When it rains it gets cold and if I don’t exercise in the morning the ice cold shower is so uncomfortable. So, I found the two biggest pots we had and put them on the stove with water, heated them up and put them in a bucket to pour on myself in the shower. But without wisdom I used a glass cup and in the middle the cup dropped and shattered into a million pieces. I cut my hand and foot on it. We also had a rendezvous really early that day so all the cleaning up glass time took up my personal study. With these experiences and the flooded streets, I wondered why everything was working against me. And then I realized my great companion, in his righteous desires, had prayed for mountains to climb and because I’m his companion I had to climb them too. But looking back on it those experiences were for my good.
On Wednesday night, I went to do a split with elder Kalonji in Cococodji. I was super excited. Elder Kalonji is Congolese and I have not had foofoo Congolese since I was with Kadima and I really wanted to eat that. But, Kalonji was new in the sector so he didn’t know where to find the ingredients and he had no money. So, we had to go out and buy all of the ingredients. We started searching for ingredients with a member at 20h00 which is what 8h00 pm. We had to go all over the place to find the stuff. We walked and walked for miles to get these things. My white shirt was drenched in sweat. Finally, at 10h00pm we got all the ingredients and got back to the apartment. But it takes at least an hour and half to cook so we didn’t get to eat till 11h30pm. It was a great price to pay to eat some foofoo. But it was so good I’m gunna miss that dish a lot.
The rest of the week was good. We worked hard, stayed busy, had some people cancel on us, the usual until we got to Friday. On Friday, there is an investigator in the sisters’ sector in our zone. The sister missionaries wanted us to come help teach this guy. This guy was one of the best people I’ve ever met. This man is so, so incredibly smart he is a professor of sociology at the university here. And he is not yet baptized but knows everything there is to know about the church. After about one year of research he also knows about every other religion. He tried to ask us a lot of questions to test our knowledge of our own gospel to try to trip us up. It was a mentally tiring game to teach him, but the spirit was with us and at the end of the lesson he was smiling congratulating us on our methods of teaching and knowledge. He can’t get baptized yet because of some personal decisions he has to make first. But, I have no doubt that guy has been chosen to be a leader here in Benin.
On Sunday, we were wondering what we could eat. We didn’t have a lot of food so we looked at what we had and we realized we had all the ingredients for no bake cookies, except neither of us knew how to make them. We tried anyway. In the end it turned into crap. It looked so gross. We realized we should have put the oats in last or something. So, we had to eat some nasty stuff for dinner. Pictures below, warning, it looks nasty.
The no bake cookies gone so wrong
The moto packed streets of Benin
This is a normal toilet here. People are lucky to have this here.
