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| Giraffe at Sunset |
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| Southern Yellow-billed Hornbill |
Recently I attended a women's conference for our church. The guest speakers were Elder and Sister Cook
of the Area Presidency, President Chatora our stake president, and Elder
Hartman, the mental health advisor for the Area. The theme of the conference was “Overcoming
Challenges”. After the talks members in
the audience were encouraged to ask questions of the panel (Cooks, Hartmans,
Chatoras, Sister Clarke) regarding their own challenges. Most of the challenges are ones most women
have – how best do I treat my non-member husband, what can be done with
rebellious teen-age children, and how do I explain to others the need to work
out of the home, etc. The one problem that
was unique to South Africa dwelt with the marriage tradition here called
“lobola”. There are many young
people here who are not getting married. One of
the reasons is “lobola”. Simply put
lobola is an African long- time tradition of the groom paying the bride’s family for his
bride with cattle or cash. Nowadays it
is usually cash. The tradition was meant
to bring the two families closer together, but today is often abused. For instance the bride’s family, including
extended family like uncles, use the money to pay off debts rather than help the
young bride set up housekeeping. Or the
groom may feel that he has purchased his bride and therefore can treat her as
his property. She must stay home and
cook, tend the children, etc. while he philanders. She cannot leave him because her family
cannot afford to pay back the lobola and under the lobola system the children
would go with the father. Her family may
also not be supportive because the husband may still owe a substantial part of
the lobola. It also contributes to the
problem of AIDS because of the promiscuous behaviour of the husband. So many young people are putting off getting
married because they cannot afford the lobola or need to use their resources
for education. Lobola
is a controversial subject here in South Africa in and out of the church.
We have had great opportunities to meet
wonderful people, the senior missionary couples and the African Saints. Earlier in May we went on an overnight trip
to Harare, Zimbabwe where we trained a new assistant auditor, Godfrey
Matsika. He is young and
intelligent. He works for KPMG, a big
auditing firm. We gave him much
direction and insight into what his position as an auditor for the church involves. If these assistants catch the vision and
aren’t afraid to magnify their calling, the financial program of the church
here in Africa will be greatly strengthened.
It was only a two hour flight to
Harare from Joberg, but it took over six by the time we were picked up at the
Area Office around 9:30 am, were taken to the airport by Abraham, waited for
our flight, and went through customs in Harare.
We paid $30 each for visas when we arrived. Zimbabwe uses the US dollar as its currency. They must have a limited supply of bills
because the ones and fives are so soiled and wrinkled. It felt good, however, to be dealing with a currency
which we understood. A hotel taxi took
us to our hotel, The Miekels. It is a
historic five star hotel and we had very nice accommodations and dining. We flew on British Airways this time and were
again given a meal going and a nice sandwich on the flight home. Harare is a city of six million people and is
the capital city. We saw very few whites
and the ones we did looked like tourists or visitors. It is a fairly modern city except for the
infrastructure. The streets were badly
in need of repair. The people were
better dressed than those we saw in Malawi and there weren’t nearly so many
makeshift roadside stalls or shacks. Across from the hotel was a large floral
shop which was composed of several stands holding dozens of beautiful flower
arrangements. There must have been some
weddings (or funerals) on Saturday because early in the morning there were
several customers come to buy flowers.
We noticed that the flowers were covered over or taken in somewhere for
the night. By six-thirty am they were
available for sale.
It was great to see Patrick and Rayleen Bonkemeyer this month.
The Bonkemeyers used to live in North Spokane and have since moved to
Cape Town in South Africa. Their son,
Dustin, has received a mission call to Santiago, Chile and came to receive his
endowments in the Johannesburg Temple. Dustin was a youth when a
few years ago at Christmas time we did 600 baptisms for the deceased in the Spokane Temple to
even out the number of baptisms and confirmations. I remember the early Wednesday morning
because that was the time my grandson, Sean Lovinger, baptized me 50 times as a proxy. Sorry to say, I didn’t remember Justin from
then. Tom and I officiated the temple session
they were on and then took them to eat at Mike’s Kitchen afterwards.
Tomorrow we
will be going to Zambia and part of the reason we are
going is to help train the mission office personnel there. It has been a long time since we were the
mission office couple in Tokyo; so we went for a refresher course to the mission home here in Johannesburg. It was more than a refresher course
as we used a program called MOS, (we think it stands for Mission Office System)
but now they use iMOS, which as we understand it means Internet MOS. There is a new office couple in Lusaka, Zambia and we hope to be of assistance in getting them trained in the financial software they will be using. While we are there we will
also do some training of priesthood leaders in church finance and
auditing. We will be there almost a week. The mission president promised to take us on a little safari, so if we remember the camera, we should get some good animal pictures.
