An Important Day-April 25,2010

Today was a great day in the Congo and in all of the Africa South East Area. We arrived at church to find the Congolese Saints already filling the chapel. They were dressed in their best, which for some was beautiful, colorful African dresses made of bright prints and scarves to match. For many men it was white shirts and ties. A few wore suits. For others it was t-shirts and jeans. But we knew that whatever they were wearing, it was their best. This was an important day. They were ready and excited for it. They soon completely filled the chairs that were crowded into the chapel and all eyes were fixed on a 23- inch TV at the front of the room. It was sitting on a small classroom table that was standing carefully balanced on two sturdy chairs, so as to elevate the TV for better viewing. A generator kept the TV running. A DVD player and small speakers were hooked up to the TV to provide both picture and sound. At the appointed time the TV was turned on and the first ever video presentation of General Conference held in the Lubumbashi area (and translated into French and Swahili) began. Across the aisle from us on the front row was the Katuba Stake President, Pres. Makubu. He had his notebook and pen ready so that he could write down the things he heard, as did many others. He told Brent before the meeting that in his 20 years in the church this was the first time he had ever seen General Conference and what a thrilling occasion it was. They showed the two Sunday sessions consecutively with only a thirty-minute break between them. Nobody complained and it seemed that there wasn't a sound in the chapel for the whole time, except when they sang along with the Tabernacle Choir. In a smaller room down the hall we could just barely hear the sounds of the conference being broadcast in Swahili for those who don't understand French. This was a historic moment for the Church in the Africa South East Area. Conference was being played in all the wards and branches of the Church. In Lubumbashi Stake it was much like at home with a big screen and curtains to block the light so that the picture could be easily seen. In Katuba Stake, they had no curtains and no screen, so they covered the wall behind the pulpit with white paper and brought their curtains from home to hang over the windows. In Gecamines it was a 23-inch TV. In buildings all around Lubumbashi, and Kolwezi the same scenes were repeated. We understand in Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon, Botswana, S. Africa, Malawi, etc. it was the same. For Likasi, DRC the important day had to be postponed until next week because their DVD didn't arrive until noon Sunday. Things didn't go without a hitch. This is Africa. But it happened. The General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with sound and video, came to the Africa South East Area today, for the first time. It was a touching moment to share this historic day with these faithful African saints.

A new Branch in Kasumbalesa

Soon after we arrived here in September 2009, we went to visit a group in Kasumbalesa, a town about an hour and a half away. Groups are congregations of members who are too small or too remotely located to be official units of the church and get church services. They are often allowed to have meetings and pass the sacrament if they have priesthood leaders.

We met with 45 members in a small schoolroom and fell in love with this group of people who faithfully and without official church support meet weekly. We excitedly told the mission president about them. He told us that they were too far away and that we would not able to help them. We were very sad because this group is strong and wonderful. They hold Sunday school, primary and sacrament meeting every Sunday and do it just as well as any ward at home.

Primary Childeren and the Young Women of Kasumbalesa

Relief Society Sisters meet every Wednesday

They have a very special spirit in this little group and we love being with them. Since our first visit to Kasumbalesa they have been on our minds and weighed heavily on our hearts and we have prayed for them often.

Last week when the mission president was here, he got word that eight people had been taught by the group missionaries and wanted to be baptized. This peaked his interest and he suggested that we go there, interview the baptismal candidates, meet with group leaders and consider the possibility of making them a mission branch. We immediately made plans to go there the next Sunday. When Brent called the leader of the group to tell them we were coming and our purpose in doing so, he told Brent that he had just that moment risen from his knees where he pleaded in prayer to the Lord concerning the subject of becoming a branch.

This is the group leader and a member who is the director of the school where the group meets. They have 1,000 students in this small school who meet in a few rooms like the one the members meet in. They have double sessions to get them all in every day.

When we visited on Sunday, we took the Assistants to help interview the eight baptismal candidates. The people were all well prepared and ready to be baptized. These young elders are fabulous. Elder Mbambu served in Lubumbashi when we arrived, so it was very fun to see him again. He's an artist and this time he gave me a drawing of a little old women who he said was me. His work is awesome, except that he didn't take off a single wrinkle or grey hairs.

