Two Golden Gates in One Week! Week 104

Hard to believe that was two years ago when we started this amazing adventure.  We arrived home in the afternoon, Saturday 5 February 2022.  It has been a marvelous experience.

We had a wonderful last week in South Africa.

Monday morning we went for some last-minute souvenir shopping with the Hubrichs on Umgeni Street in downtown Durban.  There are lots of little stalls selling all kinds of African/Zulu goodies.

Elder Hubrich wanted to buy a Zulu headdress -- like the one they gave Ken.  Elder Hubrich loves to haggle the prices -- and then he pays them what they originally asked.

Tuesday and Wednesday we spent two days with the 16 young missionaries who make up the Mission Leadership Council (MLC).  (Could this be the real reason we postponed our departure for a week?)  They usually meet once each Transfer (6 weeks), alternating between in-person and on Zoom.  But once per year they have an overnight away-retreat activity.  This time it was in Golden Gate Highlands National Park.  We stayed at Wilgenhof Education Centre, which is designed for school groups on environmental education trips.  

It was perfect for us -- a dorm room with 20 single beds, 3 "adult" rooms for President &  Sister Lines, Elder & Sister Taylor, and us.  It was not elegant: We had to bring our own bedding.

There was a large hall for us to hold our meetings and eat.  There was a huge kitchen, and a braai (BBQ) area where we cooked meat for dinner -- after Sister Taylor coaxed the visiting horse and her baby out of the area.

We went for a hike on Tuesday afternoon and again on Wednesday morning.  The Elders all took off racing up the mountain.  We sauntered along at a more leisurely pace befitting our ages. 

The views across the valley and of the mountains were spectacular.  It was a gorgeous day!  We are going to miss the beauties of South Africa, for sure.

 These are such wonderful young men who donated two years of their lives to service.  They are the current leaders of the Mission, and the future leaders of the Church and the world!

The only problem with Wilgenhof was that there is no cell service up the canyon where it is located.  While wandering around the property looking for a cellphone bar or two, Ken and President Lines found the swing-sets.  They are both forever young at heart.

After breakfast was study time with President Lines on the steps of the hall.  The Elders are all learning to love the Gospel of Jesus Christ and carry that love to others.

And then some farewell photos.

We have grown to love these people so much!

We wanted to take a photo of those with matching ties -- but Sister Lines decided to do a photo-bomb.  Here are Elders Mokhoanatsi & Paulsen, Sister Lines, President Lines, Elders Viviers & Naisbitt.

We drove back to Durban on Wednesday afternoon.  It should have been a four-hour drive, but we needed to stop for petrol or diesel.  We were 14 people in 3 vehicles.  President Lines decided to take us all out for lunch at the road-side restaurant.  Unless you go to McDonald's or KFC or some-such, eating at a restaurant in South Africa is always a minimum two-hour process.  We were the only ones there, so we managed to get out in 1 hour and 45 minutes!  But we loved the time to visit with everyone.  We arrived home late and started the painful process of packing.  Packing is hard anyway, but doubly so when you are leaving a place and people you love.

Thursday we were back in the office to continue to help the Taylors.

We took our farewell photo with dear friends Wynn and Bette Hubrich on Thursday because they were leaving early on Friday morning to drive to Lesotho.  Their mission assignment is Humanitarian Aid, so they went up there to see some potential projects where the Church can help with local needs. 

Thursday evening was our farewell dinner with President & Sister Lines.  The Hubrichs and Taylors came along too.  

After dinner (yes, it took 2+ hours), we went to the Mission Home for our last chance at one of Sister Lines' fabulous cakes.  Sue had requested cheesecake, but it also had a chocolate lace decoration around the outside and on top, with raspberry syrup too.  

And there were more photo-ops.

With Elder Hill, who was formerly one of the Social Media Elders, so was often in the Office with us.  He is now our Zone Leader for Hillcrest Zone.

President Lines and Ken had to show off their suits made by a tailor in Lesotho -- with Cheetah-fabric linings.

Elder Dillon Peterson and Elder Paballo Mokhoanatsi are the Assistants to the President -- and also to us.  We loved working with them and enjoyed them as our upstairs neighbors in the West Victoria flats.

Jeanne Birasa is our friend who cleaned the Mission Office and our apartment each week.  She is a refugee from Rwanda, a widow, and the mother of three boys -- two grown, one in high school.  We loved getting to know her and appreciated her work for us.

The bags are all packed and Friday afternoon we were off to the airport.  

