A Moving Experience

It’s Sunday, Feb. 22^nd in Joburg and a very hot and beautiful summer day, quite surprising since yesterday was overcast and cool, almost like fall. What a week this has been! We woke up Tuesday morning and while driving to the office commented about how our jobs were beginning to seem quite routine – going into the office every morning, and at the reception desk Bob would go one way and Martha the other, then we’d meet for lunch, go back to the office, and ride home tired from another day at the office. Then, on Wednesday everything suddenly changed, including our routine.

We stayed home Wednesday morning because nine flats needed to have pin boards installed (large framed bulletin boards) and Martha was in charge of the project, being the property manager now, and had the keys to all the apartments that needed the boards, so she accompanied the installation crew while I worked from home until she was finished. One of the flats, #301 on the 3^rd floor, was vacant and newly renovated, and as soon as she walked in, Martha was taken aback by the spaciousness of the flat and how light it was with all the windows, and she wondered if anyone was scheduled to move in. Long story short - By the end of the day, we had made arrangements to move into the new, larger 1,650 square foot 2-bedroom flat on Thursday.



Our pin board with 8x10's of all 10 kids and families

When we arrived at the office Wednesday afternoon, Jessie, the Area Physical Facilities Manager, told us he had a desk for Martha and would be moving it into my office, so we now work side-by-side all day!

Our new flat is a very spacious 2-bedroom, 2-bath apartment that feels much more like home than #119 did, and almost everything about it is a big step up from what we have been living in for our first 2 weeks. Our home office also has two desks in it side-by-side. We took the day Thursday and moved everything from one apartment to the other. Since then, we have had to address some technology glitches, but now we’re back online, and we are loving our new digs. Photos later.

Friday night we were invited to a braai (barbecue) at the Johannesburg mission home by President and Sister Dunn and had a delightful evening with the Dunns and the Glen Holmes family. Glen Holmes is president of the Benoni Stake in Johannesburg and his daughter Emily is married to our former SACTM missionary Jaxon Martin, who were there with two small children, and Glen’s son Daniel is married to Camilla, the daughter of Elder Christoffel Golden of the First Quorum of Seventy, who was Area President back in 2005-08 when Bob was mission president in Cape Town. The Holmes’ other son Reuben is a newlywed and was there with his wife, Megan, and a long-time buddy who recently returned home from a mission to the Netherlands. The meal was delightful, and the company was great! President Holmes’ brother, Leon, is mission president in the Ghana Kumasi Mission and Leon’s son Ryan is the stake president of the Cape Town Stake, so Bob is now very acquainted with three Presidents Holmes.

It was stake conference yesterday and today at our Soweto Stake, and it was an absolutely fabulous experience. Neither of us had ever attended an all-black stake conference, under all-black leadership and presided over by a black African Area Seventy. It’s a nice, huge stake center and it was packed – maybe close to 1,000 people. And the conference was beautifully orchestrated and presented with some fabulous talks, both assigned and spontaneous. And four of Bob’s former missionaries (Elders Lubisi, Nyoka, Nzimande and Buthelezi) were in attendance with their wives and children. They were so excited to see Bob, give him big hugs, introduce their wives and children, and meet the new Sister Egan and have their photos taken with us. Elder Nyoka said, Hi, Momma!” when he met Martha.



With the Lubisis

 



With the Nyokas

 



With the Nzimandes

We have become good friends with the Dunns now, having been with them virtually all weekend. We loved being in their mission home Friday night, then they were at stake conference – Sister Dunn spoke Saturday night and President Dunn spoke this morning and was the speaker at our senior missionary zone conference/fireside tonight at Duke’s Court. They are fun, capable people.

It’s been a very eventful week, and we are loving our African experience. 

 

New Assignments

We went to lunch with Vaudys and Laird Dummer, from the Granite Ridge Ward in Sandy, this week and compared notes about our missions in South Africa.

Tomorrow we will have been in Johannesburg two weeks. We are settling in and really getting to know our co-workers and neighbors here, who are very choice, wonderful people and several are already becoming good friends. We're getting used to living in a one-bedroom apartment and are surviving nicely. Johannesburg is an very beautiful city in the summertime, especially the area where we live and work. Temperatures are warm but not unbearable (upper 80's in the day, 70's at night), even without air conditioning. We keep the windows open.

Martha received her assignments from the Area Presidency this week. We had a visit last Sunday night from Elder Jones, Executive Secretary to the Area Presidency, and his wife, and we had a good visit. Elder Jones told Martha the Area Presidency has several things in mind for her but she would find out about most of them in our meeting with the Area President the next day.

