The Day of Africa
Text by Maurine Proctor and Sylvia Finlayson
Photography by Scot Facer Proctor

click photos to enlarge

PART FIVE

President Gunnell

Grant Gunnell, former mission president in Accra and new temple president here said that President Faust told the people at a conference in Cape Coast in April of 1991 to prepare to receive temple recommends.  He said that even without the thought that a temple could be here, they should go to see their bishop each year and carry that recommend. 

President Gunnell remembers Besti Opoku, a sister in the Winneba district who in speaking with some friends reverently and quietly held out a piece of paper to show them saying, “I am a recommend holder.”

“They understand the meaning of the temple,” President Gunnell said, “They understand covenants.”  I have every confidence this temple will be very busy despite lack of means for transportation.”

President Gunnell interviewed 417 people who wanted to be ordinance workers and ended up with a nucleus of over 100 who will be temple workers.  The willingness to serve marks the West African Latter-day Saints.

His love for West Africa began in 1989 when he and his wife, Alice, served in the Nigeria, Aba mission.  “There are many who came on missions and didn’t stay because it wasn’t easy.  We spent about half our time just surviving.  We hauled our water and boiled it.  It strengthens your faith and your testimony to have to do things like that.”

The truth is it strengthens your testimony to sacrifice.  All the tears on this day of dedication were from those who had given so much.  In his preparation for a three- minute talk in the dedicatory service, President Gunnell admitted, “I only have to prepare one minute, because I’ll cry for two.”

On this day of dedication, so did everybody else.

Epilogue:

The Latter-day Saints who came from Ivory Coast for the temple dedication stayed for three more days, many of them sleeping in the bus.  In those three days, 200 living endowments were performed, 50 sealings of husband to wife, and 30 sealings of parents to children.  In those days, the number of endowed members of the Abidjan Stake in Ivory Coast tripled.

One of the sealings was of a new widow to her husband who died just seven months ago.  Their children were sealed to them as well, among them a daughter, also lost this year.

Robert Reeve who oversees this area for the temple department said, “I’ve never seen a people more reverent in the temple and more eager to do what they are asked.” 

Click here to go to Part Six and see the prophet greeting the Saints as he comes out of the temple.

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After receiving her education from University of Utah and Harvard, Maurine Jensen Proctor, the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Meridian Magazine, began her writing career with McGraw Hill Magazines and the Chicago Sun-Times. She has created award-winning television documentaries, has written a radio show for more than six years that played on 300 radio stations, and was a long-time writer of The Spoken Word for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

She, and her husband, Scot, have written several books together, including Witness of the Light, Source of the Light, Light from the Dust and The Gathering. They also edited a new version of Lucy Mack Smith’s biography of her son called The Revised and Enhanced History of Joseph Smith by His Mother and The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt. They were formerly the editors of This People magazine.

Maurine has been a part-time Institute teacher for the past 13 years and is the mother of eleven children and grandmother of three.

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