Elders Benababu & Mbambu

We were so excited to go to Kasumbalesa! Becoming a branch will allow them to have the support of the church and will make a huge difference for them. It will be one more step to having missionaries there and then we will really see the church grow. Again, as we visited we felt a wonderful spirit. The two elders, Brent and I were the speakers in the meeting. When Brent spoke he told them that we had been blessed several times to be in the conference center for general conference, with thousands of members and the general authorities in attendance, but the spirit there was no stronger than it is in this small schoolroom in Kasumbalesa. This faithful little band of saints is making progress and we are pleased to start the paperwork to request that they become a mission branch. It was a wonderful experience to be with them. Now, we pray that soon there will be a church Branch in Kasumbalesa.

Je deteste les mutations.!

Another transfer happened last week. I HATE TRANSFERS! In an ordinary mission when you lose an elder from one city, you will see him again in another. With the division of the mission coming, we know that if an elder goes to Kinshasa now, we will not see him again. This time there were six elders who left us. It's always a sad day. It's pretty hard for us all. We hate to see them go! We have grown to love them!

These six elders are some of the best and we will miss them.

Elders Kapele is one of two brothers in the mission. He started his mission the same day as us. Elder Buzangu, who speaks great English had planned to go with us to Kolwezi as my translator. Elder Banza was the Likasi District Leader. Elder Mbayo Papy is from Kolwezi. We know his Dad, who looks just like him. Elder Kambele stayed with us on his way to the MTC and then returned as a "greeny," and Elder Tshmungu has been with us since our arrival. We will miss them all so much!

Since there were 8 of us and all their belongings to transport, we decided that, even in Africa, this wouldn't work. So, we determined that we would need two cars, so I would drive too. You rarely see a woman driving in the Congo, so it was a bit of a challenge for me. The road to the apartment is a bad one and the police make me nervous, but we had no choice. When I drove up to the apartment to pick up the elders and they saw me behind the wheel of the truck, they were shocked. Most of them don't even drive. They gathered around like something from outer space had just landed in front of their barrier. They laughed and had a great time teasing me about driving, but I think they might have been impressed. I told them that I didn't like the rough roads. They called it the "dance of the road" and told me to enjoy "the dance!" We have so much fun with these great young men. With several more trips to the airport, we picked up 14 new missionaries. We are growing quickly into a real mission. We are up to 48 missionaries in our area. This transfer, we got the first sisters to ever serve in Lubumbashi. It will be so fun to have this new dimension in our mission area.

Sisters Keta, Mesenga, Kalonji and Matondo

Then the next week we held zone conference with all the zones. It's a good time to get acquainted and we love them already!

Zone Likasi

Zone Katuba

Zone Lubumbashi

There is just one more transfer before the mission is divided and then all the missionaries here will be ours to keep in the........... Mission Lubumbashi.

Payday in the Congo

If you put everything that we do together I think we did 90% of it in the last 7 days. The quick rundown. We delivered supplies and money. We had a huge transfer with 35 changes in elders' assignments and housing. We went to Likasi. We held two zone conferences. We had the Mission Pres. and his wife staying with us for 5 days. We rented two new apartments. We got approval from the missionary department for the new Lubumbashi mission home. We made four trips to the airport taking and picking up missionaries and visitors. We changed all the records, taking off the missionaries who have left us and adding the 12 who came. We recorded baptisms, did financial reports, took pictures of all the elders for the missionary board, made lunches, cakes and banana bread and birthday cares for zone conference, and cooked lots of meals, wrote and gave talks and had a nervous breakdown. What a week!

The week began with payday planning. It's always a challenge. Remember rule #1 from an earlier post. Banking is not easy in the Congo. It goes like this. All the missionaries are given cash each month for all their expenses. So, we go to the bank to get the money for them and cash to run the mission in Lubumbashi. This is not like going to the bank at home. Remember rule #1? Payday is not easy in the Congo. We begin by writing a check to ourselves. Then we go to the bank, sit down and wait until they call us to come to the window. At the first window we can get a bank statement for the month to make sure that the money really got sent from Kinshasa. You can only do this in the first week of the month without a charge. No calling to get your bank balance and since we don't know when or how much they will deposit into our account we just have to hope it's there. This month it wasn't. So, we went home and arranged to get the deposit made from Kinshasa. Then we waited and then went back to the bank, hoping the money was now there. This time we go to a different window and get the money. It's all in crisp $100 bills that you must count at the window and verify that each bill is dated 2003 or later. US Dollars made before then are not accepted here. They say that in 2003 there was a huge problem with counterfeit US dollars. So now only 2003 or newer are usable.

