A trip to Kruger Park and AAA Conference



A Leopard in our path!



We followed this elephant



Yellow-billed Hornbill
 

A kudu

One of many giraffes we saw

A hyena on side of road

After we got home from Blantyre on the 30^th of March we were able to celebrate Easter by going to church in Tembisa and having dinner with the senior couple missionaries. Monday morning we were off to Port Elizabeth to investigate a possible defalcation in the Uitenhage and Kwa Nobuhle 2^nd Wards.  We stayed in a bed and breakfast that was within walking distance of the Uitenhage chapel.  We interviewed all the bishopric and the member of the stake presidency whose tithing was missing.  No one confessed, but we discovered irregularities in how the clerk and bishopric counselor were processing the donations.  We pray that the heart of the guilty will be softened and that trust can once more be established in that ward.  The other ward was lacking in documentation and funds may have been missing there as well.  We trained the bishopric who were new as of last September and left it in the hands of the stake clerk to follow through.

Wednesday morning we had no appointments so we took advantage of our free time to visit the Addo Elephant Park which was not very far distant.  It was also our 54^th wedding anniversary so it was nice to be able to spend some quiet time together.  It rained most of our time in Uitenhage and this day was no exception.  We drove around some areas of the park and saw warthogs, a black-backed jackal, zebra and many beautiful birds.  We stopped and listened while a bokmakerlie sang.  There are supposed to be 500 elephants in the park, but none of them were visible to us that day.  Tom was very kind and patient that day as we slowly drove around and stopped to see anything that interested us.



We no soon got home from Port Elizabeth when we turned around to go to Kruger Park with the Eppels for a week.  The first Sunday we were in Crystal Springs in the Drakenburg Mountains of South Africa.  We traveled one and one-half hours to go to church in Nelspruit where a small branch meets.  We enjoyed the Fast and Testimony meeting and the other meetings.  The saints here have to travel long distances to meet together.  It was General Conference weekend but we were unable to listen to very much of conference.  The Eppels have a modem and 3-G card so they can access the internet, but listening to the Saturday morning session last evening was very choppy.  We only got one talk on Sunday.  We live in such a wonderous age – to think that we could be listening live to conference half way around the world and 8 hours’ time difference!  In Joberg we can use the internet to call via our Vonage phone our family at home and it sounds as if they were next door.

We really enjoyed our time with the Eppels in their time-share condo.  We took two whole days in Kruger searching for animals and birds.  I don’t think we saw as many animals as we saw in Madikwe.  Someone else told us that the sightings were scarce this last week at Kruger.  Neverthless we experienced a leopard which is quite rare.  Elder Eppel hoped to see a hyena and just before we left on Wednesday we saw a mother hyena and cub beside the road.  We saw giraffes, zebra, hippos, impala, kudu, elephants and a variety of birds. 

The Area Presidency gave us their impressions of General Conference in the devotional on Monday morning.  They spoke of some faith promoting incidents and Sister Renlund gave a thought gleaned from Elder Bednar regarding the necessity of coming to meetings, conferences, etc. with a question in mind in order to be taught by the Holy Ghost.  President Renlund said the new assignments for the quorum of seventies were given, but can’t be made public until May 1^st.  All President Renlund would tell us is that he and Elder Cook will not be packing their bags soon and that we will be getting a new member of the area presidency.  We were pleased to learn that Elder Dube, recently released as the Zimbabwe Mission president and called as an area seventy, is now a member of the First Quorum of Seventy.  Two other members of our Area were called as Area Seventies, Elder Giddy and Elder Van Reenan, both stake presidents from South Africa.

AAA Conference Attendees Apr 26, 2013

We have had a busy time this past month preparing for the Assistant Area Auditor conference.  Elder C. Scott Grow who is over the Auditing Department and Brother Michael Beck , a managing director of the department came from Salt Lake.  Ten assistants from Angola, Mozambique, Madagascar, Uganda, Zimbabwe and South Africa attended.   We started with a dinner on Thursday evening, all day training on Friday, a temple session Friday evening and ended with a joint meeting of the Area Seventies and Assistant Auditors on Saturday morning.  It was a lot of work putting on the conference – arranging for the flights, hotel accommodations, a conference room at the hotel, transportation from the airport to the hotel and from the hotel to the area office and temple, etc.  Tom did almost all of these arrangements and did a great job as it all went smoothly.  Well, except for Solomon Malidadi, our assistant from Berea, Mozambique.  His plane from Berea was over an hour late getting into Maputo, so he missed his connecting flight to Joberg and also his dental appointment we had made for him.  Thankfully it is only a short hop from Maputo to Joberg so he made it in time for the dinner we had Thursday night.  And the dentist was very gracious in seeing him on Saturday before he had to fly out even though it was a holiday. 

We usually hire Abram to take us back and forth to the airport and we had hired him to transport some of our assistants.  There was also an Area Council meeting for all the Area Seventies this weekend.  Actually we had a joint meeting with the Assistants Auditors and Seventies so that they could connect and build a relationship.  Abram picked up two of the Seventies coming from the Congo on Friday night and was hijacked on the way to the hotel.  It was the first time it had happened to him.  Two cars headed him off the road and approached them with guns.  They took all their belongings, but thankfully no one was hurt.  It happened on a back road after dark.  We cannot be too careful. 

Tom and I enjoyed the conference – especially after it was all over and everyone had returned home safely.  Neither we nor the Eppels will be here for the next training- we will just leave notes for our successors.