Boarding Visits and Boogie Boarding -- Week 52

It's hard to believe that it has been a year this week since we first arrived in Durban.  And two months since we second arrived in Durban.  Time flies when you are working hard and having fun.

First -- all the good news!

South Africa is opening up again.  We can now have church meetings with up to 50 people!  Some of the congregations in the western side of the mission started up today.  Those closer in to Durban are planning to start up next week.  We can hardly wait.  It's been almost a year since we've been to live church.  And we are most excited that we will get acquainted with some of the South African Saints, and be able to participate in teaching with the young missionaries.  We are really missing that opportunity to share the blessings of the Gospel of Jesus Christ with others around us.  That is really why we are here!

And the visa system is also opening.  We have been told that three Elders who were supposed to come here last August are finally going to arrive on 13 March!  Their visas came through last week.  That's a beginning of what we hope will be a lot more.

Second -- a follow-up to last week's blog.

When we finished our gondola ride one of the workers there came up to talk to us.  He had read our missionary nametags and asked a little about what we do and what Church we serve.  We told him, and President Lines gave him a card and wrote his phone number on it.  The man called this week and said he and his wife want to know more about the Church.  The Lines are going to meet them for Church services next week.

"South African" for an apartment is a "boarding."  Sue is responsible for keeping track of these, and Ken is responsible to pay all the bills associated with the boardings.  When there were more missionaries and more Senior missionaries in the Mission Office there was a full-time Housing Coordinator.  No longer....

The Mission currently has 48 boardings, but only 17 are occupied.  We are in the process of closing seven.  About 15 were closed in 2020. That will still leave 24 empty.  The problem is that we keep hearing that "next month" we will get another 20 or 30 or 40 missionaries who were assigned here, but are held up in their home countries awaiting visas.  So we hate to give up boardings and then have to find another one.  With the ones we are closing, there are a lot of questions.  Where do we store furniture?  Who will do the cleaning?  Are there repairs that need to be made?  Where are the keys? Two of those we are closing this month are in the country of Lesotho, and the borders are totally closed.  We have to hire someone there to move our belongings to another boarding that we have in the same city and just store it.  We have no missionaries in Lesotho at all now.

This is long introduction to our Thursday outing with President and Sister Lines.  We drove north on the N2 tollway and visited three boardings that we hope to have occupied soon.  They are up near Richards Bay, about 175 km (108 mi) north of Durban.  

The drive through the South African countryside is beautiful.  Everything is so green -- a lot like California in the winter, but much more hot and muggy.

We saw kilometers and miles of forests with these tall thin trees, and lots of trucks carrying similar tree trunks.  These are paper trees.  They grow fast, and when cut down the stumps are left to grow new trees that also grow fast.  Look at the area south of Richards Bay on satellite view of G-maps and you can see all the cultured forests to be harvested.

Our first stop was a senior couple boarding about 40 km south of Richards Bay.  It is in a beautiful neighborhood and only about 1 km from the beach!  It has two bedrooms, so President Lines was thinking of putting four Elders in there to re-open this area.  

We weren't sure which keys fit this house, but had brought three sets that were a possibility.  We sat in the driveway pushing buttons and the solid-wood gate was not opening.  President finally got out to look at it, and found that it was not automatic but had a chain lock.  One of the keyrings had a padlock key that fit!  

We were surprised that both garage doors were open when we came in.  We discovered as we were leaving that Sue had been pushing lots of buttons on the fobs on all three keyrings.  One of those was for the garage doors at this boarding!  So we did close the doors before we left.  There are four units in this building, so the others who live there would have been very surprised to come home and find their garage doors open but nothing stolen!

We walked up the path through a lovely yard.  Our boarding is on the right behind the tree.  at the top behind the white stone sculpture is a swimming pool.  Oops -- not such a good place for young Elders for whom swimming is not allowed.

The Lines had visited this last June, and it obviously needed a major dust/vacuum/ mop since then.  Other than that, it's a very nice apartment for a senior couple.  We hope we get someone soon who can live there!

Our second stop was a lovely house on a nice residential street further north.  The key fob opened the gate, and so we went inside the yard.  But then we were stuck.  We couldn't figure out how to get into the house, and as we pushed buttons we kept setting off the burglar alarm!  We walked around the other side of the house and found another gate.  

A man came out to talk to us and it all got straightened out.  Willie Brits owns the house with his wife, and they rent a granny unit to the missionaries.  He showed us through the unit and explained about the alarms and gates and which door to come in.  He and his wife have kept the unit clean, so it looks great.  And they are anxious to have new Elders move in again.  

Third stop was a large complex with about 100 units.  We were worried because we didn't have a fob to open the automatic gate, but it wasn't necessary because the gate has a guard.  It was a basic one-bedroom boarding.  Nothing fancy, but good for missionaries.  It has a meter where you have to buy electricity, so we took a photo of the meter and Sue went on Friday and bought 1,000 Rand worth.  They'll be all set when they move in.

After all that we went out to Linner [lunch/dinner] on the harbor in Richards Bay with the Lines.  

It was a lovely afternoon and good food.

Besides church and visas, South African beaches opened this week.  We (Sue!) have wanted to go since we got back.  It's summer here and perfect beach weather.  

Perfect beach weather means hot, and that often means Load Shedding.  Midnight to 2:30 a.m. we can ignore -- except our A/C turns off and doesn't turn back on again.  Sue woke up at 3:30 a.m. and did that manually.  Saturday morning we decided to leave early since that's the hottest part of the day and staying home with no A/C could be miserable.

We drove 40 km north to Thompson Beach in the resort town of Ballito along the Dolphin Coast.  The Lines had told us about it, because it has a beach and tide pools and a swimming pool of sorts.  We were glad to be there early in the morning before it got crowded.  And it was not dawn or dusk when sharks are out!

We had inherited an old beat-up boogie board, so it was time to try it out.   

Sue got in a few good rides, but the water was pretty rough and tide was coming in.  

Ken got in the water, too.  He's not the water-baby that Sue is.  The undertow was pretty strong and pulled the sand out from under his feet and he fell over, so got he good and wet and sand in his hair!

Then we walked over to the swimming pool.  It's just an area where the ocean has been contained by a concrete wall that serves as a breakwater and dam.  The water is only about 5 feet deep, so it's pleasant for swimming, or just floating.  

Floating like this with feet and hands out always reminds Sue of her Grandpa Miner.  He would do that in Lake Arrowhead when Sue was a kid, and she would marvel at it.  I guess the ability to do this comes with grandparenthood (or maybe body fat content...)

Then we walked to the other end of the beach to the tidepools.  Here's one of Sue's 360 camera views of all that:

Tidepools at Thompson Beach, north of Durban South Africa. 6 February 2021 - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

While near the tidepools we started talking to some other people visiting there who are locals.  They recommended the Salt Rock Hotel for lunch, so we decided to do that.  

We sat out on the terrace, watched the waves and the coconut trees and had great food.

Sue has been working on the puzzle.  It took all week, but she got most of the rhino done.  The undone parts of rhino nose are elephant colored, and the undone parts of buffalo face are black.  It looks like the black sections will get done next.  The elephant may be impossible.