Then we go home and call a money changer to come and change the $100 bills into Congolese francs. That means that they bring us roughly 7,000,000 cf. Remember that each Congolese bill is only worth $.50, so that's a lot of counting. We count it all out and package it into 32 bundles of between 83,000-125,000 fc each, depending on what expenses each elder has. We wrap each bundle with rubber bands and fill up the briefcase with all these bundles of money. By now our minds are almost totally fried from the madness of counting and bundling all those bills. It makes us crazy!

At 6:30 AM on Thursday we load cleaning supplies and the brief case full of money and anything else the elders need into our car. As we go, we check their apartments to make sure they are clean and neat and to see what needs they have.

This time, since we had a transfer starting on Fri., we picked up elders as we went. They piled into the truck all their earthly possessions. We were helping them get to new apartments and to the apartment for elders who would be leaving the city. Since we only have a five passenger truck, we had to make a route that caused us to make as few stops as possible while allowing us to get people where they needed to be. It took us almost an hour to plan the route and then they called from Kinshasa to say that the plane reservations had changed. So, we started all over with route planning. We had 35 elders who were affected by the transfer. Several times we stuffed 5 elders in the back seat of the truck. We drove for over 5 hours picking up and dropping off elders with their luggage, water, blankets, coats, pillows, charcoal, even pots of fufu.

When we get home, we are thankful that it will be another month until payday comes again.

Our Two Deacons

Kindnesses and generosity come to us, as missionaries, from many sources, as we serve the Lord. Compensating blessings come to us and to our family at home. In Feb. we enjoyed greatly our visit with Elder Renlund of the First Quorum of the Seventy and his wife, Ruth, as we toured our mission area together. It was a great blessing and lots of fun to be with them.

One day we mentioned that we had two grandsons, Michael and Ethan, who would turn twelve in the next couple of weeks and would receive the priesthood. They're our first grandsons to receive the priesthood and it would be hard for us to miss this special time with each of them.

Ethan, who lives in Utah, would be ordained the Sunday before General Conference. A few minutes after our discussion, Elder Renlund asked if we thought that Ethan and his father would like to experience Ethan's first Priesthood Conference together in the Conference Center. He suggested that he would be willing to give his own tickets to conference to Ethan and his dad so that they could have this special experience. Having no son of his own with whom to do this, Elder Renlund said that he would be pleased to do this for Ethan and Ryan. We were amazed and thrilled by the offer. This week, Ryan and Ethan went together to pick up the tickets for Conference at the Renlunds home in Salt Lake. It was really exiting for them to go together to meet Elder Renlund and thank him in person for his kindness.

Ethan at the Conference center

On Sat. night Ethan attended his very first general priesthood meeting in the Conference Center. It was an experience that neither he, nor his dad, will ever forget. A great blessing came to them because of Elder Renlund's kindness and our opportunity to be with the Renlunds.

The story of Michaels's first General Priesthood Meeting after being ordained is an equally wonderful story. He lives in Arizona and was invited by his extended Tassainer family to take a little vacation in Mesquite, Nevada on conference weekend. It's always great fun to be with the Tassainers, but Michael made the decision to stay home so that he could go to his first Priesthood Conference. What a great young man he is to make such a mature and righteous choice. He went to priesthood conference with his step-dad, Marvin Pearce. Michael, too, had a great experience. He commented on the talks and said that he especially liked the talk on patience because that was something that he needed to work on. What a great kid!

These are two great, new, young priesthood holders. We are so blessed to be their grandparents and, although we were not there to be with them for these special occasions, we feel that the Lord is giving our family extra blessings while we're away.

The Testimony Tie

This is Elder Bernard Etienne Fety. He arrived in the mission field in mid-February, 2010, with Lubumbashi as his first assignment .

Along with the interesting things about the Congo and the travel logs, it's important to hear the tender stories of faith and testimony that we see around us every day. They are nothing huge, but they are world changing for those to whom they happen.

