Thou art Fabrice, and upon this rock I will build my church

First, a funny story. Last Sunday Gardner was teaching a lesson about the organization of the church in our gospel principals class. And he asked who was the prophet after Jesus Christ died? The room was kind of silent... so he looked at me as if he wanted me to respond to help the class out. But then I saw that one of the investigators in the class named Fabrice whispered the answer. So, I looked at Gardner and pointed and said "Fabrice." But Gardner didn’t hear and so he looked over to where Fabrice was but his hand wasn’t raised. Fabrice said the answer again, "Peter," but he said it so quiet Gardner didn’t hear. Gardner looked at me again and asked who had the answer. I said, "Fabrice" but the room was kind of noisy so he didn’t hear so I raised my voice and said, "Fabrice, Fabrice!" Gardner calls on Fabrice and finally the response to the question is given, "Peter" and it’s all good. However, in the class that day was an old man, and this whole exchange confused the heck out of him. When we went to his house to go over the lesson we found out he thought the name of Peter was Fabrice. So, when we explained the organization of the church he would get super confused. We would say Peter, and he would try to correct us, "do you mean Fabrice?" Through the whole lesson I didn’t connect the dots why this old man would think Peter’s name is Fabrice. I thought back to Sunday and realized what had happened. When I was telling Gardner to call on Fabrice, he thought I was giving the answer. But for the moment in the life of the old guy, Joseph Smith received the priesthood from Fabrice, James and John.

On Tuesday in our district we had planned an activity to say good bye to Elder Djossou, who was in my apartment but left on Thursday because his visa came for his real mission in Sierra Leone. Everyone was told to make something from their country. Gardner and I woke up early and made a bunch of french toast. However, when we were about to go to district meeting all the sisters in our district called in sick. We ended up going any way and eating a bunch of french toast with the zone leaders who also had planned to come.

On Wednesday we had a service activity. The stake center here has some patches of grass around it. Whoever mowed and cleaned these grass patches when the stake first was built had stopped a long time ago and they had become super gross. So, we all got together and cleaned them, cut them, trimmed them up and also cleaned up other parts of the stake center. It was a good activity. Way better than the disservice we did in painting that house.

This place does a great job at weirding me out. We went over to one of our investigators house and the guy said, "hey you guys are Americans, right? Well I got two cousins that are visiting form the US, you can talk to them in English." So, this 9 year old girl and this 5 year old boy come out, and it was too weird. They spoke real American English. They lived in New York and Atlanta, Georgia. But the bad part is that the little boy was a typical snotty little American kid and he disturbed us the whole lesson. I tried to distract him on the side while my companion taught, so I tried to show him pictures in the brochures and ask what he thought the people were doing. He said American things I had long forgotten about "they’re poopy-heads, they’re ugly." Typical things a snotty kid would say. I have gotten so used to African culture where all kids don’t understand me and they are all kinda scared because I’m white. Not gunna lie those American kids intimidated me because they were more American than me.

We also walked a ton this week!! I made it a personal goal to go to every bishop’s house in every sector and I’ve done it so far. I just needed to go to the bishop’s house here in Fidjrossé, but dang he lives far away. It’s a two hour walk if you walk fast but that’s just going there it’s another 2 hours back. Gardner lost his mind on the walk back he started saying “hi” and using all the Fon greetings he knew on people to make them laugh because if you want to make someone laugh super hard here all you have to do is be white and speak their language. It was some funny stuff.

Making french toast

MY SON! Kouadio came to visit me in the cyber