September 9, 2012

 Sunday always brings new adventures.  Sacrament went fairly well.  The first speaker just read a complete talk, which took more time than he was supposed to, so the other ones had to cut theirs short.  The Young Women sang a song approved by President, however, they put in a few “hallelujahs” themselves.  He said that won’t happen again, they will have to just sing from the Hymn book.  He didn’t tell them, just me.  Elder Scicluna also spoke and was very direct in telling them they needed to do the basics to be blessed.  Hopefully they listened and took it to heart!  They really need to. Sister Barris spoke before Elder Scicluna and spoke on repentance.  She mentioned that when she wanted to apologize to her husband and he wouldn’t listen, she would put a white hankie on the end of a stick and just waved it through the door and he would tell her she could apologize.  It was quite funny.  This is Elder Sciclunas last Sunday here.  He just found out he is going to be a zone leader in the Sommerset West area, Cape Town South zone.  We weren’t surprised he would be made a zone leader.  He is a great teacher and leader and task oriented.  

Had the Elders for dinner tonight, our usual Sunday dinner.  I made Elder Sciclunas favorite lasagna and chocolate cupcakes.

September 8, 2012

 This morning the Elders came over and Elder Dale made his wonderful pancakes.  We had ice cream, buttermilk syrup, maple syrup, yogurt and strawberries to put on them  Elder Dale also put chocolate chips in his and my pancakes.  It all was very good.

We had another baptism today.  Elder Scicluna baptized Reason Mudodo and Elder Dale will confirm him tomorrow at Sacrament Meeting. 

 He is very excited about the gospel and is 24 years old.  Sounds like he would like to serve a mission in a year.  He is related to the Tunye family.  I made a couple of batches of cookies for the refreshment.

September 7, 2012

 District meeting today…sadly, the last one with Elder Scicluna as we know he will be transferred this week.  We will surely miss him.  He is a great missionary and always works very hard.  He has helped a lot of people move forward in their conversion and had a lot of baptisms while here.  He has also been a great help to us. 

Tonight was also another branch activity.  The Elders Quorum were in charge…that meant President Nteyi asked me to help with food or in other words…to do it.  As it turned out, the Elders did the activity and clean-up, etc.  We have a lot of work to do in helping the members understand they need to be pro-active in doing these things.  I made sausage rolls, tortilla rollups and cheese bread for the refreshment as they did not want the usual cookie thing.  I didn’t realize what I was getting into when I agreed to help and President said we wouldn’t be doing that again.  More teaching is just needed.  We really want the branch to be more self- sustaining. That is the whole plan of helping them grow.

Since the activities are at night, we have told people if they get there, we will get them home as it is not safe after dark.  The Elders cannot take any nonmembers in their car, however, they can take members.  Since the nonmembers come with members, we get most of the take home duty.  Last night we spent a little over 2 hours taking people home.  Lots of trips to the township!!  We were exhausted when we were done.  I think everyone had a good time, however. 

September 5, 2012

 The Elders and us went to Sister Vlindlu’s home to help her clean since she has been ill for a few days.  We didn’t do much, she is a very good housekeeper.  She lives in the town area so her home is on the nicer side.  She and her husband are black and both are school teachers.  The Elders also made lunch for all of us.  Homemade tortillas and filling.  It was really good.

Today is the birthday of a young girl in our branch, Yonela Hola.  She turns 10 and since she probably won’t get a birthday cake as her family can’t make or afford one, we thought we would make one for her and go with the Elders and wish her a happy birthday, which we did.  She was happy about the whole thing. 

After taking the cake to Yonela, we went on to seminary at the Mgadi’s.  Again they were the only ones we taught.  We had a rain storm later in the afternoon and it was still going on.  After seminary we went home and boy was the storm big by now.  Pouring rain and blowing wind.  Rivers were running down the hills and lakes at the bottom of the hills.  Dirt roads were washing onto the highway with rocks as big as baseballs, lightning and thunder and just lots of water everywhere.  Driving was slow.  What a night. Amazingly, we never lost power!!

September 2, 2012

 Fast Sunday today and Rick gets to conduct for the whole month.  I am sure Brother Canny (Nobebe) and Brother Hola are happy about that.  They both don’t like conducting, but they do just fine and both are trying very hard to do it right.  Fast and Testimony meetings always seem to be wonderful and today was no exception.  So many people bear their testimony and you can feel the Spirit so strong when they share their sincere testimonies.

Our Elders came for dinner, but first wanted to have a “district inventory”. Since Elder Scicluna is our district leader, he can call one of these meetings.  We were a little nervous because we figured they wanted to school us about something.  Well…as it turns out, they were feeling we were having a hard time this last week and just wanted to be of help.  They told us they enjoyed being able to come here and it felt like home to them.  Elder Scicluna said they could come over after a hard day and talk about their trials of the day or when they had good days they could come over and share that with us, as well, and felt comfortable doing so.  They wanted us to know it is nice to be able to talk about their day with us. We do spend a lot of time with them and have learned to love them dearly.  Elder Scicluna will be leaving on the next transfer, which will be in a week and a half.  We will really miss him. It was nice to know we have been of help to both of them.  I think the hardest part of the mission is sending our missionaries on to other places.  They mean so much to us.

September 1, 2012

 The AP’s are here with our Elders and all of them are coming over for dinner.  I am making great chicken…hope they like it!!  And cupcakes…!! Okay what’s not to love about great chicken and chocolate cupcakes.

The AP’s (assistants to the President in the mission) chose to spend the night with us instead of the Elders. I think it may have something to do with the much nicer beds we have but I’m not positive. They are two great missionaries and no matter why they stayed here we enjoyed their company and stories from the mission. Elder Lebala is from Botswana and Elder Bryers is from Australia.  Elder Lebala is very dynamic and spent the beginning of his mission here in Port Alfred and is excited to see the members he knew from before.  They will leave tomorrow after church to head back to Port Elizabeth where they will catch a flight to Cape Town where they serve.

August 30, 2012

 We spent the night in a flat near the Fowers that can be rented out a night at a time.  They live in a nice area with a wonderful view overlooking a small valley and a lot of trees where monkeys play sometimes in the morning. 

 Unfortunately, not this morning.  We ate breakfast with them, and then headed to the stake center where the conference was to take place at the Amalinda chapel in East London. 

We were inspired listening to the Woods and the Cooks present great information on how paying tithing helps people grow in the gospel.  The members in our branch really struggle with paying tithing.  They just don’t understand how important it is and how much they will be blessed by just doing it. Hopefully, we can pass this information on to them in a different way that will inspire them to do better. 

We had pizza and salad for lunch and took a couple of pictures with the Cooks.  (Unfortunately, they got wiped off of our camera a while later.) As they say here in South Africa… shame. Now this is a really big “SHAME”. (Okay, it was a trial, but I did get over it). We do have a picture of our Elders together with us and one of Elder Dale with the Cooks.

We then all gathered together where Sister Wood recorded our Zone singing the SACTM song.  It was pretty cool. It was a great conference, we left feeling inspired and ready to do better.