However, he did make one assignment Sunday night. He asked her to be the property manager for the 19 senior couple apartments at Duke’s Court that the Area either owns or is leasing. Her job would be assigning apartments to couples and being the contact for any repairs, maintenance or other issues, dealing primarily with the church facilities people and contractors.

The Church owns 9 or 10 of the apartments (really condos) and leases the other 9 or 10. There is currently a couple, Elder and Sister Barnes, who have that job, but they go home April 2^nd (less than 2 months from now) and turned everything over to Martha this week. There are about another 15 units in the complex that are Church-owned and used to house temple missionaries, but she won’t be managing those.

He also asked both of us to replace Elder and Sister Barnes on the Duke’s Court Board of Trustees. Also with the assignment comes the responsibility for hosting new couples that come to the Area as missionaries. That involves sending them a welcome email with a document called “What to Expect in South Africa” and Martha will need to make herself available to answer any questions the couple might have via email before they leave home. Then she will assign each new couple a hosting couple who will greet them at the airport, take them to dinner, orient them to their new surroundings and drive them around for the first week or so, making them feel welcome and comfortable.

Then on Monday we met with Elder Carl B. Cook of the Seventy, our Area President, who was a delight to meet with, and had a follow-on visit with Elder Jones. Elder Cook said that Bob would report directly to him and that his door is always open. Then he said he wants Martha to work directly with and for the Area Presidency.

 

He said they will be organizing as many as 14 new stakes this year in the Africa Southeast Area with new stake presidencies and high councils and approximately 100 new bishops in those new stakes alone, as branches become wards. If you add to that the normal changes in stake presidencies and bishoprics that occur in the normal course of events, there is way too much administrative paperwork for Elder Jones to handle by himself. He asked if Martha could plan on spending about half or more of her time assisting him in doing all the administrative work for putting all the new leaders and boundary maps in place and for submitting to Church HQ all that “paperwork” (online) for the Area Presidency plus handling those communications for the Presidency.

She will spend what's left of her time helping relieve the workload of Elder Hamilton, 2^nd counselor in the Area Presidency, who is responsible for communications and public affairs, among other things, and is in dire need of administrative help. The Presidency wants to give Martha a desk and workstation right in the Area Presidency’s suite of offices.  She has received special confidential clearances to access all the necessary systems and files. So she’ll be a very busy missionary, doing very important work to help with the rapid growth of the Chucrh in Africa.

We also received our weekend assignment. We will be the first and only senior couple assigned to the Protea Glen Ward in the township of Soweto (SOuth WEst TOwnship), south Africa's largest township, about a 30-minute drive southwest from our apartment. We will do what the bishop needs us to do, but our charge from the Area Presidency is to be shadow leaders to help develop future leaders among the Africans.

The Protea Glen Ward meets in a beautiful, large chapel right in the Soweto township. Elder & Sister Jones drove us there this morning and we were overwhelmed with what we experienced!  We were pleasantly surprised to see how full the large parking lot was. We got there 15 minutes early, and the chapel was close to half-full.  We were amazed at how many children there were - babies, toddlers, primary age and youth.

 

Elder Jones introduced us to the bishop, who called on us both to bear our testimonies in sacrament meeting. It was a very special meeting with over 200 members in attendance, and the speakers (besides us) were all very good, sharing powerful, yet humble, spiritual messages. A newly baptized sister was confirmed a member of the Church. We were the only white faces in the congregation, except for Brother Rudy, a recent convert who refers to himself as "the white guy who stays in Soweto."

We were quite impressed by Bishop Qinisile (originally from Queenstown in the Cape Town Mission) and his counselor who was there, and we were especially impressed with the young married sister who taught gospel doctrine in Sunday School. Elder Jones and I attended the High Priests group meeting where there were 12 high priests besides us, and Rudy, the convert from a year ago, taught the lesson from the Ezra Taft Benson manual, and he came across as a long-time member.




Bob with Bishop Qinisile

After sacrament meeting, Thulani Buthelesi, one of our SACTM missionaries, came up to us very excitedly and wanted us to meet his wife and 2-year old daughter Ayala. He is second counselor in the Elders Quorum Presidency and his wife teaches in Young Women. He grew up in the home where his non-member parents still reside, just across the parking lot from the ward building. Bob just loves these reunions with his missionaries, and they are always so excited to see him.

Buthelezi Family in Protea Glen Ward

The Joneses had us over for dinner, and we have enjoyed several meals this week with other couples who live our complex.

Also, yesterday, for Valentine's Day, each of the missionary couples baked a batch of cookies and we all met in one apartment where we played a Valentine's "newlywed game" (We aced it), then packaged the cookies up in 22 clear plastic bags with Valentines, and we delivered them to the employees of the apartment complex; the cleaning crew, guards, etc., who live, some with their families, in very humble one-room apartments (about 10 ft. by 10 ft.) in a narrow hallway on the roof of the complex and share bathrooms across the hall. They were so thrilled to be recognized that way and absolutely loved the cookies.  It was a very touching experience for us.

