Busy, busy work week here!

This is one of the missionaries in our apartment. His name is Elder Wehyee from Liberia. We came back and found him like this yesterday, ha ha.

Man this last week was probably one of the busiest weeks we have had so far!

We had so many lessons to go to this week it was insane! People were actually wanting us to come and see them, so much so, that they were actually calling us! The only problem was, I have been writing down the wrong phone number the whole time that I have been here so we never got any of the calls.....  Hee hee, so this week we are going to fix that, ha ha ha. 

The joy of finding mozzarella sticks! :) #mineandhailey'sfavoriefood #bairdfamilychristmaseve

A funny thing happened, we went to visit a members house and while there one of the kids wanted to show us where one of his friends live. It was far away and he had a wonderful idea (not really it hurt a lot , ha ha)! A common African thing that they do here is that they put two people on a bicycle. One sits on the seat and pedals while the other sits on the cross bar in the middle with both their legs on the same side, so imagine how in the movies when girls in dresses ride horses, that's what it looked like, ha ha. The kids name who helped us is Derek and he is 16. He is almost the same size as me. Since he has done this method of riding a bike before, I got to be the lucky one to sit on the cross bar! Let's just say it doesn't feel good, ha ha! Ghana dirt roads are not very nice,  ha ha! It hurt really bad, ha ha. I was on it for about 15 minutes.... that was one of the longest 15 minutes in my entire life...

 Ward party which we got to help out with!

Hee is a good story, ha ha.  We have been teaching an eighteen year old named Julius for a couple weeks now. We met him while knocking on gates just trying to find people to teach. The first time I met him I was a little skeptical that he was really interested, but he kept reading the pamphlets and Book of Mormon assignments that we were giving him. Last week I challenged him to mark every time Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost are referenced. Man! He has taken it to a whole new level! He is reading the book super-fast and he is learning so much! I gave him three chapters to read and he read seven! This guys is insane! He read the story of Ammon and he was able to repeat it too me perfectly. He showed us all of his favorite scriptures. He marks a scripture when it teaches a doctrine about the church and then he asks us to explain it to him. This guy is going crazy. He says he prays every time he reads and every time he reads he says he feels good and won't stop reading it. I am so shocked to have found someone so interested in the Book of Mormon. The Lord lead us to meet this guy for a reason. His gate was actually the very first gate we knocked on. I didn't think anyone was home but I still knocked. Now, he is one of the most interested investigators I have ever seen. 

Missionary work is so amazing. You get to see miracles every single day and it is such a blessing to witness these miracles first hand. I love it here and will never look back negatively on any of the experiences I am having. It's hard, I haven't had much recorded success when it comes to baptisms and all that, but that is not the purpose of a mission. We are here to plant seeds. We met a lady this past week who said she met with missionaries twenty years ago and now she wants to learn. Those missionaries probably never thought she would want to be taught again. But now she is. I want to encourage you to look at your lives and see the miracles that happen every single day in your lives. 

Sincerely,

Elder Baird

This is the old MTC. It is a bit smaller than the new one, ha ha! (He said that they don't use the building for anything at the moment."

Mom's notes:

1. He is finding a lot more investigators. They have three baptisms scheduled for this next month. He is hoping that they work out. :)

2. Two of them are the ones he told us about last week.

3. For his p-day today he went with his companion to the old MTC in Tema because his companion has an Aunt who lives near it and she brought him a bunch of food from Kenya that he can use to cook.

4. His companion, Elder Alumande, knows the Book of Mormon really well.

5. He hopes to have a baptism this week. His name is Frank and he hopes to baptize him on Saturday.

6. Transfers are next week. He hopes to stay for another transfer, but he does miss the bush. He hopes to go back there for part of his mission. At the end of this week he will have been in Batsonaa for three months.

7. He, "loves the ward so much." He says that the members are his favorite part of his area. He said that they are, "really friendly and they work hard. The only problem is that the members are spread very thin in such a big area so that going to see all of them is really hard."

8. They only ride bikes in his area. "Taxis are wayyyyy too expensive!" He added, "In Akatsi you don't use taxis in the town. You only do it to travel to Dzodze. But here, to take them just up the road for like five minutes costs almost the same as taking a taxi from Akatsi to Dzodze."