President and Sister Lines took us.  They really like to do all the airport runs.  We started with a 70-minute flight from Durban to Johannesburg.  We had to fetch our bags again there and then go check in for the long-haul international flights.

While walking through the airport, Ken was wearing his backpack that says Kilpatrick Townsend on the back.  That was his law firm for many, many years.  A man stopped us and said he had used the firm as attorneys for his work.  He was obviously American, so we started talking.  He is also a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints!  He did grad school at Stanford in 2017-18 and lived in Menlo Park.  The Church is a very small village (of 16 million people.)  He is now living in Johannesburg with his wife and four children, and they, too, love South Africa.

We managed to re-check our baggage and waited several hour until take-off of our red-eye to London.  This was one of our two new Virgin Atlantic Boeing 787-900's.

After 11 hours on the flight from Johannesburg to London Heathrow, a 4.5 hour layover and another 11-hour flight from Heathrow to San Francisco, we are home!  Our second Golden Gate in one week. 

It was interesting that the SFO airport was giving free COVID tests to all those arriving on international flights, with a kit to do another test at home in 3-5 days.  We thought that was a good process.

We rented a car for three days so Ken has time to get white 1956 T-bird off the blocks and running.  (He did and it does.  On Monday morning as this was being written, he topped up the battery, removed the blocks, pumped up the tires, and primed the carburetor.  It fired right up.)  But on the way home from the airport, we stopped by the cell phone store to get new phones and our numbers on a regular plan.  (We had put them on a $5/month, 30 min/month plan just to save our numbers.)  Sue's phone had died a couple of months ago and so she had been using a mission phone.  Ken decided it was time to upgrade his iPhone 6+ he's had since 2013...  Then we stopped at the Xfinity store to get a modem and Internet service.  

We finally made it into the house.  Notice our life-size Hadida bird on the porch.  These birds were our most-beloved, most-hated Durban neighborhood friends.  Fun to listen to at sun-down, awful at dawn (4:30am!) 

Our wonderful renters, the Hansens, had made welcome-home signs for us!  They were in the front windows when we arrived.

The yard looked so dead!  But then we remembered it is the middle of winter here, so of course the trees are leaf-less and the grass is brown.  However, Sue's daffodils are starting to bloom.  They are always beautiful for Valentine's Day.

Next stop was going to be the grocery store, but the Hansens had left us some basic groceries to get us through the weekend.  We ordered Chinese from Green Elephant Restaurant in our neighborhood and started to sort out what was in the suitcases.  We managed to stay awake until 10pm and then crashed.  Jet lag is the pits.

Our ward has afternoon church, so we went for a walk on a beautiful sunny Sunday morning to see how things have changed.  The new bike/pedestrian bridge over the US 101 Freeway was opened while we were gone.  It's beautiful, and will be open year-round.  The old path went through the creek bed under the freeway and was closed in the winter when the creek covered the walkway with water.

We had to smile when we walked into the Church building and saw this poster on the Bishop's office door.  It was made by the 8-9 year old children.  We love that they are all wearing masks.  Many places in the USA have become complacent about COVID protocols, but not Palo Alto Foothills Ward!  Bishop Covert is a professor at Stanford whose specialty is dangerous viruses.  Everyone wears masks at Church, and every-other row is closed in the chapel, and Zoom meetings are all available for those who still do not want to come.  

That's why we felt comfortable going to Church in person on Sunday.  But it was weird to be there with so many people instead of in our small-but-beloved Molweni Branch.

After Church we went to visit with Stake President Rob Daines to be officially released as Missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  It was awful!  We have loved serving and being part of the great work to spread the message of the Restored Gospel to all the world.  We are home and will find other ways to serve, but it is just not the same.

By the time we ate dinner we were beat.  Sue managed to finish her daily-required NY Times crossword in 30 minutes over her usual time, because she kept falling asleep.  The blog had to wait for Monday morning.  So we are done...

We want to invite you all to our homecoming report in Church on Sunday, 20 February.  The meeting starts at 12 noon.  We will speak at about 12:30, or a bit earlier.  Our children and grandchildren are coming from far and farther.  That day is also Ken's 75th birthday!  The biggest treat will be son Reed playing violin with son Tim singing between our two talks.  It will also be on Zoom.  We will try to remember to send out another reminder the day before.

https://zoom.us/j/99672250857?pwd=U3Q5czNMYmY2Wmo5akIwM3JGOFptZz09 

Meeting ID: 996 7225 0857

Passcode: 435516

We love you all.  Thank you for coming along with us on this adventure and supporting our efforts.

