Monday April 15-Thursday, April 18th - writing stories for newsroom-misc

On Monday, we went through all our Durban public affairs emails and calendared various items. One of our priorities is to acquire a location for the David Glen Hatch concerts that will be performed here in August. He is an Emmy award winning pianist and his CDs are for sale in all the church bookstores. He is bringing some of his students, at his own expense, to do a concert tour starting in Johannesburg and then to Durban and Cape Town. He has offered to do these concerts for free and even pay for the venue, if needed. He is also offering to do a youth fireside while he is here in all the locations. We contacted our public affairs people here in Durban and got them going on looking for a location. We also contacted our Cape Town contacts and tried to find out what was happening with the University down there...where we hope to secure a location. It turned out to be a lot harder than we thought, even though the concert is free. We are thinking about turning it into a charity event, where entrance is a couple of cans of food,which we will donate to a local charity in each of the venues. We are in the planning stages but lots of work needs to be done. This will be a continuing process for the next few months.

New branch in Leribe, Lesotho celebrates with Von Stettens

The mission president called and asked me to stop by the mission office. He wanted me to write a story about the new Branch in Leribe, Lesotho for the Mormon Newsroom for South Africa. This was a surprise, but I figured the Mission President wants me to write a story, I'll write a story. We went to the office before lunch and Sister Holt (the mission secretary) gave me her account of the beautiful ceremony and how happy the people were for the new Branch. They have been meeting in a rented business office. You can see the story here: http://www.mormonnewsroom.co.za/article/leribe--lesotho--group-achieves-branch-status

We went to the mall afterwards to pick up some groceries (All grocery stores here are located in malls where you have to park, take a ticket and pay for the parking when you are done). Most parking anywhere is paid parking, but not all that expensive. I finished up the story and sent it to the newsroom where Sister Murdock edited and took out stuff that the News Media would not understand (church terms) or gave explanations for those items. The newsroom is basically a place for the media to find out what is going on with our church. The same article with lots of stuff added will go in the Liahona. I didn't get to go to the ceremony, but I had met most of the people, so it was fun to write about it.

Flyer I am working on for Lotus FM

Tuesday, I got busy creating a web page for Lotus FM radio station for our wheelchair give-a-way. I spent most of the day on that one trying to create it in a rather weak software that we have in the office. I really miss my graphic software at home, but it turned out okay. Everett is working on getting to know names and faces. It is so hard to pronounce names and accents are so thick that we cannot understand what they are saying when they call. It is rather embarrassing, but it gets easier every day. Hopefully they understand and will be patient with us.We get up each day, get dressed in our Sunday clothes, put on our missionary badges and go into our upstairs office. It is nice not to have to travel to an office. The Durban/Cape Town public affairs office is actually in our flat. We have a great office computer and printer. Loads of church supplies, maps on the walls, filing cabinets full of stuff and we work from 8-9 am until about 6 pm at night making phone calls, answering emails and going to meetings.

We occasionally take a break and go to lunch at the mall, or to the dry cleaners or drugstore, but this is a full time job! Wednesday at 2:30, we headed off to meet with the member from Umlazi that is putting on the Mother's Day Event. She told us to meet her at Mega City, so we found an Umlazi Mega City on the GPS and headed off for that location. It just happened to be raining and schools were getting out, so lots of car and foot traffic, but we got to our destination and it was a huge liquor store. That didn't seem right, so instead of getting out, we called Zanele and she said we were at the wrong place. We call our GPS Liah, after Liahona and she is very helpful, but sometimes, she is way off. After several phone calls and a few wrong turns we finally met up with Zanele at a fast food place, called Spur. Three other people showed up, including the manager of the restaurant. They all wanted to help her. We had a good meeting, but I left there wondering how in the world she will be able to pull this thing off. I had agreed to call the radio station to get their support, as we have a good relationship with them, so I got to work as soon as we got back to the office and immediately emailed everyone involved and Elder Kyle tried to check with the Bishop to make sure this project was OK'd by him and we put out feelers to the other Public Affairs people in that area.

Lotus FM wanted all kinds of disclaimer stuff on the web page, so I redid the web page to include that. Just another day in Africa!