Market Place

 

 

Picking up our new shelves at the market place

 

Lady selling beans

 

 

 

 

 

Missionary Temporal Service

Saturday morning we got up at 6:00 to do a service project for Sister Christiann.  She needed a lot cleared of weeds and garbage for an addition to the old family home.  Most of the work was done with machetties.  I used it for about 15 minutes and had enough.  The lot was about 75’x75’ and it took us 2 hours to get it cleared off.

A bridge we drive across on our way to BonaBeri the other branch we serve with.

Brother Gaeton is working the machettie.  I am hauling weeds.

The neighbor children came out to watch us work.


Sister Gailey working with the machettie.



A coconut tree in the lot we were clearing.  They are not ripe.



Elder’s Andriamamongi, Lavering, Brother Gastone, Elders LaFleur, Gaileys and Lurcher with Sister Christiann in the middle.


After our work, Sister Christiann took us to her house and fed us rice and stir fry after we washed our hands with alcohol and hand sanitizer.

Gregoire, Gabriel, and Ange and Their Children

After church for three weeks now, we have gone to this home to teach Gregoire and his wife Gabriel.  They have been members of the church for about 8 months.  They got married so they could get baptized.  They want us to come over and teach them how to have a strong marriage and how to raise their 6 year old son Mesi. Elder Prince and Elder Porter go with us and translate for us.  Tonight we talked about Eternal Marriage.    Their friend Ange has been meeting with us and the Elders and is getting baptized this Saturday.  She left her boyfriend that she has been living with for several years to join the church.  They are so gracious and always say how honored they are that we will come to their home.  We are the ones that are honored to be in their home where the spirit is so strong.  They have so little materially, but have such great faith.

 

Six People on a Mototaxi

                                             Who needs a van when you have a mototaxi.

Homeless lady

This is a lady that lives down the road from us. This is where she lives. As you can see from the picture, she stores her items in the trees nearby. We had to sneak a picture while she was sleeping. She always sleeps on this 6 inch curb. She loves when we bring her treats and reading material.

Statues at Edea

We saw these statues of carved men on a bridge we drove over. We thought they were interesting, and have been trying to find out what they represent, but with no luck. We have seen figures of them at the marches to buy.

Logging Truck

      There are logging trucks like this one all over town. Can you imagine the weight this truck is carrying?

Over Turned Truck

Whenever there is an accident around town, they pull out grass along the side of the road, to use as a marker for oncoming traffic.

Apartment Building

This is one of thousands of abandon apartment buildings that people live in. In all that we have seen, none have any windows or doors.

Truck full of bananas

                                               Is this a truck load of bananas or what?

Happenings from around town

You’ll see clothes hanging like this everywhere you go. It’s so amazing to me to see how clean they get them, especially their whites. All from washing out of buckets and tubs of water.

                                            I wouldn’t want to tangle with this big boy.

                            We had so much fun viewing the many different primates at this park.

                                      It was so fun to see the ocean again. It was beautiful there.

                                When the tide comes in it looks like you are walking on water.

                                     This is part of the Dim family. They are so good to us.

Our P-Day Trip To Limbe

The Elders had been asking us for weeks to take them to a resort town 11/2 hours away called Limbe.  One of them had been there several months ago and said how wonderful it was.  We set a date and met at the church at 7:00 a.m. to get on the road.  One of the investigators that we thought was going to help drive us didn’t show up.  The Elders went to his house and he said that he couldn’t go and we would just have to pile into our little truck.


We ended up renting this van to haul the Elders.
This family, the Dims, from from one of the branches has adopted us.  They were so excited to show us around Limbe and borrowed a car from a friend to go with us.  Half way there their car died and coasted to the side of the road.  We figured out that the timing belt had broken, so we pushed it a little more off the road and went on in our other 2 cars.  It turned out that when the mechanic got into it, the piston had hit the valve and broke the cam shaft in three pieces.  (That’s Mechanic talk)  It cost him a lot to get it fixed.  Romeo spent the whole day going back to tow it and missed out on Limbe that he was so excited to show us.

