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| This was carved from one piece of wood |
Stan and Teril are from Springfield Missouri and had just been on their mission for about 3 weeks.
When Elder Petersen was a Stake President in Missouri about 15 years ago, his wife died of cancer. He married Teril not too long after that.
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| We don't know what he is carrying, but it sure looked heavy |
They picked us up from the airport and E/Petersen already seemed pretty comfortable driving (on the left hand side of the road, like here in South Africa). The traffic there is very similar to the other countries we've been to. It was crazy and congested! There are few traffic lights or STOP signs, so it's who ever can get into the intersection first. Then three or four cars would follow along. There were lots of traffic jam.
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| The VIP Hotel was very nice |
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| And no, we didn't go swimming |
We stayed at the VIP Hotel that is fairly close to the harbor and it was very nice. Stan drove us there so we could check in and then we went to their apartment. Our purpose for visiting was to train the Petersen's. There is a lot to learn and we tried to break it up during the day so it wasn't so overwhelming for them.
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| This was our training venue |
Stan and Teril had been out to visit some of the projects with Glen and Leigh Pond (the couple they were replacing) and already knew a lot about them.
The official language in Mozambique is Portuguese. It is one of the two countries in our Area (along with Angola) where Portuguese is the official language. Even though Portuguese is the official language, most of the people speak one of several African languages such as Swahili or Makhuwa. Portuguese for them is a second language. Elder Petersen had served a mission in Brazil 40 years ago, so he is re-learning his Portuguese.
Thursday morning we accompanied the Petersen's to the Ministry of Health where they had an appointment with the Minister. We met the Stake President's wife there at the Ministry. She is the local Director of Public Affairs for the Church and had arranged the appointment for us. We waited for about 20 minutes and then were told that the Minister was in another meeting and wouldn't have time for us. We hear that same story from a lot of the couples. They get stood up or have to wait hours to meet with officials. Working with the governments can be very frustrating in these countries.
On our last night there we went out to dinner with the Mission President and his wife along with Elder and Sister Kimball, who are the office couple. We had a fun visit with them at a very noisy restaurant. President and Sister Koch (pronounced Koe) are from Brazil and they had been there only about 6 weeks.
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| Left: President and Sister Koch. Right Front: Elder and Sister Kimball (mission office) Right rear: Stan and Teri Petersen |
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| It was very crowded and very noisy |
Saturday morning we flew back to Joburg. We had a very enjoyable trip and felt the training went great for our first solo try at it. We went into the office to start catching up on our work. We planned our trip to be just as short as possible, but looking back, we should have stayed one extra day to visit some of the projects there and see a little bit of Mozambique. There's a good chance we will never get back there. Our next time for training will be in November when we'll fly to Nairobi, Kenya to train E/S John and Kaelene Petersen.
