Last week we received in 6 new missionaries on Thursdays and then one more on Monday. This was the most unique transfer we have had as all seven of the missionaries were from different countries and for all of them English is a second language. Tonga, Fiji, Ivory Coast, Cape Verde, Angola, Rowanda, and the Philippines. This is a very talented group of young missionaries and they will add much to the Ghana Kumasi Mission. We know that over the next few months their English will improve significantly. Sister Dos Reis Sanches (Cape Verde) and Sister Manico (Angola) are the first two Portuguese speakers we have received. Sister Uwamahoro is from Rowanda and her first language is Kinyarwande. Elder Kauvaka speaks Tongan and Elder Colati speaks Fijian. Elder Mabini who arrived on Monday speaks Tagalog, although his English is probably the best of the group. It is always fun to see a missionary progress from understanding “little” to understanding “everything”. This group will be fast learners.

Our transfers have now moved back 9 days. Beginning with May, the MTC will begin to bring in missionaries every week instead of every two weeks. To accommodate that change, some mission transfer dates were moved up and some were moved back. We were among those most impacted. This means that our missionaries serve an extra 8 days from their previous release dates. The missionaries have handled this change well. We were initially told that our transfers would be on a Friday, but gratefully the Ghana MTC President made a strong case for needing to send the missionaries out on Thursday. For many of the 17 West African missions, it takes more than a day to get to a missionary from Accra to their mission due to airport schedules. This would make it impossible to orient and train the new missionaries before sending them to the field without encroaching on the Sabbath Day. We made the decision to start sending our outgoing missionaries the day before the new missionaries arrive. While this month was manageable doing them both the same day, we expect some sizeable transfers ‘out and in’ beginning in August, and trying to do that all on the same day would become a logistical challenge for us.

This transfer we had 16 missionaries go home. We had some of our strongest missionaries depart the mission last week. Sister Damsa, Sister Opa, Sister Mukwaira, Sister Diamonds, and Sister Apana were all Sister Training Leaders during their time of service. Elder Penrose and Elder Brigham were both zone leaders. All of the remaining elders served as district leaders. Let’s just say this placed a “dent” in the mission and we will miss these wonderful missionaries.

We brought these 16 missionaries in on Wednesday (May 24th) and sent them off the next morning to Accra. Those who had flights from Accra to their homes after 3 pm we arranged for them to visit the temple. Those going to Nigeria had 11 am flights and we couldn’t make it work for them. This was the first time we have done this and we will continue to make efforts to help them attend the temple before they leave as many of them live far from current and future temples. Hannah (mission cook) made a nice dinner for everyone and we ate at the Mission Office. With so many missionaries, we could not accommodate them at the Mission Home. We enjoyed playing some “Preach My Gospel” Jeopardy before they left. Since we have started our focus on the One Minute Drills in regards to learning the 42 principles better, the scores have been much higher. Just one evidence that the effort is paying dividends as the missionaries are learning and teaching these principles with greater clarity.

On Thursday morning, LaDawn and I drove to the airport along with the Assistants who drove their truck to bring back the luggage and the 3 new elders, and we brought the 3 new sisters – all arriving from the Ghana MTC. We have changed our orientation process slightly, now focusing on the Mission Vision and expectations first. We want the first thing they hear to be about the Mission Culture and the expectations we have as leaders. We have them fill out paperwork, do the financial training on subsistence, and health and safety reviews afterwards.

Despite the language barriers, we did the best we could. We stopped for lunch at 12:15 pm and then started back up at 1 pm and went until 3 pm. They were all pretty tired having arisen at 3 am that morning to get to the airport so we gave them a one hour break. We started back up about 4:15 pm and finished about 5:30 pm. We then had another dinner prepared by Hannah (she was a very busy cook last week) and allowed them to go to bed early. We took the Sisters back to the Mission Home bunkhouse.

On Friday morning, we gathered at 8:00 am with the new missionaries and their trainers and talked about the expectations of training a new missionary. My favorite part of this training is when we discuss 3 Nephi 17:7-10. The Savior invites those who were “whole” to bring those who were “sick, afflicted, lame, bind, dumb and those that were afflicted in any manner” to Him and He would heal them. In verse 10 it tells us that “those who had been healed and they who were whole” did bow down at His feet and worship Him. The point is that whenever we bring someone to Christ, we too, find ourselves at His feet. This is the job of a trainer. The Assistants then walked them all through “Finders of the Elect”. We finished just after 9:30 am and were to the Bantama Stake Center for transfers by 10:00 am. One hour later, everyone was gone except for the zone leaders. Much of this was due to the Loveland’s arriving at the transfer grounds at 9 am to help facilitate the ins and outs of the missionaries.

