Merry Liberian Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all...

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. My companion and I got fed a lot! There was a lot of rice and chicken and potato salad and soft drink. I could hardly walk by the end of the day. I also got to talk with my family which made me so happy! Next year hopefully we will have a Christmas with everyone at home! I was really happy and I'm excited to be going back pretty soon... I'll be coming back in February. Still not sure on the date! I'll let you know. I'm excited, but I still love serving here and being around the people. But my time is definitely coming!!

We had our Christmas party yesterday and it was really nice. We played some games, had some Christmas songs and presentations and whatnot. We ate a lot of food there as well! I don't need to eat for a few days now. The mission gave us these really cool gifts as well! A mission key chain and pen and little flash light thing (could be useful for when the power goes out). They did a really good job I think everyone had a lot of fun. 

That's my short letter for this week! Yesterday they also had the runoff election so we should finally find out who the president of the country will be soon! Just so happy for this thing to be over. I'm tired of hearing about all this political stuff going on. 

Much love,

Elder Bush

Party!

Hey everyone how's the body? My body is doing alrigh o. 

So this week was pretty good. I always feel like there is so much stuff going on and then when it comes time to email nothing really happened. We had some fun this week though. We had two different parties that we attended. The first was on Saturday where the stake put on a whole Christmas devotional thing that was fun. Probably not as spiritual as the one at home might be, but definitely a cool experience. They did a lot of cultural dances and stuff as well which I loved! Took some pics and videos. 

Our landlady who we rent the apartment from had her graduation party Sunday after church. She just got her master's in something I don't remember. But they had their party in our compound (they also live there) and it was no small thing. The woman talked for probably over an hour about all her life's accomplishments and whatnot. It was her day though so no problem. They had tons of food and drinks and everyone in the community came to be a part of it. They did a really nice job and spent a ton of money. This is one of the nicer apartments that I've been in. 

Well, aside from that I don't recall too much stuff happening. Love you all!

Elder Bush

Me and the grad party

Grad party

Me and my companion

The capitol building (our apartment)

Walking about in my area

Exchange with Elder Stitcher

Small Kona! 

Small Kona again

Human baby stroller Amaka

Felix house! (we eat there every Thursday)

Me and my companion :) Elder Udo

The first three are myself and Elder Edemenang

This was my last district before 3 elders got transferred

Myself and Elder Jensen

Men in the Apartment

Men in the Kitchen

The bush near our apartment

Elder Beinbein!

Basketball near mission office

Royal Grand with my companion!

Monrovia!!

Oh, Hey Neighbor

Hey fam!

Just wanted to let you know that I love all of you very much. THe time continues to run down and I'm just amazed each day that I've been on my mission for this long. Can't say it has gone super fast, but it is still moving. Next week will mark 2 months till I go back, but who's counting?

This week was alright, a little stressful like it always seems to be, but not a bad thing. Helps me to focus on the work. I was blessed this week again to be able to meet with another Area Seventy personally. Elder Vinson came to Liberia to create the Paynesville and Caldwell stakes and I got to be in our MLC meeting with him. It was really cool. He read the dedicatory prayer of Liberia with us and it was incredible. The church is true o!  It was quite a spiritual experience. At the end he said well we have gone long and I haven't eaten all day so I think we should end here. I got to talk to him afterwards a little bit too and he is just a really normal person. He told me of a time when Elder Stevenson came to this mission last year. He was sick so Elder Vinson gave him a blessing. He said he was nervous blessing an apostle because he had never done that before. I think I would be nervous too.

So after the meeting we went to the assistants apartment to sleep because it was too late to go back to our apartments (Elder Vinson could only meet with us in the afternoon, we usually have MLC in the morning). So while we were there we were all just talking and Elder Weber started asking me some questions about BYU. He went there around the same time that I was going there. So he asked me where I lived in the fall and I told him I lived in Heritage Halls. Him: Which building? Me: 15. Him: Hm, I think I was in building 15... Which floor? Me: Third floor. Him: Woah! (moves backward a little bit) I was on the third floor! Turns out that not only were we in the same ward, but we were basically neighbors, were on the same side of the building and everything. We never even knew each other! He knew all of my roommates because the following semester one of my roommates became his home teaching companion. Never knew me though. It's funny too because we both kind of had the same philosophy in the ward. Show up, don't say anything, avoid giving talks or lessons, eat the food at activities and leave. Probably why we didn't know each other. Could have been really good friends though sadly. Just wanted to share that with you.

