Week 46-Bardege, Gulu with Elder Ankrah

Your week sounds wonderful- I love thanksgiving just because it's such a family thing. I miss cutting down the tree! I was telling my comp about that this week, it's such a cool tradition. This week was long and hard but we also saw some great blessings. Monday, we found out a girl we baptized a while back, (she's 16 mind you) is now pregnant. It's a mess. She was going to have an abortion- since that is what most people do here.  But I think we talked her out of it as we taught the Lords perspective on the sanctity of life and the church’s position on Abortion. Her only other real option is to raise the baby herself. We're working with the relief society to see if someone has the means to adopt, but I doubt it. The wonderful thing is she has great support from the branch. Then Tuesday we got bounced ALL day long, so we went around and tried to find new people to teach but we didn't have a lot of success. It's all good though, some days are like that. Wednesday, we drove to Kampala to pick up the new missionary in the zone, and traffic was rough, so it took all day. I listened to some conference talks that I really liked though, so it wasn't a waste. That night we were invited to a member’s house in Insombia, the one who fed us last time we went down. She cooked a nice meal for us for thanksgiving. We had tacos, chicken fajitas, and then this Ghanaian dish called fufu that was super good. That night on the way home we got a call and found out that a recent convert named Irene had been brutally murdered. We do service for her every Tuesday by bringing her clean water and then teaching and playing with her kids. It kind of ruined the week. We actually spent this whole morning at her funeral, we were pretty close to her, so they had Elder Ankrah and I carry her casket. Then Thursday we spent all day waiting for our truck to get serviced. It took a long time, we had to wait for about 4 hours, then make the drive back to Gulu. By the time we got home it was about 8, so we went and saw some of the members who were taking Irene's death really hard. Friday was normal, and we had some really wonderful lessons, but we also found out there's a group of people going around in the area that we live in and robbing and beating people at night. So, we can't be out past dark now. That same group tried to burn down a member’s house on Thursday night with a Molotov, so we spent some of Friday cleaning up her house and moving the burnt furniture out. It's so impressive how the people here push through things like this. Sunday was good though, we had a ton of the people we are teaching show up to church. We had a breakthrough with this one sister who is sooooo shy and she started to open up with us Sunday. Even though there were some extremely sad things that happened this week, we were blessed with some tender mercies as well. Also, mom- I really promise that I'm totally safe.