Weddings in Ghana

This week we rotated all the missionaries into Accra, we had 24-28 per day. In the morning half went to the temple, and the other half had interviews by President and a cooking class with myself and Sister Hill and then Terry did a class on how to take care of your bike and water filter system. The missionaries liked it, they like any extra food they get and going to the temple. Of course they also like to see former companions and friends.  One of the Sisters is making the fried rice made with eggs and vegetables  in it.

One of these Elders is from Ephraim and I said that the beautiful Larsen sisters from Ephraim were going to view this blog. He blushed and smiled. Sister Hill is making a Bisquick mix. I also made some tortillas and they all had to roll out and cook their own. I then had some south-west seasoned beans and rice to put in and they thought it was great. We are trying to encourage them to eat more eggs and beans,because meat is hard to get. Our area Public Affairs couple is a retired podiatrist and he had to do a little surgery on a couple of ingrown toenails, upstairs in his office. Terry went to help and that was his favorite part of the week.

This weekend we also went to a Wedding. This is a young man we know he is a returned missionary and a student. He goes to the same ward as the AP's and he has started working for the mission a little part time. What he does is he goes to the street markets to buy things we cannot get for a good price at Melcom. For instance we used to get inexpensive mirrors for all the bathrooms from the store for about $7.00. then they disappeared and we would have had to buy mirrors for about $40.00. He was able to get much better mirrors from someone in the market for about $10.- and that is with his profit. There are several other items he gets for us. Back to the wedding! We went first to the traditional wedding.

 This is the family of the Groom arriving at the traditional wedding.

This is the happy couple. The Traditional wedding is very interesting. The Grooms family is to bring gifts that are requested by the Brides family, as part of the ceremony they bring in the gifts and if they are not happy the wedding is off. I was worried that they might call it off because the Brides Mother was very unhappy about some of the gifts they received and she even left, but then she came back. Everything was accepted and they were able to go ahead and get married. This is just a drama for the wedding, actually the Bride price is a negotiated and paid ahead of time. I think I already wrote about the Bride Price. Many couples just live together here, because they cannot pay it. Elder Holland and other church leaders have already talked and talked about that this is a tradition that they should leave behind them.   

 
Later we went to the Church building for the real wedding. Next they will go to the Temple to the really real wedding. It was a very long day of sitting, but very interesting.

This is a very fuzzy picture, but an on going theme of unbelievable things we see on the road. It is a metal box, not tied on, the 3 men are "holding it on". Hope they did not tip over.