The rest of the week was fine. Trying my best to keep moving forward with strength. The area is not very easy but it will continue to progress. This woman named Kona that we are teaching is still giving us a hard time on Sunday. We went there to teach her from the Book of Mormon. In my opinion her problem is that she is not willing to be baptized again because she was baptized in her church. So even though she is praying, she is not praying with real intent because she doesn't intend to act upon that answer and accept the invitation to be baptized. Moroni tells us that a prayer without that real intent profit a man nothing and God answers none such. Just trying to encourage her to read and pray, but I don't believe she can reach that answer until she is willing to act upon it.

Aside from that everything is good. My stomach is doing alright... We still here.

Love you all!

Elder Bush

We Can Be Busy!

Hey my people. I'm doing my best not to think about home, and since we have about a million things going on right now it is making it a little bit easier. We are just constantly having meetings and things going on that we have to attend to. It makes me stressed at times but I guess it is better than being lazy and not having anything to do. The area is a little bit slow so all the attention on other things is not really helping. 

Is it getting close to Christmas? I couldn't really tell because nothing looks like Christmas here. It's really hot all the time and everything is just dirty. No Christmas lights or trees or anything. It's not really their fault though these good people don't have any money. The election nonsense is still going on as well so no one wants to spend their money because they are afraid that something could happen after the election actually ends. It's pretty sad.

Anyways, my week was alright. I feel like time is going to start moving a little bit slowly because I can actually see the end of the tunnel... Maybe. We have recently met with a man named Mohammed who is progressing pretty well so far. He is from a Muslim background and grew up in Sierra Leone and is really interested in the gospel now. He's heard some interesting things from different people but he wants to see for himself. We gave him a baptismal date for the 31st of December. If we can meet with him enough, he should be baptized on that day. Unfortunately, a lot of the people that we are able to meet with frequently during the week are not really progressing. Those that are can be difficult to meet with so we are trying to find the best way to adjust ourselves to be able to meet with them. Small small in this area. 

As for me I'm doing well. My stomach has been giving me small problems, but recently I've been feeling better. Everything will be fine in a few months?

I hope everything is going well and you are enjoying the Christmas season. 

Appreciate all the Savior has done for you. 

Love you all,

Elder Bush

12 Weeks Training

Well this is it my friends, my last 12 weeks in Liberia has begun!

I'm happy that I've made it this far, hopefully my body can make it a few more weeks. I believe it can. This week was good. We are struggling in our area a little bit due to a lack of investigators to teach during a regular day. Saturdays and Sundays always seem to be busy as well. We did a lot of finding to try to revamp the area. Hopefully a few of the people that we met with will progress. A few of them promised to come to church but none of them did unfortunately. 

We had a really fun Thanksgiving full of food and goodness. Thursday was Zone Conference so we went to the chapel in Tweh Farm and had a nice meeting there. We talked a lot about the Book of Mormon and the power it has in conversion. My testimony is strengthened each week in the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. We had lots of rice for lunch. I think it was turkey but it might have been chicken. Who knows. After the conference one of the members also had food for us (they feed us every Thursday). We went to the other Elders in our district's apartment and made fried chicken and fried potatoes for our dinner. Most of the good food here is fried... We were there till late so we just slept there and walked back in the morning. I hate sleepovers.

Sunday our Bishop gave us an big helping of potato greens. I like potato greens a lot. We are also beginning to teach two guys that are both from a muslim background that want to become christian. I think that is really cool. I'm excited to start to teach the two of them. 

Sorry, no pics this week, I will get you those next week! 

Love you all,

Elder Bush

Photos

Photos from my 21^st birthday…

 New teeth my mom sent us...

 This little guy loves us!

 Squished in a car-always 4 in the backseat

Calculation Givin me Har Time

So this week was pretty good. I can't believe that this transfer is almost over!! It's nuts! I feel like I just blinked and then it finished. Well, I guess it isn't over yet. These last 3 months are still sounding pretty long to be honest with you. I know that they will go fast though. Won't be long. 

Anyways, not much to say for this week. On Wednesday I went on exchange with Elder Olaoluwa so I slept in town with them in their apartment. They have a pretty nice apartment and they even have air conditioning. I tell you that air conditioning gave me a hard time. The next day I felt like I had a sore throat. I think I will die when I go back. But I'm ready to face it. Like I just feel so clean when I'm in air conditioning, it's amazing. I slept way better back in my hot apartment with my fan on though. I feel like I'm going to be like that missionary from the Other Side of Heaven when he goes back and has to sleep on the floor. Except I will need a hot room, a fan and a mosquito net. It will be so strange without it. 

So anyways on the exchange i learned a lot form him. He is Nigerian and will be going home one transfer before me. Everyone on this mission is going home it's nuts. Probably half the mission or more have only 6 months or less left. He is a great missionary and is still working hard. Trying to be like him :)

Sunday we had two of our investigators Confirmed (last week they were baptized). Very happy that they made that step. 

