Welcome to Liberia

Oh, the difference a week makes!

It’s hard to believe that last Sunday we were sitting in Provo at the MTC in a Sacrament Meeting presided over by President Nelson and attended by the first Presidency, entire Quorum of the Twelve and presidency of the Seventy.  The First Presidency were kind enough to shake each of our hands. President Nelson was the only speaker at the meeting. It was a rare and wonderful meeting!  

Each day of the Mission Leadership Seminar was packed full of instruction and insights from the apostles and other members of the Missionary Committee.  We even had family night with a David Archuleta Concert. It’s hard to beat a 3^rd row, center seats!

The interesting thing about the Seminar was the transition from an emotional “What are we doing here?  Do we really want to do this?” when we arrived, to “It’s time to go!” four days later. What a lovely experience to be nurtured, instructed, inspired and supported by the leadership of the Church.  This work is important to them!

We came home from the Seminar on Tuesday night; said our last, heartbreaking good-bye’s on Wednesday; and flew out Thursday morning.  Our routing took us from SLC to Chicago to Brussels to Sierra Leone to Monrovia. Things were uneventful except for a 5-hour delay in Brussels.  Because of the length of the delay, the flight crew needed to be exchanged. It required them to skip the stop in Sierra Leone and fly directly to Monrovia (yay!)  This got us here at least two hours earlier than we would have otherwise (yay!). Speaking of tender mercies, the outgoing Mission President picked us up at the airport.  They had allowed 90 minutes for them to get to the airport to retrieve us but got stuck in traffic that hadn’t moved for an hour. They were pretty concerned and knew they wouldn’t make it to the airport on time unless they started moving.  They said a prayer and said the traffic just “opened up”. They arrived at the airport about 6 minutes before we came out. They knew they had experienced a miracle.

After getting to bed around midnight, we went to the Mission Office all day to be ‘debriefed’ by the outgoing Mission President.  We had only been there a few minutes when the President received a phone call from one of his missionaries and promptly handed the phone to President Price.  The missionary was a native African with a strong accent. President Price had no idea what he was saying so he kept saying: “Elder, we must have a bad connection, would you repeat that?”

For Church today, we drove out to the Totota Branch with one of the Senior Couples.  They have only been organized for about a year and have recently moved into “new,” rented space (pictures included).  It’s a pretty humble building with plumbing issues. We were filling buckets of water from the baptismal font to be able to flush the toilet.  Both the Primary and RS rooms were about 8’ x 8’. These people are so grateful to have a building because their previous meeting place had been a concrete slab with a tin-roof (no walls) that leaked in the rain.  They would often have to move the sacrament table to a non-drippy spot on the concrete! The Elder’s Quorum President told us: “We were not looking at the building, we were looking at the message. Interestingly, the spirit we felt in the Sacrament meeting today was just as strong as the spirit we felt in the Sacrament meeting last week with Pres. Nelson.  There were ten investigators at Church today—pretty typical for most of the mission!

We met with one of our Zones today for the Meet the President meeting.  They are energetic and fun! We’ll continue to meet with the rest of the zones this week.  We will also have our first Mission Leadership Council (MLC) this coming week.. Hopefully, we’ll have time to buy some groceries!

It feels like our world has turned completely upside down for all the contrasts we are seeing from just one week ago.  Everyone is so, so poor—but so happy. Images of windowless vans with garbage bags taped on to keep the rain out.—laundry done with a washboards and plastic basins—children carrying baskets of goods and big sticks on their heads—babies tied on to their mamas and siblings—delivery trucks piled three bulging layers high with people riding on top—traffic driving the same direction in all lanes (even with oncoming traffic)—little girls playing with sticks with black yarn nailed to the top (babydolls).    

It is wonderful!