Baptism pictures

Christmas in Africa

Mission President

French

Oh yeah, so the title of the email. Lately, I have been working with some new missionaries now, and in a new branch. It seems like everyone has been telling me I speak good French. And actually, I do feel like I speak decent French most of the time, but I still have a lot to learn. But, I speak French pretty much all day every day, and most of the time it works fine. There is the gift of tongues for you. 7 months to learn a language.

Akpakpa

I am in Akpakpa now. It is quite a change. It is a lot different than most of the other areas of Cotonou. There are a lot more big houses, and bigger roads, more cars, etc. Our apartment is right on one of the major roads here, and so is quite noisy some of the time. The church is below our apartment, so it is very close. The branch here is small, very small, but yesterday the room was completely filled, since the room we have sacrament meeting in isn't very big either. We had 41 people there, including several investigators which is not something the missionaries have had a lot of success with here, getting people to church. Often, two or three at church is a major accomplishment.

You asked if Akpakpa was in the East of Cotonou, I think so, but I don't really know directions that much. But, I guess the ocean is to the south, so yes, it is to the east. It is a section of Cotonou, there are tons of different quarters or areas in the city, it is a big city.

My companion is named Elder Aka, he is from Cote d'Ivoire. I don't know a whole lot about him yet. I think he has been a member 4 years or so, and on a mission for a year and a half or so.

Ouidah

Zone visit to Ouidah

Slave arch

Portugese slave castle

Today we went out to Ouidah (pronouned Weeda) with Elder Samutamu, who was our zone leader and finished his mission tomorrow. It was pretty fun, we saw tons of crazy things. It is a town about an hour from Cotonou. It has quite a few ''tourist'' type places, or at least as tourist-y as you can get in Benin. We went to a musuem that was an old portuguese fort and had some interesting stuff. Also some places where they talked about the slave trade here, which they also talked about at the old fort. The ocean is really beautiful, we got to see that. Ouidah is apparently the city where voudoo originated, there is a cool fact for you. Voudoo is really big here, I think it is recognized by the government. There was a voudoo temple here Temple de Pythons, I think you can probably translate that. But, we didn't end up going there.

First, when we went to go there, there was some problem, and a bunch of people running around with machetes, so we decided it would be better to come back later. We never did find out exactly what the problem was, but that is probably best in a situation like that. We came back later, but it was closed. I am not really a snake person, so I wasn't too dissappointed, but there were other missionaries who really wanted to go there.

We got stopped by the police on the way back, since we had too many people in the pickup truck. But, after talking to us for a while, they let us go.

Ouidah beach

Lunch at the beach

Here is Elder and Sister Blacks view from the trip:

Before Elders Samutamu and Kra left on Monday, we told Elder Samutamu we would take the missionaries on a special activity of his choice. He chose to go Ouida, the birthplace of Voodooism that we have talked about on the road to Lome. The first stop was a Portuguese slave castle that has been rebuilt exactly as it was in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The word castle gives entirely the wrong impression as it was definitely not a castle for the slaves. The slaves were imprisoned in an area behind the castle, and if one died or misbehaved they were thrown in the alligator mote. That is certainly not my idea of how life should be in a castle. When the ships arrived, the slaves were taken down a road to the ocean to be taken to Europe, North America, Brazil, the Caribbean, etc. Trafficking human beings is a sad thing and slavery was certainly a sad chapter in the history of the world. The interesting thing is that it was normally the different warring tribes that rounded up each other to be sold as slaves to the white traders. We followed the slave route out to the beach and saw a few historic things along the way. At the beach we had fixed some sandwiches for lunch and found a quaint little pavilion some folks were willing to let us rent for an hour to eat our lunch. We were also going to see the python Temple which we understand is a monument to Voodooism, but when we arrived we found it was closed from noon to 3:00 and we had to get back to Cotonou by 4:00 so we missed that part of the tour. That will be another P-day activity. All in all it was a good trip and a little diversion from the normal routine.

More pictures