Sunday night one guy called us and asked us for money to pay his house rent. We asked him how much it was and he said he pays 120 for the whole year. My companion then asked so then how much per month. He was confused for a little and then said "I don't know the calculation givin me hard time!"

I love these people. I will miss them so much.

Bye bye!!

Elder Bush

Washing Bidneh

Alright this week was not bad. We were busy as usual with meeting and other stuffs so we didn't get to teach too much. We met one guy who really wanted to contend with us about our beliefs. I don't really have time for people like that anymore. Wo unto the wise. 

Sunday we had a baptism for Evelyn, Theresa, Mamee and Bishop! Mamee and Bishop have been investigating the church for about 2 years now but they haven't been consistent so no one has baptized them. They finally got themselves together though and we're all happy! Aside from that everything else is normal. Well, relatively.

This week I will talk about washing your clothes. According to Liberians you all are lazy because you use a washing machine. So let me tell you the real way how to do it:

So first off you need a few buckets. Preferably you will have a large tub that is wide so that you can put a lot of clothes in there. You can use a small bucket if you don't have many clothes. take the large tub and fill it maybe a little more than half way full of water. Then add some soap. Powdered detergent or liquid soap if that is all you have and bleach if you are washing whites. Mix the water around and then put your clothes inside. If it is whites, you can probably leave it in the bucket over night to let the bleach set in to help bring out the whiteness. 

Now here is the tricky part that is not so easy. Obviously you are going to use your hands to wash these clothes. So you will pick up one shirt and start to basically rub it against itself. You can also use a bar of soap to get it more clean since the powdered or liquid soap might not be enough. So use your two hands and begin to rub the cloth against itself in order to take out the dirt. Kind of difficult to explain. You especially need to do this with the collar. Continue doing that until you have scrubbed every part of the shirt and you think it is clean. Then squeeze it and put it in bucket of water to rinse it. Once you rinse it then you squeeze it again and hang it up outside on the line! Then wait for the sun to dry your clothes and you're done!

Thanks for all the love and support! Have a great week!

Elder Bush

Don't Be The Wild Duck

This week ended up being really great.

I will skip to Sunday because of time. Sunday we had our second counselor from the seventy come and visit our Stake Conference. He gave a story that I really loved. He said when he was growing up there were ducks all around him where he lived in Minnesota. During the winter they would migrate to another place. He said that he had some tame ducks that he would feed corn or bread or whatever to and they would not fly because they were too fat to fly. Well, one day another wild duck who was around the tamed ducks started to get closer and eventually started eating the food he gave them. Pretty soon the wild duck became very fat, so much so that he could no longer fly either. One day a man came and picked up all the ducks when it was getting closer to winter. His mother told him that the man was a farmer that would take care of them, but later he learned that the man was going to eat them. He knew that the tame ones probably would have that end but he felt bad for the wild duck. This was a duck that was free, but lost his freedom because he became dependent upon others. He talked about self reliance and how we should not rely upon others and become fat like the wild duck. We should work and gain our own money so that we don't have to look for others to provide for us. The wild duck chose the easy way... Work hard!

Love you all,

Elder Bush

TIA This Is Africa

Hello my people!

I don't really know who is still reading this besides my mom, but thanks if you are I appreciate it. I only have about 16 more of these letters I think. I had a pretty good week despite some few short comings. The Lord always performs miracles.

So like I said this week had some short comings unfortunately. Tuesday my companion and I walked out near hotel Africa which is so far away and no one that we hoped to see was around. We Walked!! We always walk a lot but that day just seemed to be extreme. We were so tired coming home but I always feel that the Lord blesses me for those efforts, even though nothing is going well, He recognizes my effort.. 

Wednesday I fell sick with a poor stomach. I was able to go out for one lesson to one man that we contacted. I just felt like I should force it to see the man. Turns out he is legally married, has a lot of children and even came to church on Sunday! That meant a lot to me.. 

The rest of the week went fine. The Bishop was supposed to go with us to meet a man on Saturday but when we called him he said he was in Nimba... About an 8 hour drive from Banjor. Liberia... He made it to church the next day and met with this family I was teaching a year ago in Caldwell who just moved here! They haven't been baptized because they are not yet married, but they should be soon. I was so happy to see them come to church. Small world right?

