Thursday, April 4th, BIG NEWS!

Johannesburg Temple at night

We were picked up by the Hatch's at 7:45 this morning to go into the area office. The office is right next door to the Temple, about 10 minutes drive from our flat. We are both suffering from jet lag, but ready to meet the Area Public relations director and everyone else at the office where we will be working. As soon as we arrive, Sean Donnelly, the Area PA Director, says he wants to meet with us before the meeting and we join him in his office. He welcomes us and then starts in by saying that he had been inspired to change our mission to Durban. He said the Durban PA couple have been out ten months and know the ins and outs of the area, so he thought it would be good to bring them into the office and put us out in the field until their mission is over in December. Then we would come back to the area office in Johannesburg to take their place and the new missionaries would go to Durban to take ours. He said he wanted to do that from now on with all the missionaries in the area office, so he would have experienced couples to work there. That was quite a surprise, since we had just unpacked our stuff and didn't know anything about Durban. He also said he had changed the Durban mission and was taking Madagascar (French Speaking) and the other islands by Madagascar out of our mission and he would cover them, since he speaks French and was the Mission President there before this assignment. He added Cape Town to our mission, as the PA couple there, Roberts (Sherry Toler's brother and his wife) were going home and they were not replacing them. Capetown is about 1200 miles from Durban. We will also have Lesotho, Swaziland and other small places in between. He then brought in the Murdocks from Durban, who were just as shocked as we were. They loved Durban and wanted to stay there, where they had established lots of relationships. She even teared up at the news, but we are both here to do the Lord's work and if that is what he wants, we were glad to do our part...until he told us that we would be leaving with the Murdocks the next day to go on a trip to Bloemfontein, Lesotho and Ladysmith (and would not arrive back to Johannesburg until the following Monday evening. Considering how tired we were, this was crazy news. It was a very difficult trip to get here. We had to go back to the apartment and pack up our stuff again and then we had to leave the next day to drive several hours by car with the Murdocks, who we did not know for a four day road trip to other countries in Africa! We just looked at them blurry-eyed and said "Okay."

Dianna & Sean Donnelly,
SE Africa Public Affairs Director