Well the last three weeks have been interesting to say the least. For all who don't know, I am now serving in the Atlanta Georgia Mission where I will be staying for the rest of my 2 years.
Here is my account on how this all happened. - Part 1
You will have to forgive me, I don't remember dates.
This all started one day, I think it was on Thursday 7/31. Elder Maranca and I had just gone into town to get some things the district needed. We were about half way up our mountain when we got a call from the zone leaders (Elder Losee, my trainer, and Elder Woodhead). I picked up the phone and Elder Losee told me to get back to the apartment and to call everyone in the district and have them all in the apartment in the next 20 min. They didn't tell us anything other than that. So we all got back to the apartment. We knew it had something to do with Ebola but we didn't know just how serious things had gotten.
So the first thing we did was clean the apartment. We didn't know how long we would be in there and I did not want to live in filth 24/7. So everything was clean then we realized we had no food, mainly because we had just finished cleaning and were hungry. Due to the terms of the quarantine, we where not permitted to go outside the compound or to have anyone come in so we call some of our friends on the outside and slid a bunch of money and a shopping list under the door and off they went to get us food. When they were shopping we went outside to the front of the compound and being boys had an aggressive soccer game. Then we kicked the ball over the fence and that was the end of that. Not too long after, our shopping heroes returned with a mountain of food. We told them that they can keep half for their efforts. Man, you should of seen the looks on their faces.
We then spent 4 days with 6 elders in the apartment together 24/7. At one point we ran out of water so we all had a huge bon fire and did a rain dance and low and behold it rained and we collected all the water we could. At this point we still didn't know how long we would be there. On the 4th day of the quarantine in the morning we received a call from the mission president, and he repeated the three words that struck us all speechless "THE MISSION IS CLOSED." He then expressed his feeling on the matter, which were grievous to say the least and gave us all our reassignments. Elder Hamilton and I were assigned to the Ghana Accra West Mission and would be leaving the next day to the mission home. He told us that we could not tell anyone we were leaving and not to say goodbye. That night I didn't sleep well. Those words just repeated in my head all night, THE MISSION IS CLOSED. The next day we all packed and got in a transport to the mission home.
This is where the story will end for this week. I will continue next week.
As for Atlanta:
I am enjoying my time in a first world country. I will admit it has been a shock coming all the way back to the US. It doesn't even feel like I'm that far from my family just in comparison to where I was.
But that's my update for this week. I will continue and expand on everything next week.
Elder Gebauer
