We have lots of animal life around our boarding – also in our boarding. The Black Headed Heron was in the lot next to us. The young sparrow is sitting on our entrance rug. The gecko guards our garage door to scare away any robbers.

When we picked up the Esikhawini elders from their boarding we noticed this tree with these large, beautiful flowers.

One of the joys of being missionaries is being able to help the members. Mama Zulu lives in Enseleni and needed to borrow the sewing machine to make some dresses to sell. Sister Happy is a convert of about a year and we were able to help with her wedding a few months ago. We met her today at Esikhawini where she was taking her turn cleaning the chapel for Sunday services.

23 January 2010 – Saturday

We really did not get much done today but what we did get accomplished helped people and that is what missionary work is about.

The men arrived promptly at 7:00 to put in our A/C and went right to work. Unfortunately they ran into a number of problems that caused them to go back to their supplier in Empangeni to get the right parts so when noon rolled around and we really had to leave, they had only put in one of the units. But that one turned out to be a life-saver as the weather turned hot and very humid.

While Mary stayed home to keep an eye on the house, I went to Port Durnford to pick up the Youth for Seminary and Institute day. Because I did not like the idea of Mary being at home alone I called the Richards Bay elders to come over and stay with her. Since they were going to come over anyways so Mary could produce a program for their baptism tomorrow, it killed two birds with one stone. Elder Lemmon is looking and sounding great and the companionship is working hard.

My trip to Port Durnford was somewhat disappointing as only Fufu, Ayanda and Lungani ended up going. The other three decided not to go. One of them suggested that they did not want to go because brother Maqca said the same thing all the time. While the four of us were driving back to RB, I asked the young people about this and they agreed that he did often say the same thing but Ayanda and Fufu pointed out that all he was trying to do is keep the Youth on the straight and narrow path. This led to a discussion of how much AIDS educations they get and it turns out that they get lots of it in school.

On Sunday when I asked those who went how the meeting was, they said that it was different from other ones and they really enjoyed it.

Back at our boarding we got ready to go to Esikhawini and piano lessons while they finished up getting the one unit installed. When they turned it on a wonderful stream of cool air flowed into the room. It felt great. As soon as they bundled up their tools and left, we were right behind them. We drove up to Empangeni and picked up Elders Vinson and Dishon to take them to their area. They had used the morning to do the planning that they could not do yesterday because Elder Vinson still felt very ill. But today he was fine with only a small headache remaining.

It turned out that Mary got bunked on all of her lessons. That is the first time no one showed up. We tried to contact each student an hour before they were supposed to start but only got through to one who said they could not come. 

However it turned out that our time was not wasted. As we were waiting, sister Happy came to clean the chapel and other rooms for the meetings tomorrow. The key they share opens most of the doors but there are two it does not open. We had the keys to those doors so all the rooms got cleaned.

We were also able to help sister Happy with another problem that was very important to her family so our being there was a true tender mercy for her. I do not know why I still find it amazing how often we seem to be in the right place, at the right time, but not for the reason we thought we were there.

After taking care of sister Happy’s problem we headed back to our boarding so I could drop Mary off and then go get the car washed. Due to the fact that it has rained or sprinkled almost every day for the last week it was rather dirty inside and out. Even though it looked like it might start drizzling at any moment, I decided that we really should not drive such a dirty car to our meetings tomorrow.

We had a very nice, and thanks to our new A/C cool evening. I spent much of it getting caught up again on pictures and even got some of them on the blog. I still have not figured out how to get good pictures of the African missionaries and members. I was looking at how great they look on the Mann’s and Mickelsen’s blog and how poor the detail is on ours.