Monkeys, Puzzles and Ladysmith -- Week 49

The favorite parts of the blog for our grandchildren are the monkey stories, so we'll start there.  Sue has not learned her lesson!  We have many days when the weather is so nice here.  We don't need to run the AirCon (South African for A/C) if we can just open windows and doors and get a nice cross-breeze through the apartment.  Ken questions the wisdom of opening the door.  But Sue makes sure there is no bread or food on the counter by the door.  She was happily working on the jigsaw puzzle on Saturday afternoon with her back to the door when this crazy monkey came in and sneaked all the way across the kitchen to the other side, grabbed a banana, and Sue didn't notice until he is nearly out the door!  

 How many monkeys can you find in this picture?

There are more monkeys down in the back yard by the stream.  The black & white critter is not a monkey -- just one of the three house cats that live in our building.  But Saturday morning Ken counted 20! mongooses (mongeese?) down on our back lawn.  They eat snakes, so that lets us know we must have snakes in our local forest.  Another reason not to walk there.

We thought the highlight of the week was getting haircuts!  Because of COVID-19, we are not going out to commercial places, except for groceries, etc.  André Slabbert is our handyman who does all the mission repairs.  His wife Vanessa is a beautician.  She was willing to come to the Mission Home and give President and Sister Lines and both of us haircuts one day.  It is so nice not to have all the excess fuzz down the back!  We don't have a rear-seeing mirror in our flat, so Sue hadn't seen the back of her head until last week when Ken took the photo of her working on the puzzle.  It was definitely time for a trim.

We had a mostly quiet week in the Mission Office on Monday and Tuesday.  Ken went to the doctor for some tests because his feet are swollen a lot.  He is declared very healthy -- for a man of his "advanced" age.  No heart or liver problems -- so that is good news.  It turns out that swelling feet is another symptom of Parkinson's, so not a surprise.

Wednesday and Thursday there was a virtual Mission Tour with Elder Edward Dubé.  He is from Zimbabwe and is a member of the First Quorum of Seventy -- one of the general leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  He has been in that position since 2013 and is currently serving in the Africa South East Area Presidency.  

In any normal year he would have come and spent all week touring around the Mission with President Lines, visiting all the areas, meeting with the missionaries, etc.  Not this year!  With the country shut down, this would not be considered "essential travel."  So instead we had two morning conferences over Zoom with Elder Dubé and his wife.  There were good discussions.  We only have 34 missionaries, so a small enough group to include everyone.  The Elders learned about their missionary purpose, which is to bring people to Jesus Christ.  And they received good instruction on how to be better teachers.  After the general meetings were over, Elder Dubé took some of the Elders one at a time into a Zoom breakout room for personal interviews.  We were mostly observers, but we enjoyed hearing from so many of the young Elders that we are just starting to get to know.

Also in a normal year we would have taken photos of Elder Dube with each zone that he visited.  We forgot to do a screenshot of the Zoom from the Mission Tour, but here is one from our Mission Devotional on Sunday night.  They are all a great group of Elders!

On Friday we skipped out of town with President and Sister Lines to visit the city of  Ladysmith.  It is about 250 km northwest of Durban, on the way to Johannesburg.  Many Americans are familiar with the name because of Ladymith Black Mambazo.  For those of you who don't know this music group, visit their webpage and listen to their wonderful music.  They've been nominated for 17 Grammy's and won 5. Their founder (in 1959!), Joseph Shabalala died in February about the time we arrived.  His funeral in Ladysmith happened just a few weeks before the lockdown, and 25,000+ people came to town to honor him.  We saw the group perform live in Mountain View, California about 25 years ago, and have loved them ever since.  

We have a new Senior Couple coming soon, and they will be moving up there.  They are South African, so don't have to wait for visas.  We needed to look at the house and see what needed cleaning and fixing.  Originally they were coming this Monday, so we were going to really clean and buy basic groceries, etc.  But now because of the lockdown they are not coming until 15 February.  We did a little sweeping and organizing.  The house (pictured above) is in pretty good shape, and there was no point in dusting/vacuuming when no one will be there for a month.

While we were in Ladysmith, we also went to visit the two sets of Elders who live there.  First we saw Elders Martin and Mahe.  Elder Martin is South African, so has been here since he started his mission in August 2019.  Elder Mahe is Tongan, but his family lives in the USA, so he was evacuated home with us last March then spent a few months in the Ohio Columbus Mission before coming back to Durban in December.  They are both great young men!

Then we stopped by on Elders Wilson and Netshiheni.  They are both South African.  Elder Netshiheni has been here almost two years, and will go home in March.  He is training Elder Wilson who came in November while we were home.  Also great young men who are doing well in Ladysmith.

To get to Ladysmith we drive NW up the N3 freeway -- a very nice toll road.  Durban is at sea level and our apartment is at 350 feet. We drove up over 5,000 feet high, and then dropped down into the high plains of central South Africa.  There are a lot of game preserves and cattle ranches in the area.  Ladysmith itself is about 3,500 feet high.  It is summer, which is also the rainy season.  The weather is strange to us.  We are used to foggy summer mornings and it gets warmer in the afternoon.  Here it is the opposite.  We have bright sunny mornings and it's hot -- often 85F.  Then in the afternoon it clouds over and rains.  But that makes everything so beautiful and green.  Here it cools off in the winter -- about like California.  But there is no rain, so everything turns brown.  Opposite of what we have at home.

On our way home we stopped at The Windmills Kitchen for lunch.  It's a lovely rest stop -- they advertise healthy fast food along the road.  

We sat outside next to their vegetable garden where they grow much of what they serve. 

We left there about 2:30 pm, and as we walked out Sue said to Sister Lines, "It feels like it's going to rain."  About 30 minutes later it did!  And it poured buckets and buckets and cats and dogs all the way home to Durban.  It was raining so hard that the windshield wipers could not keep up. Ken made a short video (of course.)   There was so much water along the side of the road that the tires would send up waves.  

It is normally a 90 minute drive from The Windmills Kitchen to our home.  It took almost 3 hours!  40 kph felt too fast on a road that is usually 110 kph speed limit.  President and Sister Lines said they have never been in a storm that rained that hard for that long.  When we got home we asked the Elders downstairs how long it had been raining so hard, and they said it was only about 30 minutes. And it stopped soon after.  So we looked at the rain radar online.  We discovered that we happened to get in the middle of the worst of the storm and then drive with it as it moved from west to east across the country.  Poor timing on our part!  But President Lines is a good driver!

And when we got home the quiet little stream in our backyard was a raging muddy torrent.

Saturday was a quiet day.  Especially since load shedding has started again.  That's the two-hour-long planned power outages.  We haven't had too many since we were here -- a couple that started at midnight.  But Thursday afternoon we had a crew to fix the AirCon at the office who showed up at 3:30, and at 4 pm the power went off.  We all quit and went home.  They'll come back on Monday.  Saturday morning we had load shedding from 8 to 10 a.m.  Sue was working on her computer and then the Internet died.  Oops -- no power.  She decided it was a good time to run errands.   She'd started a pair of slippers but didn't buy enough yarn so had to go back to "One Stitch @ a Time."  She arrived there at 10:05, just as their power went off for load shedding.  We are getting load shedding twice a day now -- one in the middle of the night, and one in the daytime.  Today it was 4 to 6 a.m. and noon to 2 pm.  We cope.

Since Saturday was quiet, Sue worked more on the jigsaw puzzle.  Here are latest photos.  She's excited that the horns, ears and nose of the wildebeest are all connected!  And more done in all the corners.  It's getting harder.....