, I bought a pair.

The blue fabric is one of the pieces that I bought. Several of the ladies are having skirts or dresses made. A seamtress
here will charge you $10.00 for a lined skirt and $20.00 for a dress or a skirt and top.
The material was also quite inexpensive. I am going to have a skirt made from that piece of fabric.
It was a very day - I still don't think we could find the shop again and parking is another story!

On Wednesday of this week, when we went out to go to work, a little girl that lives here wanted me to take her picture. Her name is Josie. I took her picture, then I bought her a coloring book and crayons and gave them to her. She was very excited.

This is Josie, it was taken in the Courtyard of where we live.

Thursday of this week, we had a whole group of people come from Monrovia, Liberia to attend the temple. The church actually paid their airfare for them to get to Accra. These people come with their families, so that they can be sealed or go through the temple for the first time. They bring all of their own food with them and sometimes they sleep in the Stake Center. They NO MONEY.

I have been helping Brother and Sister Houssian with some family history. Trying to train people on Sunday's how to teach the Family History class. They have developed and real hands on program, but
people have very little access to computers and even the ones at the stake center are hardly used, because they do not know how to work them.

Thus, they often come into the office building to get help, so that they can get the names entered, so that they can get the cards made at the temple to do the work. On Thursday of this week, Sister Houssian was so busy, whe asked if I would ehlp a man from Liberia. His name was Henry Himie Nagbe. When he came to my office, I helped him enter the names of his children and wife. He looked old, but the children were really young. I asked him if I could come and take a picture of his family.

This is the story: He is 62 years old and his wife died and he has several children that are grown and married. He had a good friend that was going to die, the one thing she wanted him to do, was to take care of her adopted daughter that had some medical issues. She knew if she died, the girl would be cast out to the streets and that because of the medical condition, no one would marry her. He married the girl and gave her a home and has taken care of her. They have had these three children. They came to be sealed.

I decided to make a copy of these pictures and give them to him. It was very touching. You would have thought that I had given him the world. He was going to laminate the pictures and he kept saying, now we have something to take back to show our friends. It does touch your heart. It is hard to think that we have so much and they have so little.

Saturday - the Shai Animal Reserve

Dad and I decided to take a ride to the Shai Animal Reserve which is just North of Tema. It is always so interesting to go through these little towns. One of the towns that we past through had bread, up and down the street everyone was selling bread. I suppose there is a bread factory close by.

I haven't figured out which one I would stop at, since they all look alike and sell the same thing!!!

Check out the name of this store - most businesses are named using a phrase from the scriptures.
They are also written on the back of all the taxies and tro-tro"s.

I loved this stand with Mango's and onions. You never know what you will see.

After driving for a couple of hours, we finally arrived at the Reserve. I can't say it was the best place I have ever been, but it was interesting.

This was at the front gate. It is where we bought our ticket and got a guide. They have you drive your own
car and the guide gets into the car with you, to show you where to go.

The Shai Reserve consists of a very striking and attractive range of rocky hills set in the middle of expansive open and wooded grassland plains. At present, it has 31 species of mamals, more thant 175 species of birds and 13 reptile species. It is very hard to think that it has that much, since you really see very little of them.
The first animal that we saw were some ostriches - They imported them from South Africa.

This is the Female - they are keeping them behind a fence until they can fix the reserve.

This was our guide.

The Black one is the male. He is much prettier.

We drove over grasslands to see the Antelope. The road were awful, they were dusty, dry and bumpy. If it had been the rainy season, it would all be MUD.

If this looks black, it is. They have burned a large area of grassland, so that during the rainy
season they will get fresh grass for the Antelope

They may have large herds of Antelope, but we did not see very many.

They can run very fast

One of the more fascinating things in the park were the caves. The Shai tribe, who drifted over to Ghana from Nigeria many years ago, settled into these caves and surrounding hill tops. The tribes were territorial in nature and therefore defense was an important issue. These caves were very unique because they could only be entered at one certain point. They could easily defend that entrance. We hiked up to one of the caves.

This was entrance to hike the rest of the way up to the cave.
You had to duck to get through it.

Kent at the Entrance

When you got through the entrance, there was a shear rock wall, they could block the entrance with rocks
and they could also throw rocks from the top down on the people below. You still
had to hike quite far up to get to the cave.

I stopped and Kent continued up to go into the cave.

Kent took a picture of me when he was in the cave - looking out!

Once inside the cave, you can climb the ladder to get to the top of the hill.

This was an exit that led to another cave, where they sent the women and children, when someone
was attacking them. Inside the cave are hundreds of bats. The ground surface was very
soft, The guide said that they were walking on bat droppings.

At the top you could look out over the plains

Kent at the top - When the British came the Shai tribes recreated all kinds of problems. The British decided to
remove them from the caves so that they could be controlled. It took a great deal of time and loss of
life to accomplish this. They finally did it and now the Shai tribe lives on the plains below.

We then drove over to see the Baboons. They would come close enough to you, so that you could feed

them banana's. I loved them.