Thanksgiving Greetings

Happy Thanksgiving! Hope you are gathered with those who mean a lot to you and your turkey dinner is delicious! Our day is ending--it's 10:45pm--and it was certainly not how we usually celebrate the day! We are leaving early tomorrow for Couples Conference in Cape Town so we spent the day getting ready to go and covering our bases so that, hopefully, things will continue on OK without us til late Monday night when we return. We will have a day of sight-seeing, a day of workshops, attend Church, and, for Dad, a Mission Presidency Meeting. The mission is paying for our flight down and a bed-and-breakfast for 3 nights--nice!

Having a brai[bar-b-que] is the big-time way to celebrate here, so the elders gathered on Monday for p-day and we had a Thanksgiving brai with each companionship contributing some food and we provided chicken. Turkeys seem to be non-existent here, but chickens are plentiful, whether you prefer to buy a live one and slaughter it yourself or buy one from the grocery store. It's a sure guess which way we went!

Anyway, the elders always enjoy getting together and Monday worked better than today because we are in the middle of transfers which is always a busy time. It involves taking those who are "going down"[to South Africa] to the airport which is 45 minutes out of town, and picking up those who are "coming up"[from SA]. It would be so simple if we could leave off the going elders and then pick up the coming elders. But this is Africa, so of course, it has to be a time-comsuming process. The elders go in the morning and the elders come in the evening which means 2 trips to the airport and 2 trips back to Windhoek for a total time of 3 hours just for transport. For those elders who stay, there are some changes of companionships so they have to be taken to their new apartments. The Mission President's wife likes to have clean bedding for the elders who are transferring in, which means picking up the bedding from the elders who leave, laundering it, and taking it to the apartments of the new elders. Then there are the visas--but we won't even go there! But we count as one of our blessings the tremendous young men who we have the opportunity to work with.

We didn't have turkey and stuffing. We didn't have mashed potatoes and gravy. We didn't have pumpkin pie. But we do have so many blessings--faithful, supportive and loving family, the Lord's Plan of Happiness, the Savior's Atonement in our behalf, being His servants in a most unique part of the world among His chidren of such a different cultures, any many, many more. Take time today to "count your many blessings" as the hymn goes.