One Dark, Dark Birthday - Affery, Côte d'Ivoire

Sœur Lilliane's baptism!

Week two in Côte d'ivoire! (I know that title sounds scary but I promise it's not that bad. I'll explain in a minute)

I hope you're all doing well. It's been a bit of a wild week for me. 

To start, on Wednesday we took a taxi with one of our amis, Sœur Lilliane, to the next village over where we met with a member of the Mission Presidency for her baptismal interview! But since Abidjan, where the mission is based, is pretty far away it took him a few hours extra to get there. So we ended up hanging out at the church building in that village for almost the entire day.

When we got back to Affery, after a successful interview, of course, we discovered that around lunch time the power had gone out and, unlike the usual outages that last only a couple of minutes, it had yet to come back on. Unfortunately, the lack of electricity meant we had no running water either so we went to bed hot and sweaty that night. 

The next day, Thursday, was my birthday! We still didn't have any power but Elder Dent and Elder Christensen came into the room right at 6, singing happy birthday and holding a couple of donut-hole-type-things with matches in them for candles. 

Since we still hadn't regained power, we had an electrician come over. Unfortunately, since he was over the entire day, we never got a chance to leave the house and go work. So I spent my birthday stuck inside the hot house. We played a lot of UNO that day.

When the electrician left at the end of the day, the problem still hadn't been fixed. So we went to bed, once again, hot and sweaty. 

On Friday, after going to the church to charge our phones a bit, we found out that there was no power because nobody had sent in a picture to the mission office of the power bill that came a few weeks ago. So Elder Kamenan and I got a taxi to the next village over as fast as we could to resolve the issue else we had to live without electricity for the rest of the weekend. Luckily, we got there just in time and returned home to electricity! 

On Saturday, we had Sœur Lilliane's baptism! It was an awesome experience to be able to baptize her. It was a super small and simple event but it was spirit-filled nonetheless. 

On Saturday afternoon we went to a party at the church building put on by the Relief Society. From what we three Americans could tell, it was probably pretty sacrilegious. So that was an interesting experience to say the least. 

Unfortunately, the work ethic Elder Kamenan had our first week seems to have been a rare occurrence. I've only been able to go out proselyting for a total of about 4 hours this week. So that's been really tough on me. I really want to be able to serve.

Love you all! Hope you all have a spectacular week!

Elder Farr