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, July 07, 2014

July 7, 2014

This week was very crazy and also very wet.  I don’t think that it has really dried out since last Monday…

Lots of things happened this week, where to start..?

Tuesday was pretty normal, we had a district meeting at our chapel.  It was pretty good.  We talked about how the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve have come out and told us that we need to teach all 5 of the missionary lessons.  Normally it was just the first 4, and then after the baptism we teach all 5.  I think that teaching all 5 lessons before baptism will be a great benefit in helping with retention, which is a struggle here.  That day my shoes got soaked!!!  I had a thought that I should wear my rain boots but I decided not to… such a regret…

Tuesday night we got a call from the Zone Leaders telling us that there is an emergency transfer happening.  Elder Godi was moved to Paynesville Branch 1 and I receive Elder Jemba.  Elder Jemba is from Uganda and is from Elder Godi’s MTC.  This is round 3 with people from that MTC.  Elder Baldwin, Godi, and now Jemba are all from the same MTC.

Wednesday it continued to rain…  We had a good day in the field though, 5 lessons, and 2 new investigators.  Elder Jemba is somewhat aggressive, which is necessary here, I learned that I do need to be a little more aggressive, but I have to be careful though, we can’t force people to listen to us.  We contacted some new people too, so our teaching pool is growing!

Thursday, more rain. But it wasn’t so bad our shoes didn’t get completely wet.  We were able to get even more people in our teaching pool!   Elder Jemba has been on fire with getting people to accept baptismal dates.

Friday (Happy 4th of July!!!) we had interviews with President Kirkham at the mission office.  We didn’t want to wear boots since we were going to town.  It was raining when we left, but we brought our umbrellas anyway.  SO SMART!!!!!   We were in a middle of a lesson and it started to POUR!!!  It rained so much that we weren’t able to walk to a junction to get car for town, it flooded the road.  So we decided to wait and prayed that someone would generously pick us up and get us across the water.  A couple cars pass, one passed, stopped, backed up and asked where we were going, we told him and he said get in.  The man is a Muslim but felt bad for us and took us all the way to where we wanted to go.  I was so thankful!!  Even though we got a ride fairly quick, we were still SOAKED!! President was behind for interviews so we had to wait for ever.  I looked out the window and was so thankful that I was inside.  I have never seen it rain that hard for that long in my entire life.   We also got a free ride home to, it didn’t cost us anything to get and from town!

Saturday, more rain…  it also caused that Trokom was once again not baptized.  There are a couple things we have to talk about with him, but this isn’t the place to talk about so sorryo!

Sunday was normal.  Thank goodness it didn’t rain. It was actually really sunny, and since the water was everywhere, it was really humid… but that’s LIB!

I hope that everyone had a great 4th and was safe. I love you all and miss you!

Elder Park
The White African
T.I.A.

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