Elder Pentreath in Liberia...: Great updates from Elder Pentreath

Mon 4^th February

Well, I'm moving... toooo... Gardnersville... yea.... generator and no water ever apparently. The missionary who told me on the phone explained that the new apartment is not as nice as the one I'm in at the moment ... ah... gonna be interesting!

Friday morning I received another phone call to say that I'd be serving with a missionary called Elder Anderson! Elder Anderson is from the States, lovely guy, finishes being a misisonary this October.

I'm starting to look like Mr. Incredible, not gonna lie. Hahaha I literally look so different. Not there yet though!!! Lots more work to do and plenty of time to do it!

Mon 11^th February

Wohhhh! Well if I thought the work was sweet, I was wrong!!! The work is AMAZING!!! SO wonderful!! This week has just been so incredible, sooo incredible!! Elder Andersen is absolutely wonderful and it's incredible to teach with him. It might sound stupid because of course throughout my mission I've always wanted to teach with the spirit of course, but with Elder Andersen and I together, every single lesson so far really has been such a spiritual experience. The new area is HUGE, I'm super duper tired because we've just been walking all day everyday, yet still teaching loads as well. It's just been amazing!!

So the apartment, there's 6 of us. The apartment has some lovely missionaries within, who are really striving to do well and work hard, which is wonderful. It's soooo hot, which isn't very nice, Elder Andersen and I are in a super small room which is horrible, but there we go... we're coming on small small! =) The church members in Gardnersville are really trying and I'm REALLY looking forward to working with them!

Mon 18^th February

This week has just been wonderful, probably the very best week on my mission so far.

In terms of the apartment and area and stuff, our apartment being in the compound of a chapel is very rare, the only one in Liberia, and it's actually not our chapel either. There's no real roads from the apartment to our area and so we just trek through bush for 30 minutes to reach our area. In terms of animals, there's a lot more monkeys, but they all keep themselves to themselves. There's also a lot more mosquitoes! =D We still most often teach on benches or on the floor outside houses, which are often 'mud-brick' built. Gardnersville being only an hour or so from the main city is bush, but also 'rich-man, working in the city bush', so there’s a few nice-ish places in which there's real brick houses. People are really generous and want to share their food with us. I need to watch my weight and I'm being serious! It's all rice, of course, so I want to avoid getting a rice belly! =S Some people do actually grow food in their gardens, which is so nice to see - they can't really live off it all, but people are growing corn and potato green and... that's it really =P The earth's super sandy though and so can't sustain too much veg growth really.

Mon 25^th February

Well, this week has been SUPER tiring! The sun has been so hot and the work has been hard graft really! We’ve been blessed to teach some really lovely lessons, but with missionary training on Tuesday taking up all day and having to do 7 baptismal interviews really gave us little time to do the work we really wanted to do. We also had a problem with the water pump this week and so Elder Andersen and I spent the whole of Friday (as in, the WHOLE of Friday), pumping water.. 340 buckets full of water to fill the baptismal font – we caught the sun and made ourselves both pretty sick to be honest.

This week also featured a surprise in the form of bumping into a celebrity! We were called to help out a guy push his car when afterwards I turned to one of them, introduced myself and received the response ‘oh, I’m from England too, I’ve lived in Manchester since I was 15’.. ‘oh, right! Great! What’s your name?’ ‘I’m Alex, so tell me more about your church?’…. So I explain a bit, give him a gospel of Jesus Christ pamphlet and invite him to church. He’s just flown in that morning because his Uncle just died and the funeral’s next week so will see if he can come to church… ‘So, what do you do in England? Are you working over there?’ ‘yea, I play football actually.’ ‘oh great, like professionally sort of thing? (yea, right!)… ‘yea, I play for Manchester City, though I’ve just gone on loan to Crystal Palace last month’.. ‘…what?!?!.. ok.. what’s your name again?!’ ‘Alex, Alex Nimely’… ‘you’re Alex Nimely?!?! Wohhh.. ok… you’re really Alex Nimely?!?!? You’re Alex Nimely..?!?! Okkk… ummm well, feel free to move to West Ham, ‘cos no one seems to be scoring for us at the moment and feel free to come to church!’… hahah couldn’t believe it! Then I told all the Liberians we saw for the remainder of the day and everyone’s like ‘you saw Alex Nimely?!?!? What?! He’s here?!?!?’… hahaha so sweet! Super sound guy, really humble it seemed! Super cool! Bless him, no wonder he’s gone to Crystal Palace, doubt he ever gets a game at Man City..