Blog Description

This is a blog for the family and friends of Collin Park. He will be serving a two year mission in the Sierra Leone Freetown Mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, he left on January 24, 2013. While Collin is on his mission his Mom will be posting pictures and letters as she gets them, the content will be straight from Collin (unless otherwise noted) - spelling and punctuation will be corrected of course! Commentary and clarification may be added by his Mom as needed.
UPDATE: Collin's mission was split in half! The Sierra Leone Mission included the country of Liberia when Collin first left. As of July 1, 2013, the mission was split along the border and the new mission created: the Liberia, Monrovia Mission. Collin will never see the country of Sierra Leone. He has been in Monrovia Liberia since he left the MTC in Ghana.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Because of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Liberia and Sierra Leone Missions were evacuated on August 4, 2014 and missionaries were reassigned to different missions. Collin was reassigned to the Salt Lake City Central Mission.

Monday, May 05, 2014

 May 5, 2014

This week, what an adventure.

At home, they say:   April showers bring May flowers.  Here it is:  April sun brings May storms.
Well to start off, rainy season has begun, so now it’s time for jumping over puddles and running.  Life as a LIB missionary is sweetoo!!   This week also has been very interesting too, lots of things have happened.  Hopefully I will be able to remember everything.

Since we are in a white washed area, we had to completely rely on the members for help.  We have an area book that holds all the information, but since there are really no addresses here, if you don’t know the house, you’ll never find it and the person will be lost… which isn’t good.  The addresses here are like “Kpeleh Town,” but then you realize that Kpeleh town is about a square mile big.  LIB is sweet!! So what we did was this, we called Emmanuel Kolleh, who was baptized in September and is preparing to start his mission papers, he showed us pretty much the whole area in one day. This guy is great.  I thank him so much for what he did to help us.  We did that with different people throughout the week. 

We called our Branch Mission Leader who is a returned missionary of about 5 months, man this guy is good.  He was nonstop contacting people.  To be completely honest, contacting is still very hard for me.  Most of my mission people have just come up to me and asked who we are and what we do.  I learned a lot from him.

In Congo Town there are about 5342346 times more people than in Upper Caldwell (his last area) so I have a feeling that it is going to be a lot easier for the work to progress.   We met a lot of our brothers and sisters who are investigating the church throughout the week, one of them is Brother Trokom.  This guy is blind!!  He is so cool.  He has a copy of the Book of Mormon in braille and it’s so cool watching him read it, it’s crazy how blind people can do that.  He didn’t come to church yesterday which was a bummer because he had been to church the two weeks before.

My apartment is nicknamed ‘the Mansion’ by the couples because of how huge this place is.  It has 2 master bedrooms, 2 other bedrooms and an extra bathroom, big kitchen, we have a deep well and a water tower that holds about 1000 gallons of water, 3 dogs that love us, 2 security guards that come at 7pm and leave at 7am.  The compound is on the top of a hill so the view is awesome!  One side is the ocean which is about a 10 minute walk. The other is a view of Peace and Pagos Islands.  It’s a beautiful area.  Congo Town is great!!!

I know I’m leaving something out and I’m sorry but I can’t remember.  I hope you had a great week and I love you all and miss you.

Elder Park
The White African
T.I.A.

From additional emails:

I asked him about the security guards:   “We live in the compound with the owner and he had people break in and steal from him a while ago.  The guy has money since he lived in the states for a while and he's old so he can’t defend against rouges so he hired people to.’ 

Collin’s boots were stolen last year off the front porch, so I asked if he had gotten more:  “I got more boots a while ago.  I still hate them though, they hurt my feet.  Last year I managed most of the rainy season without them so I’m planning for that this year!”

I asked him if there were a lot of people at church:  “church attendance was good, lots of people.  The place is nice.  It’s fairly new and still looks good!!"


“Congo town is on your way from Central Monrovia going towards ELWA junction which leads you to Tinker Village.   This place is sweet!”

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