Elder Aidan Holyoak: Halloween and Deluxe Indomie

Hello everyone this week was very interesting. I'm going to warn you now that this email is going to be a little long but that's because I had a lot to talk about.

First of all, I met my new companion! His name is Elder Mvoula (pronounced mm voo la). He is from the Republic of Congo and he's super funny and chill. We have already had a great week together and I can tell that we are going to work well together. His first language is French, so he learned English for his mission here. He has been in Ghana for 7 months now though so we can communicate pretty well. Elder Segura is also training now and he is training a Ghanaian named Elder Mensah. The whole apartment is still a lot of fun (definitely not as loud).

One of the fun things we have been doing as a zone is practicing in the stake choir. They invited all of the missionaries so we have been going for around 2 weeks now. We found out that the choir would be performing at a funeral. Now it was a little bit of a shock because the entire choir didn't really sound that good. Especially the missionaries because over half of us didn't know how to sing, including me. When the funeral came around it got even worse. They told us that we would be singing one hymn for the open casket. We had a little bit of practice beforehand, but when the time came we squeezed a choir of about 50 people on a tiny stage and sang a hymn to the open casket. Luckily it was only one verse, but it was still pretty strange. We then went up to the area behind the pulpit and took our seats. We sang about 5 other Hymns throughout the funeral service and there were probably over 200 people in the building. (That sounds like an exaggeration, but the building was packed to the brim.) We found out this Sunday, after practice, that they didn't want the missionaries participating in the choir anymore. They said, "We want you to be able to focus more on your work, then to come to choir." We all knew it was just because we are bad at singing.

One fun thing that happens on occasion here in Ghana is that the water in the missionary apartments will just stop working. Sometimes we can fix it ourselves and we only go without water for maybe an hour, but other times we have to call the mission repair guy and it can be out for a couple days. This weekend we were lucky enough to go without water for 2 and a half days. That's a new record for me, but I've heard of other missionaries having it worse. The power will also go out sometimes and funny enough we had no power and no water for 3 hours on Halloween night. When you have no water you have to either buy bags of water in bulk or fetch water yourself with a bucket. The spigot for our water is just outside our apartment so we don't have to walk far. Don't worry too much about us though, the repair guy fixed our pump this morning so it probably won't break again for at least a few weeks.

Pro-tip for anyone who has to shower with a bucket: If you take about 1/4 of the water out of the bucket and boil it, then mix it in with the rest and you can have a hot shower just like the ones you had at home.

Happy Halloween!!! We didn't celebrate much because we live in a country where the holiday doesn't exist but we tried our best. Me and Segura sort of made costumes and we bought some candy. We also played some Halloween music and had dinner. I found some deluxe Indomie that I had that night and it was pretty nice.

Scripture of the Week - Matthew 21:22 "And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive."

Well thanks for reading, I hope you all had a great Halloween!

See you next week,

Elder Holyoak