Lions! -- week 79

We have had an amazing weekend. 

Starting Friday, we were asked to drive a bakkie of food from Durban to Pietermaritzburg, about one hour west.  

This was part of the very large shipment our Church donated from Johannesburg after the riots here.  Most of it had been distributed, but there was still some in Durban that needed to go west, and the Red Cross truck was broken. 

 

We brought four of the Mission's bakkies, Ford Rangers with canopies, plus seven young Elders, and two senior couples.  

We loaded all the bakkies to the tops of their covers.  That all took a couple of hours.  

The one we drove was filled about 2/3 full of long-life milk.  

We had 125 boxes and each had six 1-liter cartons.  That's about 1650 pounds of milk.  Then the rest of the truck was full of flour, rice, sugar, dish soap, and other such staples.  The other bakkies were about the same, but we had all the liquid.  We could feel it slosh when we went around corners.  It was a much easier drive home with an empty truck!

Saturday President and Sister Lines were planning on driving west to Bethlehem.  (That's South Africa, not the Holy Land.)  They wanted to look at a boarding in Kestrell, and then attend a baptism in Bethlehem on Sunday morning.  They invited us and the Hubrich's along for the ride.

Kestrell is a small town with a lovely old Afrikaaner church.  The boarding looked pretty nice, too. 

Also in Kestrell is a small animal preserve called "Little Africa."  It is one of the few places that raises cubs and keeps tame lions where you can actually go into the field where they live and pet them.  There is an electric fence that usually keeps them in, but the owner turns off the fence to let tourists like us pet the lions.  He has an amazing relationship with these magnificent animals.  He calls them and they come trotting to him.  He goes into the field and they nuzzle up to him like any tame house cat.

He turned off the electricity to the fence -- but the lions don't know that.  We just stepped through between the wires.  

Oh, and they also have pet snakes.  The orange one is a coral snake.  The brown one is a California King snake.  

We next drove to Clarens, which is a touristy shopping town at the entrance to Golden Gate Highlands National Park.  We had to visit Cheese & Chocolate, of course.  We went to the Blanket Store next door.  Sister Hubrich bought a pretty blue shawl.  Sister Lines bought a grey/red plaid scarf.  President Lines bought an elephant sculpture.  Sue didn't buy anything.  She has too much stuff already.

We stayed at the Marriott Protea -- very nice hotel. But it was cold and rainy!  There was snow on Friday on the highway pass between Durban and Bethlehem!

 

 We had dinner at Clementines.  Wonderful food!

It was shortly after 5pm, and we were all really hungry because we never really had lunch.  Clementines is a favorite place for the Lines, but the sign out front said all reservations were full for the night.  President Lines went in and talked them into giving us the table that was for a reservation at 7pm because we could be out by then.  It worked perfectly.  They usually don't start serving dinner until 6pm.

Sunday we were up for the 6:30am seating for breakfast so we could leave the hotel by 7:15 and drive the half-hour to Bethlehem from Clarens for an 8am baptism.  

Why so early?  The mother of the young woman being baptized could only come that early in the morning.  

The baptismal font in Bethlehem is outside the building.  Usually that would be fine, but today the temperature was running in the low 40'sF.  Brrr.  The Elders had to fill the font the night before, because it takes a couple of hours to do.  They had planned to add more hot water this morning, but the electricity was out at the Church!  No lights and no hot water.  We did most of the service inside with a lantern and window light.  It's a good thing baptisms happen quickly -- then run and get into dry clothes.

But it was a wonderful occasion.  She has been wanting to be baptized for awhile.  She spoke at the end and gave a heartfelt testimony of why she wanted to do this, and of her relationship to Jesus Christ and His restored church.

The meeting was over, and then the lights came on.  We could turn on the heat in the chapel, and stood around the piano and sang hymns for almost an hour while President Lines did interviews with some of the missionaries who live in Bethlehem.  

We drove through the Golden Gate Highlands National Park on our way home and stopped at the hotel there for lunch.  We still didn't see any baboons!  But it was raining a lot, so we assume they were all hiding out someplace a little warmer and drier.  The tops of the spectacular mountains were shrouded in fog, but the rock formations we could see were beautiful.  Heavenly Father really did make us a beautiful world to live in.