There is one woman we are teaching named sister Kona. This woman is very sweet and she loves the missionaries but she is incredibly stubborn. On Sunday we were talking to her about the Book of Mormon and she was not being humble at all. Trying to tell us she has read the book and knows it is all about the Americans and this nonsense. I thought of Abinadi when he asks the apostate priests if they had read the scriptures. They said yes. He said well, then you don't understand them. It was so difficult for me not to come back at her with fire. The Book of Mormon is something I have gained such a strong testimony of on my mission so when people attempt to condemn the book it takes all my energy not to give it to them... But I held my peace. Tried my best. It's not easy sometimes. Occasionally I just want to take the knowledge that I have and shove it into their brain so that they can understand. But that's not how we do it. Just try my best to be patient with her and love her but she is not yet ready to accept the gospel. She will need a lot more time but I have faith that one day she will and she will stop denying the truth. 

I know that it is true though and I can't deny it. I am thankful for the things that I understand and have learned on my mission. Helps me to understand so much more about what life is really about. 

So my mom asked some questions I will try to answer. The area that I am in now is pretty nice, I like it. It is fairly large and has a lot of dryness. The rain is slowing down so usually it will just rain for a few minutes during the day or at night. The people in the area are pretty nice, but I don't know where too many of the members live. It is a little bit far from the city, but I don't mind. Pretty quiet there. The apartment is nice. We have electricity at night and if we need it in the morning we can turn on the gen but we usually don't need to. I like the apartment a lot. It is only me and my companion who are in it so we each use our own bathroom. Kitchen is nice and there is always running water because they pump it from a well into a big black tank. So that one is not a problem. 

The election is not doing much right now, they have now gotten to the second round between two candidates. The second election is on November 7th so we might stay in that day I don't know yet. But no problems except for one of the candidates (who is now the vice president) came right next to the apartment the other day. That was cool.

Wanted to send pics but something is wrong.. Sorry, I love you guys.

Elder Bush

Transfer to Banjor

Sup people this is me.

So today I took my transfer out of Congo Town to Banjor. It is a little further out from the city than my last area. I'm not sure if I will end my mission here or not because I only have 3 transfers left. My new companion is Elder Udo M. and he is from Nigeria of course. My sixth companion from Nigeria. He's super sweet though and I think we will get along really well. 

Something interesting is that our apartment is only us. We don't have any other Elders in the apartment so that is the first time I've had that on my mission. The apartment looks pretty nice though so no problem there. 

Well I don't have too much else for this week because I haven't done anything here yet! So we'll see next week. I'm going to try to exercise more here. That's about it!

Love you,

Elder Bush

Election Bidneh Har!!!

The way the country har! That how the country lookin. So the election in this country is not a small thing. This place is so busy and jammed packed all the time now it's hard to go anywhere. The country's election is tomorrow the 10th of October. They have a ton of different candidates and they all have campaign rallies at different times and people just lose their minds. In the states we mainly have two parties that win each year, but here they have about 30 different parties that go at it. Of course there are some main ones that are more likely to win, but I don't really know any of them so to me they all can win. It makes a lot of people really busy though so it's more difficult to find people at home now. 

Anyways! Besides that this week went well. We're busy as usual. Thursday we had our zone conference and it was really nice. We talked a lot about working with members and how to work with stake and ward leaders. I never really realized before how little I was doing to help the church progress. I'll have to do better when I get back. 

On Friday, the Sinkor zone was asked to stay in their apartments because of a campaign rally that was supposed to be crazy. So we stayed in the apartment the whole day. It felt really weird because I've made that a point on my mission to never spend the whole day in the apartment. It has only happened once when I got really sick one morning and didn't even go to church. This was the second time. I just feel guilty when I'm in the apartment. Not bad though I got to rest :)

Saturday was nuts. Saturday was the last day that people would be allowed to have any kind of election campaign or anything like that so everyone was out. The traffic was really bad, but we weren't really affected for most of the day. However, on our way home we hit some trouble. Walking back to our apartment there is one of the major party's headquarters there and everyone and their dog was there. It was completely stopped traffic. There are two lanes on each side but it basically just looked like there were cars on all four lanes facing each other in a dead stop. We weren't really supposed to be there but we had to get back. Luckily it was also pouring rain so we got soaked in addition to our crazy adventure. When we got in front of the headquarters there were people all over on the street chanting and yelling and police cars everywhere. We were just walking in between cars and trucks and buses on the road because no one could move. We walked in between two huge trucks and got so wet! Luckily my scriptures were okay. Looking back it was kind of cool but at the moment I was feeling bad that we were in the situation. I didn't really think that anything would happen to us, but we shouldn't find ourselves in places like that so it was unfortunate but probably unavoidable. We made it back safely and I'm alive and well. 

Well that was the craziness that happened this week. One woman said that she was stuck in the traffic until 3 am. She still came to church because she said she had promised us but she went home early because she was tired. Can't blame her. 

I'm doing great though! Can't complain. Love you all. :)

Elder Bush

September Photos