Week 7 N’douci

He sat in the courtyard to talk to us. 

The girls are usually laying on the couch watching the TV that we stream the call on because it’s 7am and they’re still waking up! 

Caleb said there are a few different dialects of the language so it sure makes the language even harder to understand. 

He headed to Abidjan for a training and it was a long adventurous trek! 

He said this truck was about to fall apart, such humble people.

Nice bus for part of his drive to Abidjan. He had to take like five different forms of transportation! 

He loves the banana bread he found. He wants to try and make some but still unsure of the ingredients there. 

 

The people there burn their garbage. 

He has such an eye for a beautiful picture!

Caleb cooked this! He is not a fan of the meat they have there so this is what you get. 

This is heaven for my sweet Caleb! American food! 

His companion wanted a haircut. 

They had to get their door lock fixed. 

At church they had about double the amount of people at church than last week! 

His email from this week:

Bonjour tout le monde!

This week was a little crazy, but fun as always! On Tuesday we left N'Douci and headed to Abidjan for a new missionary training. We had some basic training when we got here, but this was more in depth. We had to stay the night because of the travel.

To get there we hopped on a small taxi to the main station in N'Douci for a bigger taxi. The small taxi is a three wheeled, partly covered, thing. I don't even know how to explain it. The bigger taxi’s go inter-city and are barely opperatable 30 year old cars. Like the cars you see on the road that look like their about to explode. We took that taxi for a bit to the freeway. Once we got to the freeway we paid and hopped on a big bus to Abidjan. It was a couple hour bus ride. Once we entered Abidjan the traffic was pretty bad. While the bus was stopped, we hopped off and my companion found a random taxi to take us to the apartment. I'm just glad my companion knew what he was doing. We took this taxi for a half hour. It was the AP’s and office Elders apartment. They are really nice and mostly know English. Oh and they got hot water… 

The next day we headed over to the mission office for our training. It was a couple hours. It was mostly spiritual advice, but there were some other temporal things as well. It was good. They gave us some nice food for lunch, and then we headed back to our apartment. It was the same thing we did to get here, just in reverse. Oh and don't use the seat belts in the taxis here… They make your nice white shirts, no longer nice, or white. Don't ask me how I found that out…

We go to Abidjan next week for Zone Conference, so it'll be another fun trip. Other than that this week has been a normal week. We continue to teach people, and we have a few baptisms that will hopefully happen in the next month which is exciting. 

The French is very very slowly coming. A lot of the time the natives will start speaking in their dialect, and then they'll switch to French. Oh and if you say you don't understand, they'll just repeat the phrase louder and faster. Which doesn't really help. So I just use a lot of Google Translate. When it comes to having a basic conversation I still struggle, but I can explain the importance of temples and how fast offerings blesses others. It's mostly beacuse I know the words to have a conversation, but coming up with a response on the fly is so hard right now. But it'll come eventually because I don't really have a choice. 

Every type of person has called me a le blanc which I love. Like old grumpy ladies, to teenagers, to little kids. The little kids are my favorite. As soon as they see me they start yelling and chanting le blanc le blanc le blanc, and then they'll run to me. Then once the get to me they'll like freeze. I'll give them a high five and then they’ll be so excited and run off. I feel bad though because they'll ask me a question or say something, but I have absolutely no clue what they said. Although yesterday these kids wanted me to count from 1-10 in English probably 10 times, so that was funny. 

Spiritual Thought:

I was reading in Alma where Alma the younger is giving council to his sons. Chapter 38 is to Shiblon, and he only gets one chapter to him. But it's actually so good, especially verse 5:

And now my son, Shiblon, I would that ye should remember, that as much as ye shall put your trust in God even so much ye shall be delivered out of your trials, and your troubles, and your afflictions, and ye shall be lifted up at the last day.

I love this scripture because we all have trials. They might be small, or big, but everyone has them. They are not easy and it is a trial of your faith. But I like how as we put our trust in God, we will get past those trials and be lifted up at the last day. 

Thanks for your emails and prayers! A bientôt!

Elder Robinson