It's been a very busy, but rewarding week in Bob's IFR responsibilities, including some long, late hours, often complicated by planned power outages (rolling blackouts for load shedding), which also take our Internet down, sometimes for 6-7 hours at a time. We just look at this experience as our fun African adventure and roll with the punches.  We are very happy here!

First Week in Johannesburg

Martha feels like June Cleaver with her skirt,
pearls, and apron in the kitchen in our flat

We're approaching the end of our first week in Joburg. We arrived here Monday night (Feb. 2nd) and stayed two nights, Monday and Tuesday, with another senior couple, the Bartons, in their flat. Elder Barton is the Area Medical Advisor, a former Ob/Gyn in Rexburg, Idaho, and they have become very good friends of ours. He and Bob work very closely together. The Bartons' apartment is right across the hall from ours and they have a 2-bedroom 2-bathroom unit, so we took over their second bedroom and bathroom until the Heatons moved out and their/our apartment was cleaned. We have gotten to know several couples here and really enjoy all of them.

A cleaning crew of three people immaculately cleaned our apartment for over 12 hours on Wednesday and did an amazingly thorough job, including deep-cleaning the carpets. We slept in our own new flat Wednesday night, before the carpet was completely dry, and were pleasantly surprised with how clean everything looked and felt. We've taken the past three days to unpack, get organized, shop and get settled into our new digs.

Bob has been plenty busy with missionary situations, which are strictly confidential so won't be covered on the blog, but he has been able to work from home. So we have been able to do a lot together, and when the phone rings Bob has to drop everything and get the issues resolved.

We have a shopping mall right across the street, the Killarney Mall, that has about 90 stores, including three grocery store options, and we spent about an hour and R3,000 ($300) on groceries at Pick 'n Pay on Friday. Saturday we went to the larger Rosebank Mall, about 15 minutes away, and bought things we needed for the flat, including some fun African things, a new shower curtain and all new bedding and pillows for our king-size bed.

Our king-size bad and new bedding in the master bedroom

Today (Sunday) we went with the Bartons to their assigned ward, the Munsieville Ward, in a township about an hour's drive away, as we haven't received our ward assignment yet. We will probably receive our ward/branch assignment on Monday, along with Martha's office assignment, as we have a meeting with the Area President, Elder Carl B. Cook.

The Munsieville Ward is in the Roodeport Stake, not far from the Missionary Training Center and Johannesburg Mission Office, and they meet in a double-wide trailer, using four single-wide trailers for classrooms with porta-potties across from the "chapel" on the other side of a beautifully paved courtyard/square bounded by the trailers.



Munsieville Ward Chapel
from Courtyard

Munsieville Ward Courtyard
looking toward baptism font
(blue tank) and restrooms
 

Sister Egan's new friend, who stayed right with
her and sat on her lap during Relief Society

As we parked the car, a familiar face, Elder Khumbulani Mdletshe of the Seventy, came up to me and said, "President, are you back?" I told him about our new assignment, and he seemed very pleased. He was in charge of the Church Education System for the Area when I was in Cape Town and we had hosted him at the mission home. I had also run into him at General Conference in Salt Lake a couple of years ago. He was sustained an Area Seventy at General Conference last April and was visiting and presiding at the Munsieville Ward today. He delivered a wonderful message on gratitude and the Savior, tying together and summing up the talks given by the Relief Society President (34-year old convert) on Jesus Christ and His Atonement and the Elders Quorum President on Gratitude. All three sermons were wonderful and included outstanding, touching testimonies. There were about 75 in attendance, in a chapel that has seating for about 125 with nice carpet and chairs, paneled walls and wall fans. We were among the five white faces in the congregation, all missionaries.

The full-time elders there were Elder Brown from Ghana and Elder Yates from Sandy, Utah, and they had a baptism after the 3-hour block of meetings of a lady whose sister and brother-in-law had referred her to the missionaries and fellowshipped her into the church. The outdoor baptism font can be seen as the blue tank near the restrooms (porta-potties) in the courtyard photo. When the new convert came out of the font, she was just glowing with the Spirit, and she bore a beautiful testimony. It was a sacred way to end our first week and start out a new week.

Along the Garden Route

We're sitting at the Port Elizabeth airport on Monday, February 2nd, awaiting our flight to Johannesburg. Our vacation is over and our mission duties officially start tomorrow. 

We left Cape Town Friday morning the 30th, after checking out of the Peninsula Hotel, and drove the beautiful Garden Route along the southern coast of Africa through George, Wilderness and Knysna, a spectacular 5-hour drive, through green rolling hills and lush forests between the mountains and the Indian Ocean, stopping only once to take a photo of Wilderness Bay, which, as you can see, is anything but wilderness. 