We decided to hold MLC on Friday afternoon after transfers. With the transfers themselves being later in the week, we worried about all of the travel if we waited until the next week. So after everyone left, we gathered at the Mission Office at 1 pm and finished about 6:30 pm. Those who were local returned home. Alex drove the Techiman missionaries home and Tamale left early the next morning on the bus. It was another wonderful meeting with these amazing young missionary leaders. Here is the agenda of the meeting.

• Introductions and Welcome
• Vision Refresh – High Expectations – President Kunz
• Accountability – Tracking the new goals on all 6 key indicators
• This is It – Elder Amoah and Elder Clegg – The Power of the Book of Mormon
• The Perfect Exchange – Discussion on exchanges covering the golden hours of 4 – 8 pm
• Upcoming Zone Conference Schedule
• Discussion on the visit by Elder Gong and the all mission gathering to be with him
• Dinner
• One Minute Drills
  • Agency and the fall of Adam and Eve
  • The Savior’s Earthly Ministry and Atonement
  • Endure to the End( Lesson 3)
• Role Plays – Teaching the Nature of God and Man – Assistants

Certainly one of the highlights for the MLC for me was this discussion on High Expectations as it relates to the Mission Vision. All of the missionaries know that God has high, high expectations of them, but we rarely talk about what happens to those who fall in the other quadrants. This was an opportunity to not only discover people from the scriptures in these other categories, but to understand they qualities they possessed and the ultimate outcome of the life they chose to lead. We will do something similar at our upcoming zone conferences.

After a very busy few days, we arose at 4:30 am on Saturday and left at 6:15 am to travel to the Bibiani District Conference. It was a wonderful weekend. As we look at the statistics for the first quarter, they are improved in nearly every single category over last year. There is still plenty of work to do, but of the 5 districts they seem to have the most momentum in the right direction. To be fair, they are a bit smaller than some, making the rate of improvement a bit easier. Overall it was a wonderful conference.

On Saturday at the Priesthood leadership session I went through each branch asking the Branch Presidents how many young men they had. None of them knew and those who thought they knew only counted the boys who are active. Very few have any youth Quorum presidencies, so through that experience I was able to invite them all to call quorum presidencies and begin to spend more time with the youth. In the Adult Session, LaDawn talked about honesty and integrity and I spoke about the importance of planting the word of God. We really need to develop a culture of scripture study across all 5 of our member Districts. On Sunday, LaDawn spoke about keeping our buildings clean, and I spoke about the Culture of Christ and keeping the Sabbath Day Holy. We left about 12:30 pm and made it home by 3:30 pm.

In the evening, I met with the Assistants to plan out the upcoming zone conferences and to discuss Elder Gong’s visit. One of the big changes with this transfer was the calling of a new Assistant. Elder Clegg has been serving in the Tamale Zone as a zone leader and now joins Elder Amoah as an Assistant. Elder Harnois is serving in Korforidua and training Elder N’guessan. We will miss Elder Harnois. He is an exceptional young man. And we are confident that Elder Amoah and Elder Clegg will not miss a beat. We are a bit worried that June will go faster than May did with all that we need to attend to this month. There are just not enough hours in the day to do all that needs to be done and if there were more we would be too tired to put forth much more effort. So we will just be satisfied with the lot we have been given and do our very very best for our Savior and King. It is His work after all, not ours.

We will back up to Monday and Tuesday for just a moment. Monday night we held our second MLC virtual meeting on the setting and reporting on goals and actuals of all 6 key indicators. Still some confusion with the spreadsheet and even though I thought it was protected, I discovered that adding a new sheet (copied) to a Google Spreadsheet does not bring the old protections to the new sheet. That caused me some additional effort to fix it back to where it was. We are slowly figuring this out and I am confident we will see improvement in our efforts as a mission as we keep at it.

On Tuesday, we attended the Daban District Council at the Mission Office. Elder Motuliki has been the district leader there and he did an outstanding job teaching us about applying all that we have been learning about repentance to our own lives. After the meeting we held our transfer meeting with both sets of office elders, our Assistants, the Loveland’s and Alex Cobbina our driver. It takes everyone working together to make a transfer work and we are grateful the way that everyone pitched in to do their part and even a bit more than their part.

And so the work continues in the Ghana Kumasi Mission. With the transfers out last week, every missionary that remains has come to the mission since we arrived. We have loved all of the missionaries with which we have served as we have seen them grow into men and women of Christ and we feel a special kinship to those that the Lord has sent specifically to us to gather Israel one last time, Together in Ghana.