02 September 2009 – Wednesday

Slept well and had one of those mornings when time just flew by. Part of this was because I spent over an hour working on putting pictures into my blog/journal. I should get a week worth of pictures behind because it gets boring catching up. If I do it every day or at least every other day it is not bad at all.

(It is just a little after 9 pm and I sat down to write in this journal but my mind went blank, I yawned and decided that it will just have to wait until tomorrow to be written.)

Although I could not reach him by phone to make sure he was home, we headed for Esikhawini to have a short meeting with President Malinga. We were lucky and he was in so we talked for just 15 minutes or less and then left. I am hoping that my encouragement to have Presidency Meetings and do his home teaching will bear fruit so that the branch will move forward and become united.

We went to KFC for some lunch – amazingly the elders were not there – before going to the chapel to make plans for visiting some of the members. We got out our maps and directories and tried to find each member that was in H section. After spending some time on this, we decided to go see sister Mathe and ask her to help us identify where members lived. We had a nice visit with her and found that at least one of the members on the directory had moved to Petoria.

I felt that I should call sister Happy and find out how she was doing. She had not returned a prior call and when she did not answer my call I thought she might be ignoring me but almost as soon as I hung up she called back and we made arrangements to meet her at the crèche where she works.

We had some problems with our GPS and ended up wandering around the settlement on dirt and sand roads for quite awhile. After giving up and starting back to the main road, I saw that we were driving past her old house and knew that the crèche was nearby and it was. I count it as a tender mercy that after being lost, we were found.

We got a tour of the crèche – it needs work – and then took her home. That was an adventure as she lives deeper in the settlement on a sand road that at times caused the car to slow way down. I would not want to go that way after a rain. I went in to say hello to Patrick and then we left to meet with President Machaka for his version of a PEC meeting. We left from there to go Port Durnford for Youth. We ended up with just two youth, Quinton, and later the missionaries. We held a shortened version playing Book of Mormon Bingo.

We had to stop at the mall so Mary could go to the pharmacy and get her prescription. We had gone earlier in the day but the line was out the door. This time she was through in less than a half hour. I would really like to own that pharmacy – it must be a cash cow.

Me evening was spent reading, indexing more of the 1920 Chicago census, and checking things out on the computer. The news came that there had been a strong quake on Java that killed a number of people. They said it was near Jakarta but it turned out to be the other side of Bandung. As far as I could find out only one or two members live in the area, but I am sure by now Elder Subandriyo has received the OK to do some humanitarian work there.

As mentioned above I was very tired – maybe because of the hot, humid weather? – and so went off to bed early. I had no problem going right to sleep at the end of a 1 ¾ mite day.