Riley in Africa : And the floods came up

This week flew by because it was jam-packed with stuff. Every morning this week we had stuff to do as zone leaders. On Tuesday, we had district meeting with the elders in Calavi University. After the district meeting the craziest thing happened. We all walked to a restaurant after to eat ingame peele and I passed by a security guard for a house. I looked at him and recognized him, it was Hypolite! The very first person I baptized on my mission and in my life. He has now moved from Zogbo to Calavi and is right next to the church over there. I know he became inactive in Menotin because the church was too far away, But now he is super close by so I hope he can come back. Seeing him made me have hope that he can start respecting his baptism covenants. I worried about him a lot my whole mission. I have a picture with him below.

On Wednesday, we had district meeting with the sisters in Agla and the couple missionaries of the mission. The couple missionaries in Benin are the Walkers. They are super cool, they are from Canada.

On Thursday, we had zone conference which went well. We had some good lessons. Every zone conference as zone leaders feels like a test. President watches very closely how everything is run. It puts us under some pressure.

On Friday, I got to go to a village called Tori Bossito, sounds like Mexico, but it’s here. So right before I left Cococodji, Hypote and I found a couple that lived out there. It’s super far away so I never got to go see them but Hypote baptized the couple and their 13 kids giving enough members to create a group out there. It’s taken some time but Kerr and I went up there to do baptism interviews to get a bigger base of members to create a group. It is so cool to see the little seeds back when I was in Cococodji help the gospel to spread outside of Cotonou and Porto-Novo. The gospel is progressing here.

Right before we went to Tori one of the crazy, come out of nowhere African storms came. The sky got dark as night and it rained so hard. Sadly, we were in Cococodji and had left our windows open back home. Kerr’s bed got soaked and our room got flooded because of the high-speed rain. It felt like the second coming but God said he won’t destroy the earth by flood again, so I felt comforted. (Genesis 9:11) However, the streets of Benin got super flooded so we had to take lots of roundabout ways to get places but when we were coming home we got trapped before a great body of water. Our choices were to walk for twenty minutes around to find another way to the apartment or walk for two minutes straight ahead. It was dark and we were hungry. We did not have the faith of Jesus to walk on it, nor the faith of Moses to part it, or the time to build a boat like Noah, so we stepped it and trudged through, pics below.

We worked super hard this week and saw many miracles in the sector. We had two new people come to church, one of which is super prepared for the gospel. And we found two families that are very interested in our message.

A family in the ward lost their daughter to malaria this week and as a branch after church we all went over to their house to comfort them, sing hymns and pray together it was a cool experience to go support that family in this difficult time. I know the church is true and it teaches people to love others. I’m so grateful to be a missionary for this church.