The Khanyile family would be a wonderful addition to the PD branch. Zinhle, the oldest child, comes to church and youth when the parents allow. The mother use to come to the English classes at the Nzamas. A neighboring child really wanted to be in the family portrait. We promised to take his picture if he would step out of the family shot. As I have mentioned there are huge tree farms in the country. Everyday we see truck loads of logs heading for the mills but it is hard to get a picture. I was lucky to catch this large load as it went around a corner.
10 November 2009 – Tuesday
Spent the morning doing many of the chores that did not get done yesterday. It seems that laundry, dishes, shopping, etc., does not get done by some friendly elves when we are doing game drives and holding FHE at member’s homes.
Finally in the afternoon we were able to go out and visit a couple of investigator’s home. At the Khanyile home we met the whole family and had a nice visit. When her parents let her, Zinhle has been coming to church on and off for a long time. She has two young siblings, her mother runs the house and her father is a boiler maker who makes a decent income. While the home is very modest, the children are going to very good schools. It is wonderful to see the parents invest much of their income in the future of their children. It is also great to find a family where there is a father at the head. We could sure use this family in the Port Durnford branch. We gave them a picture of Jesus and they asked us to offer a prayer before we left.
After that we picked up Bungumuse and took him to the RB mall so he could get to spend a few minutes with the famous South African wildlife painter Joe Marais. Mr. Marais looked at his work, gave him some instructions on how to improve and invited him back in a couple of months so he could evaluate his progress. Bungumuse was as excited as he would have been to have met President Obama. I was afraid he was going to have a heart attack. It was very nice of Mr. Marais to take the time to see this fine young man and help him with his drawing.
We dropped Bungumuse off at the taxi ring with enough money to take one home. We had checked with his mother to make sure it would be alright for him to go home by taxi so we did not have to make another round trip to PD.
I spent much of the evening – and some of the morning posting pictures and text to our web. I also put an album of our game drive on our Facebook page. It gets a lot of attention and we hope it might even get some couple thinking about putting in their papers for a mission in South Africa.
Mary has started a new puzzle we bought in Umfolozi yesterday – she does like to put things together.