Meeting the Missionaries

Before our mission our first goal was to meet the missionaries. So, before we left home, we arranged to have a little "Meet the Mission President Tour" set up. Our goal was to meet all of the missionaries in the first two weeks that we were here. So, the day after we arrived we began having conferences. First, we held meetings with the missionaries in Kinshasa. There are 5 zones, each of which services a stake. We didn't get pictures of every zone, but we did remember to get some of them.

This is Kimbenseke Zone. It was the first one that we visited. We went there the morning after we arrived, still a bit jet lagged from the 28 hours of travel, but moving on. The Headlees (outgoing mission President) and Koellikers (Area President) went with us to this building. The Headlees were on their way to the airport to go home. They stopped just long enough to greet the elders and take a few pictures.

Then they waved good-bye and drove away, leaving us on our own for the first time.

There we were standing in front the the church, about 12 hours after we arrived, and watching them drive away. It was pretty shocking knowing that we were now in charge. But a whole group of great young elders were waiting for us. So, off we went to our first "meet and greet."

Next we visited Mont Ngafula zone.

Our hearts have already been turned to these missionaries. An interesting note-one of these missionaries is from Madagascar. We have a few missionaries from there. They're easily distinguishable by their names, which are very, very long. I have no idea how we can remember these names.

Elders Andriamanomjy, Tsifolimandefitra, Zaphimaarnanjara, and Andriantolojanahary, Tshimanyangala,

The Mont Ngafula stake has a nice building with a full basketball court and big parking lot. Interesting that they have these big parking lots when there won't ever be more than three cars in the parking lot on Sunday. Planning for future needs?

The drive to each building was long and interesting. You could take a picture every second and get something worth seeing. It all looks like.... Africa.

The last picture is of a very large enclosed area that our driver told us was the Zoo. When we asked about the animals, he said that there aren't really many animals. They were all eaten during the war. Things have been rather complicated in the Congo.

We visited the missionaries in three more stakes and the corresponding zones, Kinshasa, Ngaliema, and Masina.

The trip to each was like all the others. You could have taken a picture a minute. It was fun to meet all the missionaries and most of the stake presidents and also wonderful that in each group there were one or two that we knew from our last mission.

Kinshasa is an amazing place. It goes for an hour or more in every direction with just miles and miles of... Africa.

Kinshasa is a city of nearly 10 million people. We're not sure that we'll ever find our way around in this enormous place.

Thankfully we have a driver, Aime, to get us where we need to go for now. Brent's trying to learn his way around and hopefully it won't be long before we head out on our own. We need to be able to be independent and leave the comfort of our nice mission home apartment when we want. Although it's such a nice place that one could just stay here forever and enjoy it. We feel very blessed to live in such a comfortable home.

Family room/dining room combination

Kitchen and view from the living room

Our first round of "Meet the President Meetings" was great. We enjoyed so much meeting our new sons and daughters. Thurs. we're off to the other side of the mission and the adventure of travel in Africa.