Birthday, baptisms and Independence Day

February started out with a birthday celebration for Elder Halladay!  He got to choose where to go to dinner and his choice was the Noble House, which serves Chinese and Indian cuisine.  This is the birthday boy standing next to the entry door.

Of course, not being one to miss a celebration, I joined him as his date for the night.

There's always plenty of food to go around when we eat here.  The plate you see on my right was NOT my dinner plate...honest.  It was the one next to it.  

There's a humorous story behind this picture...turns out that they heard us speaking of Mike's birthday so, they turned on a rendition of a cowboy 'Happy Birthday" song really loud and marched out to our table with this dish of ice cream for him while all the waiters joined in clapping to the music.  We'd never seen this done before so, we just enjoyed the fun watching them all clap along to the music.  After a couple of minutes smiling and clapping, the waiter behind Mike finally leaned forward and informed him that he was supposed to make a wish and blow out the candle on the ice cream.  After he did so, they all walked off.  Happy Birthday Elder Halladay!


 Luckily, we have a gas oven with a thermometer in it so I could bake him a birthday cake.

It worked!

Our Area has baptisms every couple of weeks.  Four of the six children you see here are from our Branch.

Elder Bonku, Grace, Elder Motloung from the Agona Branch are on the left.  Elders Ilunga and Mbyui are on the right with their baptismal candidate.  They serve in Asamong.

This is Margaret, who was baptised at the end of February.  The Agona Branch has added 12 new members since Elder Halladay and I have begun to serve there.  Our missionaries are very dedicated.

The Ghanaian flag with the Accra Temple!

This past weekend, Ghana celebrated their 59th year of Independence.  They had all of the school children marching in their home areas to celebrate their independence.  We saw many, many children as we traveled to church on Sunday.

More school children gathering on the morning of their Independence celebration.  This group was in Bonwire.
 (pronounced Bone ray.)

This particular group of school children were older and were playing instruments.  They were very good musicians!

Those not playing instruments were marching along in unison.

More students preparing to march.  Notice that their uniforms are different depending on the school they attend.

Two sets of sisters.  These little girls ran up to me when I arrived at church and wanted me to take their photo together.  Aren't they beautiful?!  I love the people of Ghana!