Love,

Ken and Sue

Transitions -- week 103

This week we started the transition to having the Taylors really run the office.  Now we say, "What can we do to help you today?"  We should have been gone last week, so they are now the bosses.  And they are doing great!  They understand all the computer systems and are figuring out the quirks of the South Africa Durban way of doing things.  

And we are starting to transition back to being in California.  Sue has been asked to help with a bond-issue campaign for the Ravenswood School District, where she worked for 25 years.  She has done this before, and of the current School Board Members only one was on the Board five years ago.  She had a Zoom call on Monday night with new Board Member Jenny Bloom.  But, the Internet in our current apartment is slow, so when we need more bandwidth, we go sit on the stairs outside the Hubrich's flat.  (You can see the front of Taylor's truck up above Sue's head--and she is sitting on the stairs between the 2nd and 3rd floors.  Our building is really down in a gully.)

Wynn and Bette Hubrich have become amazing friends.  They like to bring little gifts.  They buy yummy Mozambique pineapples from a road-side stand when they drive north and bring back extras to share.

They made a beautiful book of photos from our trip to Nambiti Game Preserve, and brought Ken a Zulu warrior headdress.

Because we had spent all day Saturday driving Elders all over the Mission for Transfers, President Lines told all the Senior Couples to take a P-day another day during the week. And did we ever!  Hubrichs and Taylors joined us for the whole day.  President and Sister Lines came for the morning shopping and then went off to do other things. 

First stop: Umgeni Street in downtown Durban.  Lots of sidewalk stalls selling all kinds of African souvenirs. 

Sue and Sister Lines loved all the African print fabrics.

We watched women weaving straw mats.  They use rocks for the bobbins to hold the threads. 

And then when President Lines wanted a photo of himself with them, they decided he needed to learn how to do it himself.

Second stop: Victoria Street Market.  This is an indoor building with lots and lots and lots of small shops selling everything, including African souvenirs.  

We bought some small gifts for children and grandchildren and some things for ourselves.  Sue bought a new purse.  [The old one was bought in St. Petersburg 3.5 years ago and looked it....]

Ken and Elder Hubrich bought another set of matching wedding rings -- since the one Elder Hubrich had from a month ago had shattered the day after he got it.  We'll see if these last any longer.

The shop where Sue bought the purse was also a spice shop, and it smelled so good in there!  Lots of kinds of curry.

Third stop:  Oyster Box Hotel in Umhlanga for lunch.  We had never been there, but it is a favorite of the Hubrichs.  

We sat outside on the veranda.

The view out over the Indian Ocean was so pretty.

It looks like we are not the only ones with a monkey problem.  Read the note at the bottom of the menu.

And on the wall by the tables.  Hubrichs said when they were there before a monkey came in, ran across a table upsetting glasses, grabbed a roll, and was gone before anyone could hardly notice!

Fourth stop:  Umdloti Beach, north up the coast from Umhlanga.  Hubrichs are always looking for good beaches, and this is one they wanted to try.  It was lovely, with waves and tidepools

and beach bums

and sand crabs that blend right into the rocks

and bathing beauties

and not-so-beauties.

Fifth Stop:  We went to visit President Futter.  He is First Counselor in the Durban Temple Presidency, but he had a heart attack and bypass surgery in December just before Christmas.  He has been doing well but is feeling confined to home and was glad for visitors.  Since we were all pretty wet and sandy, we sat out on his veranda and had a lovely visit.  We were inspired as he shared some very personal spiritual experiences. 

Thursday we worked in the office and had birthday party for Andre Slabbert.  Sister Lines made one of her fabulous cakes!

And we sent Elder Pettijohn on his way home--finally!  He was supposed to go a week earlier, but tested positive for COVID, so he had to postpone.  He tested positive again this week but had had a positive test from 13 January.  That meant he was over the disease.  Evidently after having it you can test positive for months!  He needed a letter from a doctor saying he was recovered and a copy of the two-week-old positive test.  He made his flights and is now home in Hilo, Hawaii.  Elder Pettijohn was one of the Social Media Elders for awhile, so he had worked in the office, and we got to know him well.

Friday morning we went to the Durban Temple for the last time.  It is a beautiful small Temple.  It will always hold a special place in our hearts.  We had begun our mission with its dedication.  We end our mission with a final session of spiritual enrichment.