 
One of the first places we went was to a botanical garden.  This stream ran down the side of it.  It was very lush and beautiful with vines hanging down and a lot of beautiful trees.

From the Botanical Gardens we got our first look at the ocean.  It was beautiful.
We also visited a primate sanctuary where the bring in injured animals to rehabilitate them.  Once they are better, they release them back into the wild.



This mother has a little baby asleep on her chest.  You have to look closely to see the baby.
Here we are at the ocean.  We had heard tales of the black sand beach, but the day we were there it was high tide and the beach was covered.  There were thousands of round black rocks all along the shore line.  It sounded neat because as the waves came in and receded, you could hear the rocks rolling across each other. It is volcanic rocks that are now smooth.  That is where the black sand beaches come from.
These are the Dim family girls.  The mom, Iren and the daughters Diabel, Kati, and Flora.

These are our missionaries, Elders Prince, Porter, Rambelosom, Hoiland, and LaFleur.  Elder Lavering, Rambelosom, Schmid, and Porter are below.

These look like birds and they are about the size of a pigeon.  Look closer and see what they really are.

Unusual birds take over Douala.

 As we walk to the Post Office in the morning, we would see hundreds of birds flying above one of the homes.  There are large trees and the birds would fly around and land in the trees.  It is 8:00 in the morning and they were making alot of noise. Upon closer inspection we realized that they weren't birds after all.

There are many clusters of bats on this tree.  They are a little hard to see, but the clumps are bats.

You can see the clusters of bats a little better in this picture.  I was a little nervous looking up.  I didn't know what might fall in my face.

Flooded Streets

It was raining really hard for a couple of hours on Thursday.  We drove along many streets with a foot of water on them.  On some streets we had to turn around because people were walking in them with water close to their waists.  We are suppose to be about out of the rainy season and it will now get hotter.

Round-A-Bout Art in Douala

There are many round-a-bouts in Douala.  This man is in the center of one of them.  He is probably about 40 feet tall.  He is made out of all sorts of spare parts welded together.  We think we know where we are and then we take the wrong road out of the round-a-bout and see things we have never seen before.

Douala Baptisms

We have baptisms in our branches about every other week.  This is a 27 year old woman and two 9 year olds that were baptized on October 6th.  They all have other members of their families that are members.  Jackie’s father was baptized two weeks before.  It is hard to get all the family ready at the same time.  Those found by the missionaries are somewhat posessive of the missionaries teaching them first and then their families.  It is hard to coordinate schedules to teach them together also.  The Elders are Elder Prince the Zone Leader and Elder Hoiland and Elder Rambelosom.

Jackie, her father and her children.

This is the baptism of  Brother Alex Eboa.  He was baptized on Sept. 22.  His daughter, Jackie looks 18 but is really 27 and has 3 children.  She has never been married.  Jackie was baptized two weeks later.   The gospel will make such a difference in her life and the lives of her small children. The elders are Elder Rambelosom who is from Madascar and Elder Hoiland who is from Idaho.  They taught Ales and Jackie.

This is a bunch of pineapple on the side of the road for sale.  They cost about $2 and are so good.  We hope they are available year round. 

A visit from the Ebere family.

This is the Ebere family.  They have 6 kids.  The opposite of our family with 5 girls and 1 boy.  They came and welcomed us to Cameroon.  We gave them cake and punch and Sister showed us how to braid the girls hair.  It takes about 45 minutes for each one.  Bro. Ebere is the first counselor in the branch presidency and they all speak some english.  We loved that.  The children are so well behaved.  They played with some dominos we had and cleaned up all the dishes, even washed them with out being asked.

Playing soccer in the pouring rain.

You can’t tell, but it was  pouring rain.  Elder Schmid and Elder Lavering didn’t mind though because it made it cooler.  They would have been that wet anyway because of sweat if it hadn’t been raining.  It was a fun activity for the branch and there were over 30 that came to play.

Another typical home in our city.  They put blocks and rocks on the roof to hold the tin down so it doesn’t blow off.