Visit with the Chief

The apartment of the Group Leader where the Huni Valley Group hold their church services and where the missionaries hid when the villagers were attacking.

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Six months ago some of our missionaries in Huni Valley were having fun and taking selfies with the children in the village and giving the children some religious pamphlets.  The adult villagers chased the missionaries through town until the missionaries made it to the Group Leaders home and hid.  The missionaries were just trying to be friendly but the villagers thought these missionaries were trying to steal their children.  After the crowd dispersed the missionaries came out of the home and quickly traveled back to Tarkwa.  Shelly and I are composing a letter to the chief requesting a meeting to more properly introduce ourselves now that enough time has elapsed from the incident.  

The African culture is both beautiful and strange.  Things that we consider odd are just very ordinary in Ghana.  We do things that the African's find strange such as how we manage time so tightly with meetings and schedules.  They sing with gusto and we sing with melody.  They are very stoic when they talk about God.  We are more emotional and they don't understand when we shed tears in expressing our feelings about God.   They dream dreams of visions.  We rely more on feelings and impressions from the Holy Spirit.  Yet even in these differences we all pray to the same God.  The gospel of Jesus Christ transcends cultural differences and raises everyone who hears the word.  We have definitely witnessed this transformative power. 

We hope Chief Nana Kwanena Amposah IV will give us an audience so the missionaries can properly bring this powerful message to the village of Huni Valley.

I secretly snapped this picture of the Chief's throne before he arrived.  We broke so much protocol already with Shelly crossing her legs and not wearing a headdress, I didn't want to take pictures and have them throw us out for good.

Brother John Yaw Asmah-Hemans is a villager in Huni Valley who was our escort to the king.  He is a wonderful petite little man that has a very large testimony of Jesus Christ and the Word of Wisdom.  When the missionaries met him in 2006 he was a serious alcoholic and couldn't get past the addiction.  The missionaries introduced Jesus Christ into his life and with His power he never took a drink again.  This happened before the church had a meetinghouse in Tarkwa and Ashmah would travel 4 hours every Sunday one way, 8 hours round trip to Takoradi and back.  He was bold in the presence of the Chief.

A much friendlier queen that Shelly and I got to know in Nyenase - Queen Nanna.  She was converted 4 years ago and now is a great friend of the church.