And another

Hey guys, I don’t have very much time to write. Thanks for all of the e-mails, its really nice to know that you are alive. I spent the last couple of nights writing you a letter that I was going to send with a cd of pictures home, but I left it on the table at the apartment. I guess that Ill just have to send the cd today and the rest next week. To answer some of the questions, The people here are very poor. There have been many interesting experiences so far. Ill just make a short list of things that I’ve seen since ive been here that you wouldn’t see in the u.s. 
1: Everybody carries everything on their head. you can see stuff from a notebook to a big basket of food. 
2: Everybody here uses a machete for everything, from cutting grass, to cutting pineapple to cutting people...jk not people 
3:WE were teaching this lesson on the side of the trail in between peoples houses and all of the sudden we here this loud noise. I look over and there is this chicken beating the (poop) out of this dog. The chicken chased the dog though our feet and down the road, and we just kept on teaching the lesson like nothing happened.
4: I woke up on morning, and looked out the window. It was really peaceful, with chickens eating on the side of the house and everything. All of a sudden, this hawk swoops down and eats this chicken right in front of me and then fly’s away. ( this last week I saw a cartoon drawing of the same thing in a children’s school book, so it must be an everyday occurrence. )
5:The people here wear very “traditional” clothes sometimes which, as one of the elders in my apartments says, “this just proves that they didn’t come from Adam and Eve, because the obviously haven’t partaken of the fruit and seen their nakedness”
6: We will be teaching lessons to ladies and their babies will start to cry. They will just start to breast feed them, without covering up in front of us. As you night guess its very hard to teach when this happens, but I’ve gotten more used to it.
7: they have “KEEP GHANA CLEAN” signs all over, but for some reasons these seem to be the places that collect the most trash.
8: All of the gas trucks have big letters on the back that state “highly inflammable” I still haven’t figured out if that makes sense or not .
9:It is very common for the gas stations to be out of gas.
10: One of the elders in the apartment just told me this story. Ill try to make it sound as good as he did. There are a lot of bums on the streets here that follow some of the missionaries around. He and his companion found this bum that he knew in the ditch on the side of the road one night, with this big chunk taken out of his leg. He was dead. They whent and told the town chief who was a member, and he told them that he would take care of it and for them not to get involved, because it might make the church look bad. The next day they were climbing into a tro-tro to got to town, and another one of the elders started to scream that the dead bum (who was still in the ditch) was moving. Come to find out he had just been sleeping in the ditch and they just thought that he was dead.
It is soooooooooo cool here. Its just one big adventure. There haven’t been to many animals, besides bug. There was this big iguana that the security guard at the mtc killed in our parking lot though. That was cool. I’ve started to get used to the food, but because the people here are so pour, members will actually run away when we come around, because they think that they have to feed us. Pres. Sabey has come out with a rule that we are not allowed to have any free meals unless there is an investigator present, and now the people don’t run away from us, because they know we don’t want food. This means that I don’t have to eat their food, but cook my own. That is both good and bad. My times up Ive got to go, love you lots
                Elder Russell