From November 8, 2010: Twi, General Conference and Spider-like Things

From November 8, 2010:  Well for an update on me: things are good here, still hot, but today isn't bad at all. We had a dinner at a member's house. They had a makeshift bench press and weights so I had some fun with that. They also had a gallon of ice cream for the four of us missionaries. For the meal itself we had rice cooked into a stew to give it a red color and a flavor.
I have been learning more Twi (the most used tribal language in Ghana). I have been able to order my meals in Twi and have short conversations with the people. The people where we eat love that we are becoming one with the culture and because I order and use the language, they give me twice the amount of food I order for no cost. My goal is to learn the sentence structure these next few weeks to help with the learning.
The work here is sweet.  It is tiring at night because we have been trying to find more people to teach. Because the investigators keep dropping appointments, we work to find people to teach. One of the spiritual parts of the week was contacting this family and finding out that the husband had a stroke the previous day so we gave the man a blessing and will go to see him tomorrow. While walking we saw a group of police here tearing down some buildings that were placed on government property that will be  used for a community center. There were many people watching. The police are more independent here.  They are rarely seen and they always have automatic rifles with them. We went back to the area the next day to see that the police left the rubble to be cleaned up by the people who owned the buildings. That kind of mentality is often seen here. The people do have harder lives than us, but they have a habit of giving up on what they are working on if it becomes a problem. I figure it's one of the reasons the country is third world.
General conference was shown at church on Sunday. There was about one ward (out of two wards equaling ~450 active members, I figure the wards equal to around 800 people). Many people left halfway through and the kids were just running loose outside. There was one who kept kicking, and biting us missionaries. No one really took it seriously because there were very few people who understood what was going on because of the speakers vocabulary and speed at which they talked. It was by far the most stressful Sunday I have ever had, but oh well.
Yesterday, Elder Jeff Boyd who lives in the same house as us tried to make popcorn with the kind that is used camping. The stove burned through the plastic and fire brokeout with the package. Elders Silika, his companion, helped smolder it. Elder Boyd and I also made some blueberry muffin mix using the stove (we don't have an oven, and the range is fueled with a propane tank. We recorded the event and it was a lot of fun. Elder Orchard (my companion) killed a spider like thing that was about four inches long. I realized that we don't have daylight savings time here so that's interesting.