Slackers

It seems that a couple of weeks slipped by so we are a little delinquent in sending a weekly email.  In our last letter we talked about a couple to whom we have been teaching the temple preparation lessons.  It is a large family, but only the parents and 5 of their children will be getting sealed since several of the older children are not members.  They have no car so the branch president is arranging for them to take a taxi from here to Johannesburg and back to complete the temple ordinances.  This is about a 6 hour trip each way, but it is the only transportation available.  There is a special account in the church donation system for people to contribute to a “first time temple fund” for members such as this.  They are very excited, and all this should happen this coming weekend (1/21).  A taxi will not take you anywhere until the cab is 100% filled to capacity.  So one never knows the departure time or the return time.  Also, they stop operating at 7pm in our area.

Last Saturday, 1/7, we taught our first inservice meeting to the seminary and institute teachers in Polokwane and Mokupane, about 100 km from here.  There were 12 in attendance and we think things went pretty well.  Today, 1/14, we taught two new inservice meetings in Lenyenye and Modjadji.  Tomorrow we will teach one sister in Tzaneen and next Saturday we will be in Nelspruit and KaNamazane, about 4 hours from here, to complete our series of lessons before the start of seminary and institute. 

We have met with the District President a couple of times in the past 2-3 weeks. Our latest effort is to get everyone involved in a satellite broadcast commemorating 100 years of seminary in the Church and 40 years in Africa.

Earlier this week we travelled to Johannesburg to be trained.  We drove down on Tuesday and returned on Wednesday.  It was a long two days because it is a 5-6 hour drive each way which includes about an hour wait for construction. 

We took a little break and went to tour a candy factory for about an hour earlier this week.  It was delicious.

We havn’t taken too many photos lately, but perhaps we will get a few on our next trip. 

We took a lady home after our seminary training meeting today who lives high up in one of the villages.  We asked her how she gets her water.  She has no water in her home.  She said she previously carried it from a common water faucet on her head, but now finds it much more effective to carry buckets of water in a wheel barrow.  So you can see progress is being made!  On the road to another village today we saw many people along the road carrying water on their heads and in wheel barrows.

Last week we spoke in two different branches.  In one we had a translator because they don’t speak English all that well.  It was funny, because there were a couple of times the congregation broke out in laughter even though mom said nothing funny at all in her talk.  I used the work backpack in my talk and I heard the work Mt. Everest from the translator so I think we need a translator to tell us what the translator says.