This week when we visited the apartment where Elder Fety lives, Elder Fety proudly showed us his tie and announced that he was wearing his "testimony tie." With curiosity, we asked him why he called it that. He said that he was taught the gospel in Madagascar by an American missionary. The day they met, the elder was wearing this tie. He said that he gained his testimony from his experience that day. When he was baptized the elder gave him the tie. Now, he wears it to help him as he shares his testimony with others. Last week Elder Fety had his first baptisms ever, five of them. What a great young man! It is impossible not to love and learn from these young, faithful elders!

A Real P-day

Today, after seven months on our mission, we took our first P-day! We have never really found anything we wanted to do or see, so we just continued to work. But today, we had both reached our limit with what we were working on and it was P-day. So we decided to go for it! A real P-day! We got in the car and headed out to see the sights of Lubumbashi.

Grand cathedrals are always a good place to start as a tourist. So, we went to a big church that we pass often. We knew nothing about it, except that they have been painting and hanging fabrics all week, so it looks pretty good for the Easter weekend. It seemed a good place to start.

We discovered that it's a Greek Orthodox Church. It is very impressive, quite refined and beautiful.

We were amazed at how ornate and elegant it is, in an Congolese kind of way.

Then we passed through town and on to the huge Catholic Church. They are celebrating their Centennial year in Lubumbashi. Hard to imagine that they have been here for 100 years.

We expected something "NotreDame-ish." But it was just a cavernous, barn-like stucture.

Above the doors, where you see stone relief in European cathedrals, there were interesting wood carvings telling Bible stories in very African ways. There were lions and crocodiles in the carvings. I don't remember them in the Bible, but I liked these rustic carvings very much.

The other "tourist attraction"that we knew of was a museum. So, we decided to give it a try too. It looks very weathered and dreary from the outside.

But inside it's quite interesting. It has a little natural history museum. Naturally, I had to read every word of every sign. Almost every one said something like "because of the wars........... whatever animal or thing it was, was nearly extinct or no longer available. War has taken a terrible toll on the Congo.

We found out that Okapis are found only in the Congo. They are a cousin to a Giraffe and have strips like a Zebra only on their back ends and legs. The bonobo (pygmy chimps) and Mountain Gorillas are also only found in the Congo. They are all nearly extinct because they were eaten during the wars. They call the meat of the monkeys "bushmeat." These animals were once found in the thousands in the Congo, but now only a few survive in remote areas. There are nearly no animals of any kind in the Congo because they have all been eaten. It's very sad what war and poverty have done to this nation-its land, it's animals, it's people, and everything else.

There were also masks and explanations of their cultural meanings. Most had to do with the rights of passage into adulthood.

Then we went to another part of the building where art work by present-day Lubumbashi artists is displayed. It is really quite nice art and all of it reflected life in the Congo. It was fun to spend a few minutes in a room full of beautiful things.

There is another part to the museum where you pay an entrance fee. The price for admission was 1000 Congolese francs. That's $1. We decided to save that part of the museum for another P-day. It will be nice to have something to look forward to doing.
So, this was our P-day, actually our P-hour, which is how long it took us to see all that we could find to see in Lubumbashi.

Now for the crazy Congolese twist. As we exited the museum building, I saw a lady sitting at an open window with a stack of small blue books. She was thumbing through them trying to find a certain one. Then upon finding it, she handed it through the window to one of the people standing in the grassy area out side the window. As we got closer, we discovered that it is the place where you pick up new passports. We have been looking for the passport bureau for some time with no success. So, there it was, in the museum. Sounds right for the Congo, doesn't it!?! We decided to see what the process for obtaining a passport really is like. New missionaries now go to Kinshasa and wait for two weeks, live and work with the missionaries there and wait to get a passport before leaving for their missions. The lady told us to go to a building "a cote" and pointed out the window. As far as I can tell, the term "a cote....." means "someplace in that direction fairly near"....... some other place. It's a frequently used phrase that usually tells us nothing at all about where to go. But we headed over "a cote" the building next door. When we entered and asked about passports, they told us to go to the back of the building to find the passport bureau. Surprisingly, we actually found it! Brent quickly got in and out of the office with directions for getting a passport in Lubumbashi! They said that it takes 3 weeks and $173, which is less time than it took at home when we all went to France. Now, if it really works this way, a miracle will have happened for us and the new Lubumbashi mission--all because we had a P-day.