The forecast is.......

(Entered by his brother Ryan)

Ghana is definitely a little different than Utah, that is for sure. Utah is pretty much either dry and very hot, dry and cool, or dry and freezing. Ghana on the other hand is humid and pretty hot all the time. Nothing ever really changes here. The difference between really hot days and the really cold days is about 15 degrees. Haha, back home the difference between hot and cold is closer to 100 degrees. Instead of "hot" days here we get humid days. I gotta say though, those aren't fun. Any given day here I sweat more than I would in a week back home. On the humid days though it is insane. I am sweating before I even get on my bike to go to appointments. I tell ya, I am going to shrivel up like a raisin when I get back home to 0-3 % humidity. We don't really have seasons here either. Technically there are three-ish seasons here. Rainy (really just cloudy), sunny, and windy. Even these are pretty much all the same.

Enough about the weather though. The work here is going very well. My third baptism is in two days on the 20th and then numbers 4, 5, & 6 are on the third of Oct. Some missions are teaching mission. Some missions are member retention missions, some are service missions. My mission is a baptizing mission, thats for sure.

Like I said, the work is going well. I teach all the time and it almost always goes pretty smoothly. I did have an old lady want and almost try to beat me up.....luckily I survived. The hardest part is when the people don't speak English very well, or even don't speak it at all. About six months ago the rules changed and we are not taught Twi (the local language) anymore. I can introduce myself in it and do some small talk and whatnot but thats about it. The hard times are when the person (usually only the middle aged/older people) only speak Twi. I can understand a little of what they say but I have to speak through a son or a daughter as a translator in order to teach. That gets annoying after like five minutes. The really hard ones are the people that only speak Gha or Ewe (pronounced e-hway). Those people I usually cant teach at all. Thats not really good. I don't like not being able to teach someone. It's super frustrating. Another few months and I should be able to teach at least the first lesson in Twi. That should be pretty cool.

We are teaching some awesome people though. Most all of them that we have baptized are either young (30 years old or younger) or older (55-60 and up). For some reason none of the middle aged people listen to us nearly as much. If they do, they are super stubborn and they listen because we are teaching their family. I wonder what the difference is. Maybe I will figure it out eventually.

So we were told that an Elder ran away from the MTC here in Ghana today.......... This morning everyone woke up like normal but sometime throughout the day, this Elder ran away. What? Who in their right mind would run away from the MTC? It's the best place ever. Free food and lots of it. They wash all of your clothes for you, there is air-conditioning in every class room. You get an hour and a half to play football (soccer) everyday, you can take long hot showers and you get to hang out with at least twenty plus Elders every day. No one can figure it out. There is not much of a chance of finding him if he does not want to be found. Accra alone has several million people in it, and he could blend in easily. There is now a mission wide search for this Elder. Hopefully we find him.

Well, Thats about all the news from New Town for now. I'll write all of you soon. Hope all of you will too.

Elder Tollstrup