Riley in Africa : Believing in Marriage

Believing in Marriage, what does that mean? I’m not quite sure but I saw that title in an old liahona in my apartment and thought, you know what? that is exactly the motto for my sector because I have been a little sad that we have lots of people who want to get baptized and have their spouse and they are not married. They are living together, they say they are married, they have their children, they are a family but they just haven’t done the hard work. Which means going all the way out in the middle of nowhere Benin, pay a bunch of money, and sign a paper. We can’t baptize them if they don’t do that. It is very discouraging at times.

But earlier in the week I saw that in the liahona, I cut it out, put it on my planner and I started believing in marriage, it’s possible. And what do you know this week we had a marriage!!!!! Papa and Mama Mi___ finally got married!!!! What a joy it was to see that happen! Now I will get to baptize this amazing family, I love the Mi___ so much they call me and Raveneau their sons, don’t think that is weird, here it’s a huge complement. Anyway, there will be pictures below.

However, it was a civil wedding in Benin, so it was a little weird and unprofessional. The guy who was running the thing took a weird phone call in the middle of the ceremony and we all just watched and listened to him talk for a while. There was also some random really old Swiss lady at the wedding and she just latched right on to Tshileu and talked to him the whole time no one knows why but it was super funny.

That was the good news for the week. Just a little bit more about Hevie, my sector. I have no idea why but doing missionary work is possible but everyone has time only two days of the week, Wednesday, and Saturday and that’s it. You walk down the streets on Friday, Sunday, Tuesday, you know all the other days and it’s just a red sandy ghost town but Wednesday and Saturday everyone is there and they want to be taught. They don’t really speak French but they come to church and progress so we do work. It’s weird but it’s true.

Also, voodoo is a thing, a big thing, I have not talked a lot about voodoo. I think it's mostly because I just try to forget about it because it’s very, very messed up. I’m not quite sure what exactly they believe but you can spot voodoo easily. I’ll give you an example of some of the weird stuff, I’ll skip the creepy though. I guess sometimes there are like trees that have bad spirits in them so what do you do if the evil spirit tree talks to you? Well you do the logical voodoo thing, you get naked, you burn the tree, you dance around it, you cut it down to a charred stump. You wrap the stump in a white cloth, you sacrifice a few chickens to it and rub all that nastiness on the stump and then idk what they put on next but it smells horrible and then after that the stump becomes like a good luck god and if you touch it you will get a motorcycle or something. If it sounds stupid, it is. I’ll try to take a picture of one of these stumps because they are everywhere in my sector.

However, voodoo is not good stuff so stay away kids, far away. I thought that might be a little interesting for you guys to read because I’m in the country with the most voodoo in the world!