Week One!

Wednesday, July 17, 2019 7:42 am MST

Bonjours mes amis! (hello my friends!)

Wow what a week it's been here in Ghana.  It's hard for me to write an email now because I've been here for a whole week and I have so much to talk about!

The flights here were pretty bad honestly.  I didn't sleep like at all on the flight to Amsterdam and then the flight to Ghana was 6 hours of sitting in the middle seat.  It felt like it took ages.  But we got here and that's what matters.  You could feel the humidity straight off the plane, it was awful, but I actually don't notice it anymore a week later, so that's good.  The brothers who picked us up were so funny.  And they drive insane!  There's no lights here, only round-a-bouts, but they seemed to just go wherever they wanted to.  They were constantly cutting people off, it was kinda scary but mostly just funny haha.

At the MTC there's probably 120 missionaries, and like 30 are American. The other 90 are African.  And in that there's probably 60 that speak English and 30 that speak French.  I love the African Elders.  They're all so nice and fun to talk to.  They love soccer, I've already found a Liverpool fan and we're buddies now.  They're way good at soccer too, probably half the MTC plays soccer during sports time and it's so fun.  The African missionaries also know their scriptures like crazy, especially the Bible.  They whip out scriptures like it's nothing, I've been impressed.  Their testimonies are way strong.  It's hard to understand them sometimes though, people are right when they say it's like learning another language.

I'm in an apartment with 3 other American Elders, and they're all way cool.  I already know they're going to be friends for life.  There's 2 from Utah and 1 from Tennessee.  The Tennessee one is going to my mission, so that's cool.  My companion is Elder Hougaard from Logan and he's going to Cote D'Ivoire.  Our apartments are really nice actually, just small.  It just feels like a hotel room right now.  It's weird to just be here and have no ties to my old life until P day.  It's like I just woke up and was living a new life with new people.  It's such a weird feeling haha.

Learning French is kind of boring right now.  It's mostly stuff that I already learned in school.  I have learned to pray and bear my testimony, and I've given a lesson in French!  The coolest part about learning the language though is that I have native French speakers living among me that I can practice with!  It's way cool and rewarding to be able to share the French that I've learned with them and show that it can actually mean something to people.

I was a little homesick for the first couple of days, but I've turned the corner and I've been doing really good now.  It just took some time to adjust.  I'm actually starting to enjoy the food now.  Every meal is half a plate of rice, so that gets kind of boring, but it's the weird stuff that's fun to try.  There's bowls of mush for breakfast and different lunch you eat with your hands and don't chew, only swallow.  They like spicy food too, and I'm starting to get used to it.  I also ate a fried fish.  Like it looked like they took a whole fish and threw it in a fryer.  It looks way gross but it was actually really good.  I'll get a picture of it next time.

There was a lesson I really liked this week on Sunday.  It was a lesson about prayer.  We talked about Enoch and his wrestle with God.  We talked about how we need to be praying for other people in addition to ourselves.  That really hit me because before that I was only praying for myself and trying to adjust to this change in my life.  Since I've been doing that I've been a lot happier and I've been able to adjust better too!  I encourage you all to try to incorporate that into your prayers this week and see how much happier it will make you!

Have a good week everyone!  Et par le pouvoir du Saint-Esprit, vous pouvez connaitre la verite de toutes choses  (And by the power of the Holy Spirit, you can know the truth of all things)

Elder Goddard

The "mush"

His companion and roommates

Ghana Temple