MONDAY AGAIN! We went walking that morning but that was to be
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| Boer house that looks like Zulu |
the first and last for the week. At 10 we met the Elders and went to an historical old Boer War battlefield outside of Ladysmith north about 6 miles called Rietfontein. It's "P" Day and we get to do stuff like that. Kent made friends with an old English codger, John, who is an historian and bought the hundreds of acres and old field hospital that stands on the battlefield. The one battle was on 24th of October 1899. After this battle was the Siege of Ladysmith, which was way more famous and captured the worlds attention for over a month. This is basically the war with the latecomer English in Ladysmith and the Boers ( Africaaners or Treckers or pioneers as they were known), who were everywhere else north of Ladysmith to Joburg. We had one history major in our group and he loved the S. African history. The others were polite and at least the guns and stories were interesting. One of the stories was that Ghandi was in Ladysmith as a young attorney and joined up to help as a medical orderly during this war. They can't prove he was there at the Rietfontein battle but he could have been there later because the Indians were neutral and this was a big central hospital for most of the Boer War.
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| 17 late pizzas for 24 people ! Is that a record? |
Brown's were in charge of getting pizza and breakfast for the guys with us as major support. We had a long day with "Tday"preparation, and making pies and rolls on this day. My neighbor Uticka helped with the peeling of the apples with good chatter, but it was such
a long day.
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| The wonderful Browns! |
We taught Temple prep on Wed morning with our cute couple again, but they were there till after 12. Since our Thanksgiving feast was to happen at 6PM with 7 Elders, I had to get our twin very small turkey birds(7and 8 pds) into their oven bags and generally fly. I had the Elders peel and mash potatoes but only 1 had ever done it before. They were comical and helpful because they did do the dishes at the end of the meal. One Elder remembered that the previous Thanksgiving in his boarding he had rice krispies for dinner and that this Thanksgiving was a big improvement. (That's all I needed!)
Thursday , was wash and clean and welcome Bro. Baldwin from Richards Bay for the night. He is one of our seminary teachers and needed to be at the Mission presidency meeting in Ladysmith, so we had him crash and have leftovers on the real Thanksgiving night.
Friday, had Kent back and forth with the big meeting and his keys and the computer guy, Ray Holder. Since Kent has become the resident techy guy, he got the info on the brand new computer and the passwords. (don't let it go to your head, honey!) We took the out of towners to our Nursery lunch place and it poured. It was fun to have ta huge downpour in the middle of the day because it is usually at night that it rains.
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| Looks guilty! BYU football hilights! |
Saturday the Browns were back from Newcastle for our leadership meeting in Ezakheni. I had a heads up that she and I would take the Primary and YW for an hour. Last time we just had YW but I decided to take my playdough recipe and I was glad I did. They are a Branch that has unique problems, so I took the 4 sisters in Primary and we hashed through them. They have 45 active Primary kids in the tiniest room, with a 16 year old Primary president, that is also the music leader. She has one class of Senior P. and 1 class of Junior P. kids. We talked money strains, Sac mt. program, and logistics. They were trying the 2 sharing times idea the very next day, they were so excited to try it. The big news --They sang "Scripture Power"- 45 kids strong, the previous week in their Sacrament program. It would have been way different than my 8 kids in the Ladysmith Branch on the same day.
Sunday saw us pack up the pulled pork and coleslaw and head off to Dundee for our missionary, Mhelengi's farewell. We had a spiritual feast and a feast afterwords. Our song went off without me crying in the middle and we got home at 3:30 and collapsed. We love the DeKlerks and the big news there is that we may not have to travel to Dundee and teach S and I next year. He wants to try new teachers if they will take the calling.
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| Elder Smith and his Mini-Missionary soon to be Real Missionary in Botswana! |
I'm amazed we survived this week -not all are like this, but just writing about it makes me tired. Lots of food prep. --but it was Thanksgiving and we were most thankful to be surrounded by such good people to feed.
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| Christmas is coming! |
The DeKlerks
You guys are the best!!!
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