A view of Wilderness Bay from the Garden Route

We drove straight through to the Knysna (NIZE- nuh) Elephant Park and arrived in time to take the last tram of the day, at 4:00, and we had a ball feeding and petting and otherwise interacting with elephants.

We had our photo taken with Kiesha, an 8-year young female elephant at the sanctuary, where they currently have 18 elephants (mostly orphaned in the wild) and a herd of 18 zebras (ZEB-ruhs) they added last year. 

 

We then drove to the beautiful home of John Mason, my former counselor in the mission presidency, and his wife Roz, overlooking a golf course at Plettenberg Bay, where we stayed with them Friday and Saturday nights. The Masons took us to dinner Friday evening at an amazing restaurant called Hunter's Lodge, on a breathtakingly beautiful property tucked away in the forest. The food was as incredible as the setting! We had a great visit, and Martha fit in so comfortably. There are a lot of parallels between our relationships and it was fun to share and compare our stories.

With the Masons outdoors at Hunter's Lodge

Saturday morning, we had breakfast in another especially beautiful setting at Global Village Earth Cafe, then we visited three nature/animal parks all under the same management; Jukani (large cats - lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, etc.), Birds of Eden and Monkeyland. It was a lot of walking, but beautiful and educational, and three quite different experiences. Then we had a lunch of bombas and Kingklip Gamberi outdoors on the ocean at Ristorante Enrico. Exhausted, we returned to the Mason's for a rest and just relaxed and visited through the evening, as the overcast skies developed into a cooling rainstorm. 

 

Breakfast at Global Village & Earth Café

 

Jaguars at Jukani

Birds of Eden - Scarlet Ibises and Spoonbill

 

Martha in Monkeyland

On Sunday morning, Martha, in her robe, saved the life of a tiny, newborn mole that was drowning in the Mason's pool outside our sliding glass doors. We attended church at the Knysna Branch where Bob was greeted royally by the longtime members there, including the branch president, Jeff Atkinson, who Bob called and set apart almost 9 years ago, and Martha says she felt like royalty. Bob bore his testimony and shared thoughts that tied in with President Atkinson's testimony and shared the experience of calling him as branch president in 2006. We were so touched by the humble testimonies of several recent converts from the nearby township about how the Church has changed their lives. Roz had packed us an unbelievable picnic lunch to break our fast, which we enjoyed both during the 3-hour drive to Port Elizabeth and again today on our safari.

We stayed at the Port Elizabeth Courtyard Hotel, next to The Boardwalk on Summerstrand Beach, with a panoramic view of the Indian Ocean from our room, and we had a delicious meal at Squires at the Boardwalk.



The Boardwalk in Port Elizabeth

This morning, after a lovely, filling buffet breakfast at the hotel, we drove to Addo National Park, a gigantic game reserve that is home to over 500 elephants, plus buffalo, lion, leopard, rhino, zebra, warthogs, kudu and various other antelope, for a self-guided safari. But the reason for it's existence is to allow us to see elephants in their natural habitat. 

 

It costs $5 a person to drive your own vehicle through the park, following your own hunches as to where the elephants may be. We saw no elephants the first two hours, but spotted numerous kudu and other animals at very close range, including families of warthogs and several herds (dazzles) of zebra and antelope. 

 

We took a break and finished the picnic lunch Roz had packed, and as soon as we left the picnic area, we saw a huge bull elephant having his own picnic on the acacia branches near the road. We didn't see another elephant for the next hour until we decided to stop at a waterhole for the second time on our way out of the reserve. As we approached the waterhole, we counted a herd of 13 elephants, mostly adult females, that included 3 baby elephants and was led by a very conscientious matriarch. As we were observing them, another mother elephant, chasing her baby calf, came scurrying over to join the others. 

 

 

The mom and baby kept our attention, as the baby tried to get a drink but her trunk wouldn't reach all the way to the water. The mother elephant filled her trunk and fed the baby from hers. We were totally fascinated as we observed interactions among the 15 elephants. After the mom and baby joined the herd and made one complete trek around the waterhole together, the original 13 left them behind and headed away toward the forest. Refreshed, the mom and baby soon followed but took a different path by themselves. What a day! Having finally seen our elephants in the wild, we drove the hour's drive to the Port Elizabeth airport. 

 

We arrived safely in Johannesburg Monday evening and were picked up by the Heatons, who go home tomorrow and turn their apartment, car, keys and phone over to us, as we take over and start our service as full-time missionaries.

Penguins, Baboons, Monkeys, Elephants and Lions

Here are some photos of wild animals Martha has taken over the past few days: