Driving, it's on the Wild side here in Africa!!!

I have posted several times about how busy and uncontrolled the traffic is here in Accra. This is a sample of one week. Wednesday- we had to be at the area office (distance of about 3 miles) by 5 P.M. so we left the office about 4:30 we drive onto the 2 lane road that is about 1/4 mile until the main road.  Our 2 lane street with no shoulder and 2 ft deep sewer gutters on each side is now has 3 lanes of cars with walkers, and street hawkers also on it. We are moving slow and then we are at a stop. Right up ahead of us are 3 lanes of cars turning right onto the road we are one. They are stopped because the a truck decided he would turn left where all these cars are coming out. We were stopped for a long time until the truck driver got out and threatened to beat up the drivers of the cars that were coming out of the side road. It was very entertaining.
Thursday- It took us 1 1/2 hours of dodging traffic to drive the 3 miles between our house and the Temple.
Friday - bikes also drive wild, one of our missionaries flew off his bike after he hit a pot hold, and put up his arm to protect his head ( he was not wearing his helmet) and really hurt his arm badly. Sat- some missionaries on a bike accidentally hit a pedestrian (not hurt too bad).

 Sunday is the best day for traffic, but this was a good picture of how they overload all their trucks
Monday- the office Elders were t-boned by a taxi cab, they were not hurt, but their van has a big dent ( it now looks like most of the other Tro- tros, van here, and the taxi cab did not do very well.

On Saturday we went up to our Branch, where we went with 4 of the missionaries,and the Branch Presidency and Elders Quorum Presidency to this village about 4 miles out of town. It is a whole village of little shacks, and they all speak a different dialect then the one normally spoken around this area. But there were more than 200 members of the church that are not active that live there. The President told us that several years earlier a white missionary couple had wanted to help this village and had arranged with the Government for some land where they could farm. The couple had paid for expenses of planting and they were helping these people buy food while the crops were growing. And more and more people were joining the church to be part of this project. After a couple of years with no success in getting any crops, the white couple had gone home and there was no more free food, they all quit coming to church. I do not know if they were on bad land or they were not very good farmers, but it sounds like they were committed to the free food and not to the church. All the children, if they are not scared, really like us.

This is a picture of some of the kids in my class, I wanted to take a group picture, but they did not understand what I was trying to do. I will try again next week, then I would like someone from our west Bountiful Ward Primary to take a picture of their 3/4 year olds and I will show them their friends across the world. We do play  Duck Duck Chicken they have never played that before and really liked that. We also do the Hokie Pokie, I don't know if the kids like it so much, but the grown up ladies really like it,they just laugh and giggle and next week I will probably have more ladies in class so they can do the Hokie Pokie.