GCC Mission

hey!

mom i died laughing at your "wo ho te sen? me yo ye." i don't know where you learn all this stuff and i'm pretty sure you speak more fante than i do. thanks for the updates on family and friends, i always love that. it's crazy how the world keeps right on spinning while i'm gone!!

and i'm happy about shauna and her quote unquote "main squeeze." (i enjoyed that one too mom). shuana tells me that this time she found one that i would actually like haha!

maybe now i'll answer a couple of your questions mom. about short ties, yes that's the style here. you look wierd if you wear a long tie. i'm still more into the long ties, but i guess when in rome...

about the mormon helping hands stuff, it's not a super big deal, but it's like once a year all the wards in west africa each do their own service project in their area on the same day. it's really cool, i think it's really good publicity for the church. sekondi ward combined with kwekuma ward and we went to a hospital in essikado and cleaned and weeded it. it's nuts how much work africans can do in such little time.

mom i got the subtle hint about sending pics home, and i'm working on it!! haha and thanks for reminding me about the "cht thank you" thing. i totally forgot about it. tell me if there is anything i can do better with. don't be shy. i'd rather know exactly what i should do rather than have no idea, while there is mumbling going on at home about how i do this or i dont do that. you get it, i'll move on.

about the new changes on the missionary work, i can't remember how much i have or haven't told you, so sorry if i'm repeating. normally we have zone conferences and interviews every six weeks, but they have now changed those to every three months. in addition, there will be two more types of meetings- leadership training and specialized training. there are 8 new lessons that the bretheren have come up with that are to be taught TO the missionaries by the mission president himself.

so i think that's alot of what we'll be learning about. the topics of the lessons are similar to what's found in preach my gospel (for example one is "personal revelation through the book of mormon") that will make us better teachers.

president sabey honestly thinks that it's aimed just as much, if not more at preparing the missionaries to be better leaders and spouses and people in the future.

one of the things that worries president is about the leadership training. it is a meeting to train the leaders in the mission (zone leaders, district leaders, and trainers). so president has spent all this time and really has succeded in making it so there isnt any kind of a ladder in the mission, and that it doesnt matter if your a regular missionary or a zone leader, which is sweet.

but now we have a meeting where if you are not a leader, you're not invited. so last week on tuesday he came to takoradi and did a specialized training about how little position matters in this mission. it was way cool. so this week on tuesday, wednesday, and friday will be the leadership trainig for the southern half of the mission, it'll be interesting to see how it all works out.

last night as we were reporting the numbers for our zone, the assistants told us that president wanted to have another specialized training today (on p-day!) so we kinda knew it had to be something important, but we never could have guessed what it was. we met, three zones together, right before our soccer match was supposed to begin.

president began by telling us that he and sister sabey had, last night, driven one of our missionaries to accra to send him home. president said that he just couldnt live the simple mission rules, like movies and music and stuff. president continued by talking to us about how our mission is doing right now.

now in order for you to get the full picture, i gotta take a step back and talk about the ghana cape coast mission. about three years ago now, they ALMOST shut the mission down. it was just filled with currupt, wicked missionaries. there were sister missionaries who had abortions while in the field. there were all kinds of missionaries breaking the law of chastity. there was a pornography ring that was run by the ASSISTANTS. it was terrible.

so what they did was they put the fire on. they sent tons of missionaries home and really cracked down on it. so it started improving over the next year until president sabey's time came. president sabey is the man, so the mission continued to shape up super quickly, until it became an obedient mission. right now, around west africa, our mission is known as the "spiritual" mission.

so we have had tons of success in accomplishing our goals and it really is a studly mission. but, as president put it this morning, now we are becoming prideful. it is not NEARLY to the point where it was before, but there are problems with missionaries calling their girlfriends at home on the phone. or missionaries who are doing missionary work but along the way they pick up another girlfriend in the field. (they don't go on dates or anything, but they will talk on the phone and send stuff to each other so that after the mish they can date). or there is alot of missionaries who have cd's and ipods with regular music on them, or missionaries who watch movies at people's houses instead of prosolyting.

the mission is becoming less obedient, and it's a problem. so president just wanted to let us know how serious this obedience thing really is, and how serious he is about it. that man is inspired.

the missionary who was sent home wrote a letter to the mission, that president sabey read. it's kinda tough for me to talk about so it's probably good that i am emailing right now. as i was listening to president read the letter, tears filled my eyes because it was one of my good friends on the mission.

so we're at an interesting junction in our mission. i could see two things happening. i could see missionaries becoming more stubborn and more disobedient as i know some of them feel like all of these rules make it like a prison. but i could also see it turning out where missionaries rally around president and come to a better understanding of how important obedience is. pray for us.

let me know if you have anymore questions about all that and i'll see if i can make anything more clear.

i don't want this email to be any kind of a downer. i love this mission, and i would never chose to go anywhere else. i really am optimistic about how it'll all work out.

i'm having the time of my life over here. and i can tell that i'm learning things right now that will benefit me for years and years.

love,

elder mackay