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!