Fried fish, head and all!!!

I'd like to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!! To the greatest father alive!! Love and miss you so much! I hope you had a wonderful day! I made banana cake and ate it in place of you for your birthday! 

So another good week. I didn't have as much as a rough time as last week so that was good. Ate something new this week.. Fried fish, head and all!!! Also had banku. It's kinda like fufu but you can chew it...somewhat. 

Banku is a Ghanaian dish which is cooked by a proportionate mixture of fermented corn and cassava dough in hot water into a smooth, whitish consistent paste.Served with soup, stew or a pepper sauce with fish. one of the staple foods enjoyed by all tribes in the country.

Anyway I ate some but near the end I started to gag a little because it was so much so I asked my companion to help me finish it. (An additional perk to having an African companion for things like this).

Anyway, we've expanded our teaching pool a little bit but not a whole lot. We've also found another less active lady that we'll begin teaching this week her name is A__. 

Yesterday (Sunday) we had stake conference at the temple site (they have a stake center right next to it). It was so heartwarming to see the temple again!! As soon as we passed the gate to drive onto the temple site I was filled with so much joy!! It felt as if all my worries were gone. 

When they started conference, there were so many people that there was hardly any room for the missionaries to sit down so we had to wait outside. But it wasn't too bad; I was able to catch up with some elders and a sister that were in my MTC group. 

To catch you up on some people were teaching, one lady whose name is M__. We've taught all the way up to through lesson 2 and she seems to understand and accept everything we are teaching, she even testified that she knows the Book of Mormon is true. But we have yet to get her to come to church! This seems to be the biggest challenge here in Ghana. Almost all of the investigators we have won’t come to church because they're so attached to the one they have been attending already. So we need to find a way to get them there to feel the spirit. The same goes for R__, and this other girl L__.

We met a new girl this week named M___. She's 19. She called us because she's seen us come around her compound a lot. Apparently she met with missionaries a while back (about a year ago), but they never started teaching her. So when we came to see her, she was reading a Book of Mormon. We had the opportunity to ask her some questions. Her biggest problem was she didn't understand anything she was reading. She didn't even know the history of the book so we spent some time and took here through that. Then her last question before we closed the lesson was 

"So how can I know if this church is true?" 

You know that someone is serious about learning what we teach when they ask questions like this! We told her through prayer that she can know the truth of all things! God doesn't lie to us and will tell us in our heart. So, hopefully we can continue to teach her and bring her to church. 

This week on Thursday, Elder Bednar is coming to our mission!!!!! He's meeting with the missionaries...as long as we bring an investigator. We're planning on bringing M__. I'm so excited for him to come! 

My Book of Mormon reading is going so well! I just started Alma on Saturday and it's like a whole new understanding for me on what I read. I pray before I read and ask for understanding and then mark when I read and it's helped me so much. It's crazy how I hated reading before my mission and now I don't really mind it at all.  I know the Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ! And that the words in it are from prophets of God!

A little update about trying to stay in shape... I grabbed Elder Barr, who is the next heaviest elder(150 lbs.-ish)  in the apartment, I put him over my shoulders and I started squatting him. It's not a lot but it definitely works the legs. We also bike everywhere in our area so that helps too. I'm just trying not to get a banku or fufu belly!! I think I'd rather go bald then fat on my mission!! ha ha Oh, it also rained and rained again. When it rains here we get flooding really quick. It's crazy. 

That's about it for this week. We will be in on Halloween this Saturday so we're going to carve pineapples and watermelons that evening. 

Love and miss everyone! God bless you all!

Love Elder Morris!!