= Sunday, we attended a District Conference, held in the rented assembly room of a high school that was hours away from where we live. Most of the meeting was in Twi, but portions were in English. Afterward, we were in a room where visitors provided their reaction to what they had just heard.
= On the way there, we picked up the Elders who support the Mfoum Branch. They volunteered us to carry a pair of Sister Missionaries as well on the way back. So we had conversation both ways. Back at the mission home, we parked outside the gate at the Barilleaus. They had just finished serving a meal to the office and social media elders, who had concluded that the meal was worth two hymns. They sang in gratitude for their supper. She fed us after they left. She then fed President and Sister Morgan when they arrived from the Conference site.
= Monday started with April Fool's jokes but otherwise was full of meetings as is usual for Monday. I had brought the apparently dead batteries from next to the generator for our compound but didn't have time to do anything with them. On Mondays, the Mission President and his wife meet with office staff together, then they meet with subsets of the office, then they have a long medical meeting with Steph; then I have a few minutes with the Mission President. Home, we had WiFi! Today is the start of a new month with renewed WiFi usage available. So, we worked until late at our laptops.
= Tuesday, we tried to find the place to charge the battery that had been in the generator most recently, but the GPS took us on a merry chase: blocked by a school gate, eventually winding up next to a cell phone tower. We tried to get cash, but the guard at the bank for the ATM that we frequent said the network was down. At the office, Steph and I individually had lengthy conversations with our predecessors, the Streupers, via WhatsApp.
= Wednesday as we were leaving for the office, the voltage to the compound dropped to 110 volts (per the regulator on the refrigerator): not good; it should be 220 or higher. The water pressure dropped to a trickle. The air conditioners stopped. The solution was to wait and hope.
= After some time at the office, with Sister Barilleau driving this time, we looked for the battery repairman. He made holes in the battery to reach individual cells and dumped the acid into a container (after showing us with a hydrometer that its balance was off), and replaced the acid, checking with the hydrometer as he went. The man’s son, perhaps 10 years old, heated charcoal until it was hot enough to melt an old battery handle. His dad used the melted plastic to seal the holes he had made in the battery. He put it on a charger.
= Steph and I later picked up the battery, found an ATM that let us withdraw a small amount, and headed home to find no power. I found that the battery did not have enough charge to start the generator. Just as we resigned ourselves to having no power and had come to terms with the idea, the power came back on!
= Thursday, I combined phone images and text to show individuals how to reserve a family history record of an ancestor to provide time (a couple of years) to do ordinances for that person. If reservations did not exist, a relative might do work just before you arrived at the temple and you would wind up duplicating work when you used an ordinance card you had printed and brought with you (or if you waited to print a card at the temple, you would learn that your trip would be less-fruitful than you had hoped).
= The power dropped again as we headed to the office. We worked, but it was a slow day. Early in the afternoon, we refueled the truck (about $60) and bought snacks. At one shop, I took a call from Sister Barilleau as a brass band marched by (!). I missed getting a photo, alas. The call was to pick up a new battery from the office. I installed the battery at our compound, and it was clear that this battery was good, but the generator didn't catch.
= Friday at the office, I received a call from one of the guards. (They moonlight.) He asked me to come to the compound to let him take the generator to the shop. At 5:30, we joined the Morgans for (chicken) hot dogs and beefburgers - there're not called hamburgers here. As soon as the meal started, I received a call to come back to the compound. The guard walked me through starting the generator and switching between line and generator power. Success! Some of the problem had been my error; I documented the procedure.
= Saturday, we went to KO-SA, a beach resort, with the Barilleaus. The 4 kilometers driving down a dirt path to get there from the main road was stressful, especially where the path was very close to a stone fence. The resort itself tended to melt stress away: a wooden lounge chair under a palm tree near the water worked wonders, and the food was plentiful and good.
= Home, we watched two sessions of the church's General Conference: one from 4-6 and one from 8-10. We skipped the session from midnight to 2 AM; we'll catch a recording of that. [There was a 7-hour difference between us and Utah, where the conference is hosted.]
this is a school bus.
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