Friday night Elder and Sister Lyon were in Durban from Ladysmith.  Their congregation was coming for Saturday Temple visit.  They came a little early to join us all for a senior couples date night.  They are doing well but miss the association with other senior couples that we have here in Durban.

We went to the Cape House Cafe near the Lines' home.  We usually like to sit outside there, but it was pouring buckets of rain, so we were happy to be inside.

Saturday morning we were up and off early to help with a service project that the Hubrichs were part of.  City Hill Church is in Hillcrest, about 30 minutes west of us.  They had boxes and boxes and boxes of donations of clothing, sundries and toys from various places that they were "selling" to anyone who wanted.  

Friday Hubrichs and some of the young Elders helped to sort all the items into piles:  clothing (mens, womens, childrens), kitchen supplies, school supplies, baby supplies, shoes, toys, hardware, etc. 

Saturday morning we had another crew to help with the distribution.

 

Ken monitored the school supplies tables.

 

Sue worked at the bath/cosmetics tables.  

We filled a small plastic shopping bag full of items, and people could get one bag full for 5 rand (about 35 cents).  

They could get a maximum of 10 bags, and they had 10 minutes to do it all.  For clothing they could fill a slightly larger bag with whatever they wanted for 10 rand.  Fifteen people were let into the room at one time.  

This went on all day.  We left at 11:30 for another appointment but heard they managed to get rid of all the stuff.  It was pretty amazing.  

Some people were there at 6am, and the event did not even open the doors until 9am.

We had to leave because we had an appointment for lunch with the Chipara Family in Molweni.  They are a wonderful family with four daughters, ages 9 to 19.  They are refugees of many years from Zimbabwe.  The girls were all born in South Africa, but like most countries (not the USA) the children are the nationality of the parents, no matter if they were born in South Africa.  They bought a lot on a hillside in Molweni several years ago and have slowly built their own home.  They have a gorgeous view out over the Valley of 1000 Hills area.  Monica said that on clear days they can see the ships out on the ocean!  They live about 45 minutes northwest of us, and we are at least 20 minutes from the ocean. But when we looked at Google Earth, they are only 14 miles as the crow flies from the coast.  

It looks very strange by US standards, but it is clean and comfortable.  The lounge (living room), dining room and kitchen is one big room with kitchen at one end and 50" TV at the other.  But the building is made of corrugated tin and they have no running water.  Their dishwashing basin is outdoors surrounded by buckets of captured rainwater. 

We had a wonderful lunch made by Marian (the daughter at the far end of the table) and her mother, Monica.  The young Elders Hall and Hulley were also invited so they could bring us up there.  The Chipara's dirt road is not on Google Maps.

They have another building down the hill a bit that is concrete block, made by Brother Chipara.  It is two good-sized bedrooms.  Their property is all planted with fruits and vegetables.  They gave us some newly ripe corn. 

Nine-year-old Amy drew this lovely picture for us while we were eating.  It now has a place of honor on our refrigerator.

On Sunday our beloved Molweni Branch congregation was back at "their" school.  

We were there with them the last time they met in Molweni area on 16 March 2020.  Then there were almost no live church meetings for almost a year, and when they did come back they could not rent rooms at the school because of COVID restrictions.  They have been meeting in Hillcrest--10 miles away.  There are only 4 or 5 families with cars, so most of them just stopped coming.  Now they are excited to be within walking distance of many church members again.  The Church has bought land to build them their own building, and we are all hoping and praying that will happen soon.

After Church we stopped to take a photo of all the adults who were in adult Sunday School.

We took our farewell photo with Elder Hall (left) and Hulley (right).  Elder Hulley is from Johannesburg area and did his Missionary Training three weeks in our office, so we have gotten to know him well.  He is a wonderful young man who will be a strength to the Church in South Africa his whole life.

One advantage of moving church back to Molweni is that they can meet in the morning, instead of in the afternoon as they had to do when sharing a building with Hillcrest Ward.  What to do with our free afternoon?  We went on a hike with the Taylors to nearby Palmiet.  It is a large nature reserve here in Westville, just behind the mall where we go for dry cleaners.  It is down in the gorge and you feel like you are off in the African jungle.  

We had to cross the river here on the rocks and all managed to get our feet very wet.

We hiked up to a small waterfall and then back.  It was a wonderful Sunday afternoon activity.  We loved being out in this beautiful world God created for us. 

We are going to miss South Africa!

Next Sunday we may be able to write our last blog from California, if we have Internet.  It's hard to believe it's over.  As Elder Taylor says, "Don't be sad that it's over; be glad for the experience."