AllensInDurban: LIFE GOES ON -- Week 48

We had mostly a quiet, normal week -- at least on this shore of the Indian Ocean east of the Atlantic. We stayed up very late on Wednesday night watching with horror the live events from Washington, D.C. We had load shedding starting at midnight -- 5 pm in D.C. -- so our Internet went down and we went to bed very worried. We were relieved to awaken in the morning to see that Congress was back in session and Biden was declared the official President-elect. This disruption, dare we say attack on The Capitol, was a jolt to our democracy, but we did have a valid, legal election, despite overwhelmingly unfounded speculation and inflammatory rhetoric about a supposedly corrupt voting process and its threat to democracy. As Senator Romney said, we should above all else pursue truth. One of the hallmarks of the American democratic republic has always been institutional checks and balances and a cooperative transfer of power from one president to the next -- even when they are of different political parties. We are grateful to see that continue.

COVID cases in South Africa keep going up every day. We were about 22,000 yesterday. In mid-November when we first got word we could come back, it was under 1,000/day. Hospitals are full here, too. We stay isolated from pretty much everyone.

We take turns driving, by month. Sue is now the designated driver for January, so Ken decided it was time to make this ten-minute door-to-door "Commute Movie." (It's a pretty short drive to the office.)

If we could fly, it's only 250 yards away. (138 Smoots), See the red line from our apartment to the office on the map. But walking is impossible that direction. First, it's down about 50 feet, and then back up about 200 feet through a jungle with all sorts of hazards. Second there are all sorts of houses and apartment buildings in between with high fences.

But even the drive (green line) to the south is only 1/2 mile (465 Smoots). We could walk it, but all that brown dirt between the road we drive and the major highway (M13) at the bottom of the picture is a major construction zone. And we usually run some errand or another in the middle of the day, so we need a car at the office. But there are lots of spare cars at the office. And construction has stopped due to lockdown. Maybe we'll start to walk to work!

No, as it might appear in the video, we are not having ice cream for lunch. The ice cream container is just good for leftover chili. The G4S trucks next door you see out the window at the end are the South African equivalent of Brinks armored cars. We read in the paper this week that one of their trucks got stopped by robbers on a road somewhere, but the driver has a safety system that fills the back of the truck with fast-hardening foam so the robbers can't get anything out! We think that's pretty clever.

Sue is starting to clean out and organize drawers in the office. We had three file-cabinet drawers with a file folder for each missionary. It has his application paper, family contact information, copies of driver's license and passport, medical release form, etc. The problem is that most of those folders now belong to Elders who have gone home. We hope to get some of them back, but we probably won't get many. Sue pulled the folders and started shredding, and shredding, and shredding. Most of the pages have personal and family detail information, so they can't just be thrown in the trash. Wednesday afternoon late Sue's nose started running and she was worried she was getting sick. But she went home, walked outside and was fine. Thursday afternoon the same thing happened. Ah Ha! Sitting over the shredder doing thousands of pages generates a lot of nose-bothering dust. Sue is perfectly healthy and glad to be done with all those files.

Ken is working on vehicles. The mission has about 40 but only a dozen or so drivers. The cars all have Bid-Track devices that keep track of location, speed, etc. It's both for anti-theft and to keep missionaries of any age from speeding. Ken gets a text when anyone is going over 120 km/hr. Because of this, Ken is trying to get the Bid-Track registrations straight. He gets texts from cars that are not in our mission anymore. Since many of our cars are just parked at church buildings they are hard to keep track of.

The highlight of our week came on Saturday morning when we went to the Mission Home for a "socially distanced" farewell brunch and testimony meeting for Elder Micheal Matovu. He is on his way home to Uganda after finishing his mission in Durban. He was never evacuated home last Spring, because Uganda also shut down, and there were no flights home for him.

Sister Lines did a great brunch and we ate all spread out on their back patio.

While Elder Matovu was having his farewell interview with President Lines, Elder Raralevu, an Assistant to the President, and Ken found a rugby ball in the garage. They also found an electric pump, blew up the ball and shared this game of catch in the Mission Home backyard. You can see what a jungle it is! And nearly 74-year-old Ken can still throw a mean football spiral.

Elder Matovu told a wonderful story in our testimony meeting that I would like to share.

There was a family that moved a lot because of the father's job. The daughter went to a new school almost every year, and had a hard time making new friends. She came home after her first day at a new school and told her father that she was not going back. Other students had teased and bullied her and she was miserable. But of course her parents made her go back to school. After a couple of weeks she said again that she was not going back. It was too hard. Her father took her into the kitchen. He put four pans of water on the stove and turned on the heat. Into the first he put a stone. The second got an egg. The third got a potato, and the fourth got some tea leaves. They watched as everything boiled and cooked. When done the father asked the daughter what had happened? The stone and water were unchanged. The egg had become hard-boiled. The potato was now soft and mushy. The tea leaves had changed the water to be all their color. The lesson? We cannot control our environment (the water). But we can control how we are and what happens. We can be like a stone -- hard and unchanging no matter what. We can be like an egg and become hard to the rest of the world. We can be like a potato and become soft and follow the crowd. Or we can be like the tea leaves and change the atmosphere around us to become better.

Yesterday afternoon, Elder Matovu left Durban for the first leg of his flight home to Uganda. When he got to Johannesburg and tried to transfer to the international flight to Kenya last night, the gate keepers refused to let him board! When we found out, Church Travel arranged for an overnight stay at the JoBurg airport hotel. It turns out to be a common occurrence. Of course he missed his connecting flight from Nairobi to Entebbe. It was a blessing in disguise. As we notified the people in Uganda, we discovered there had been a mixup in fetching him from the destination airport, three hours from his hometown north of Kampala. The delay gave us all a chance to straighten things out and get him picked up.

Time for the weekly report about the puzzle: First, how do we eat? Just on top of the pieces. It's the only table we have, except our shared computer desk, which is pretty full of desk-stuff.

Sue got a bunch done around the edges -- filled in the corners. It turns out the plain colored pieces are the easiest! The colors and shapes are very distinct. Second easiest are the pieces that are two totally different colors on one piece. So, second place to tackle was the horns of the wildebeest. The tray on the right is full of cheetah spotted pieces. The elephant is going to be really hard -- but that's for another week.