Saturday & Sunday, April
28-29, 2018
I’ve had some very pleasant days
doing the same thing over and over again—the wash, which I for some reason feel
great pleasure in doing, my bowl of cereal for lunch (feeding my addiction to
cold cereal). I even found one of my favorites at the grocery store—a
smashed-up box, but tasted the same anyway, and overpriced, as all things
American are in grocery stores meant for Europeans and Americans. I have been reading my books, watching TV (they
have an amazing variety of shows and movies here at this hotel), and working on
reports and organizing the hundreds of pictures I always seem to collect while
traveling. I do this while Jim is out
there hiking and sweating and being exhausted in the awful heat and humidity (someone
has to do it, so it might as well be him).
But in truth he keeps telling me to stay back and he is always glad
after a long day that I did—the hikes are not easy, slipping over rocks, going
way down and then way back up again. You
can see by the pictures, especially here in Freetown, the rocky hills and
valleys they live and carry their water around in. The people here in Africa are as sure-footed
as any in the world that live in these conditions.
A rocky, hilly area,
all over Freetown.
Try
carrying a bucket on your head over a wobbly bridge…
Today Jim is home with me, having
completed looking and being here a little longer than necessary, but then we
will get lots of our work done here before we return and have other things on
our jetlagged minds. Yesterday they saw
15 sites, so it was a long, hard day, but it is finished. Today he is working on his reports from
yesterday’s looking. These are possible
projects that we might put into our current water budget for this year. Since there will probably only be about 4-6
that we will request to do for this year, we can keep others in mind for
another year’s budget.
One of the places he saw had a
bunch of large poly tanks with taps at the bottom, spaced along one road, and
put in by UNICEF. The community asked
them to place these with the intent that GUMA (government) water would fill
them. GUMA only has one truck to fill tanks
in the whole area. We did an area
project and even they say that sometimes the truck never comes—the truck might
be broken or they can’t get water either.
We thought that we might redo a pump here so that we could distribute
water lines to all of these tanks and keep them filled.
We’ll give you tanks;
maybe someone will fill them for you!
Other projects that they looked
at were sometimes disappointing because of the lack of action by a
community. One group had a 10-year old
well with a hand pump that has been broken for a year. They figured that the only problem was that
the pump rod was broken, an easy, cheap fix.
A year? They were even collecting
money there, so why not fix it? They
fixed it once a year before, but didn’t care enough to fix it this time? Other places we hesitate to work in are those
that are filthy or people are fighting.
We know they don’t have many places that collect trash, but we have also
seen communities that have the same amount of trash, but they don’t throw it
everywhere and still manage to keep the place clean. Even though we sometimes don’t want to do a
project in a dirty area, we do have proof that if you go back again and again
they can learn to keep the place clean.
This happened at L/G. It used to
be full of garbage but now, through Brother Thomas’s work, it is a clean
place. These communities will be
required to donate 20% of the cost of the project. If they earn their money and get a bank
account, we will do one for them. We can
always do more of the likeable projects in future years. These people generally have more money than
they do in village district areas, where we are requiring 10%. We will have people hired like Brother
Thomas, to keep visiting them, but we want to be sure before we do a project,
the possibility of them keeping it up so we don’t have problems later.
We can ask them to
clean up their trash and they will, but as soon as the project is done, it will
look like this again, unless we have a Brother Thomas to keep after them…
We are pleased that almost all
but one area in the present project are working correctly, but much of that has
to do with Brother Thomas’s dogged determination, visiting them twice a month
for the past several months. There are
two communities that we will write a letter for requiring them to split their
committees when people can’t agree. Then
they will do better on their own and not be drug down by another group that
doesn’t work to keep their donation viable.
Why they need an official letter we do not know, but we drafted one that
we e-mailed to Brother Thomas to help a couple of the communities out. We are pleased to be working with such an
effective monitor. We will also be trying
out John Conteh, our driver, who also has done work for the church before, as
another contractor on this project. We
will give him one to see if we like his work.
He might also work for less than our present contractor, but then a
lower price doesn’t always equal good work.
We shall see.
Our Area Welfare Manager in Accra
for the last several years has been John Buah.
He is the loveliest man and is also a Stake Patriarch. He finally gets to retire in a few days, even
though he’d hope to a few months ago but they couldn’t find his
replacement. We found out that our old
AWM, Daniel Yirenya is taking his place.
Daniel has been serving as an Area 70, the ones that serve for about 8
years and then get released. Others
serve for a lifetime, the first quorum of 70.
He just got released and is back at his old job. We wondered who it might be. Now we know.
We had John and Lionel visit us
to get paid for the work that they have done for us this week. We will be working with them yet again. We really like these pleasant young men. We are on the home stretch now, but we have a
lot of paperwork and figuring to do in the next few days here at the hotel, and
of course, Church tomorrow.
Sunday
John picked us up to take us to
his Ward, a short distance from the hotel.
Our old friend Marcus is the Bishop there, and he was being released
because he is now the Stake President. So
during Sacrament meeting they heard who their new Bishopric was and several of
them spoke. Sunday school was normal and
the third hour was a CD training that was apparently prepared by the Ghana Area
Presidency about how to mentor, how to do councils, etc. Then they had a discussion. For some reason they started this about 20
minutes late, so the meeting lasted another half hour longer. It was not so hot today and sitting under the
fan was helpful, but we were both still sleepy, me especially. It is hard to hear what they are saying both
in translation (accent) and their soft voices and the bad PA system. We both fell asleep after we got back to the
hotel. Then we continued working on
reports and Jim had to decipher which projects we might want to do for this
year here in Freetown. One more day of
working, which will be nice to get completed before heading back to Accra on
Tuesday.
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