Week #52 - Granny

Dear Family,
We’ve been on the road a lot lately and tonight we are home for about 36 hours and then we will be traveling to Johannesburg for 2 days. We’ve been to Francistown again this weekend, the second time in 10 days. The Cardiff’s go home in a couple of weeks and President asked us to learn the ropes up there and so we’ve been doing our best. We were lucky enough to be in attendance at their “record breaking” baptism on Saturday afternoon of 21 people going into the waters of Baptism and today receiving The Gift of the Holy Ghost. What a weekend! They had 155 people in attendance at the baptism and I have to say there was actually a “crowd control” situation and they ran out of a food a couple of times, but kept going out for more. I think
most of the people got something to eat, but we Missionaries all opted to wait and go home and have spaghetti at the Cardiff’s. It was outside on the grounds of their chapel (a home actually) but they do have the swimming pool to baptize in and it really works well for so many at one time. The children got a little restless and we couldn’t always hear the baptismal prayer, but it was absolutely amazing anyway. They have another baptism scheduled in two weeks and they
have 17 people “On-Date” for that day also. Today at church all of them were confirmed and it actually took more than the allotted time so we just had to run over about 15 minutes to get it all done. Dad also did some re-organizing in the Branch today and sustained some new leaders and gave 3 Brethren the Melchizedek Priesthood. It was a really full day and he also had to go over to the other Branch after church and do some Priesthood ordinances there. I went home with Sister Cardiff, prepared us a lunch for the trip home and we were off as soon as Dad got there. It
is almost a 5 hour drive so we were anxious to get home again. We will be super busy for Monday, trying to get caught up from being gone for 3 days and then we are going to go to the Temple with our wonderful YSA couple, Kgosi and Maipelo Matheo. We are leaving about 6
AM so we can get there as the temple opens for their Session. Our temple is only open Tuesday thru Thursday from 3:30 til 6:30 so the live session on Tuesday is at 3:30. We are taking them to the Distribution Center first to get their garments and their temple clothes as their wedding present from us. They were going to drive on their own but after the wedding (the Lobola and all the Festivities they had to pay for) they have no money so they are going to ride with us and then stay two days at the Temple Housing (free for them) and do more temple work and return on a bus. It will probably be years before they can return to the temple, so they wanted to go through more than once while they are down there. Our temple is actually open on Friday and Saturday all day, but they have to go through on Tuesday, the first day it is open after their cleaning break. They were married by the Bishop 2 weeks ago and they are suppose to go to
the temple within in a week or wait for a year; but since our temple was actually closed the Temple President made an exception and let them wait 2 weeks if they would be at the temple when it opens on Tuesday. We are excited to take them through and we will be the only people going through with them. They have no family that belongs to the church and no YSA friends that could make the trip to go through with them. President Poulsen has decided to end the Immigration “wow’s” for now and just do what we have to do to get through without making any
waves. The Legal Department of the Church is working very hard trying to change a few things, so President plans to just transfer the Missionaries in and out of Botswana every 90 days and not try to do anything else until we get work from Church Head Quarters. So next week we will have to transfer 10 Missionaries out along with any that are going Home and Heaven forbid there should be any “Inspiration” involved that might make it so President wants to transfer anyone else. We’ll just wait for the list and go to work as soon as we know what is happening. Dad has tons of work once we get the names of our new Missionaries, so President is trying to give us their names earlier than he used to so everyone is trying their very best to make the work load up here do-able. All of our missionaries are working very hard to help Botswana become a Stake. Our goal is still the 26th of June and our Stake President, President Hall from Roodepoort, South Africa is busy e-mailing all of our leaders periodically and checking up on their Goals and making sure they are getting more tithe papers and more worthy members of the church. The Missionaries have some new Ward Mission Plans that are receiving a lot of praise and support and the Members are really getting “on board” with the Missionary Programs. We are getting over 200 baptisms per month most of the time and everyone is working hard to bring many more souls into The Gospel of Jesus Christ. Sometimes it seems that we don’t actually get to do very much Missionary Work, but we dear get to bare our testimony very often, sometimes several times a day on Sundays and at baptisms on Saturdays. We use to get to go out teaching once in a while, but since Dad has been a Counselor to President Poulsen, there are extra meetings, extra interviews, and now with our extra trips to Francistown; we are as busy as we can be without the actual teaching opportunities. We get lots of opportunities to talk to our new members “one-on-one” though and we do that every chance we get. They are beautiful people and we love them all.
Well, it’s late and I can’t even remember what else we did this week. I think I”ll just go to bed and tomorrow I’ll remember all the things that I should have told you. We can’t wait for Mike and Roger and Bryce to come and see us. We don’t have too much planned except our trip to Madikwe (the game reserve) but there isn’t actually too much to see in Botswana so we hope they aren’t too disappointed. Perhaps we’ve just become accustomed to how things look and don’t remember what is actually very different than home. It will be fun to see their reactions to Africa and hopefully all three of you will have a great time and be really glad that you came. All we know is that we can’t wait for you to get here and we are working “double hard” to have everything done so we can have a little free time with you. We are preparing our 3 sets of
Zone Leaders to cover for us for the days you are here, especially our trips to South Africa to pick you up and our trip back to South Africa to take you back to the airport. Our life is anything but boring and we’ll just take you to see all of our Villages, our chapels and some shops and there are some special people we want you to meet. Be Warned... It HOT & Humid here right now!!!

Love,
Mom and Dad, Granny & PaPa Lynn, Lynn and Lorraine