Thursday, September 12th 2nd day of Newsroom training

Today is the second day of training. We had another great breakfast at the hotel's buffet. I had a one-egg omelet that was awesome. Today we had Daryl added to our group. He is a very savvy young man that has only been married for ten months. He gets all dreamy eyed when talking about his wife. She is from Portugal where Daryl lived for a few years. He showed us a photo of her on his phone and when I said she was beautiful, he smiled and said, "I know." His wife is a kindergarten teacher. In Angola they speak Portuguese, so he was having a bit of trouble with English, but he could speak it okay. He just had an accent that was different enough to be hard to understand and our American accent was really hard for him to understand.

Today's training includes: copying stories from one website to another; adding pictures to topics and features; newsroom Facebook pages and working on the stories from yesterday to complete (with assistance, if necessary). Daryl from Angola could not get on with his password to the Angola newsroom, so he had to use Sister Murdock's computer and the Bybees, who still were not on used Elder Murdock's password. An email was sent to Salt Lake in hopes that by Friday all would be well. The time difference really makes it difficult to communicate with the office in Salt Lake.

I was pretty upset that my story had disappeared even though I saved it every few minutes while working on it. Sister Murdock could not explain it and my photos were still there, so I just had to cut and paste my story and edit it again.

Samantha showed up with her face still painted from the night before and her full African outfit. She looked Awesome. I was trying so hard not to covet her dark skin. She looks so young, no wrinkles and no freckles or other unidentified spots on her skin. I think she appreciated everyone telling her how great she looked.


We had pizza and salad for lunch. Then I started on my other article and got most of it done. They told us we could work on it again on Friday if we wanted to come in. We all opted to come in and work on our stories in the morning. I just hoped that my story would be there. It was pretty discouraging to have lost the other one and starting over. One thing I did discover is how long it takes to post an article. I am beginning to see why Sister Murdock did not have time to add new articles very often.

Elder Kyle was working on various projects with Elder Murdock while I was in the training. They talked about Elder Bednar's visit, our public affairs director in Swaziland and the dinner with the Council of Churches people, the Zimbabwe media event, the humanitarian connection, the idea of regional public affairs directors, 2014 public affairs goals, the couples conference in Kruger Park and the transition of the new couple coming to Durban, us going to Johannesburg and the couples' conference happening at the same time. A lot is going on and we will have to take over for the Murdocks when they leave. I am tired already.

That night we ate at the hotel again with the Bybees, Daryl and Samantha. The buffet changes from night to night, but I really was having a hard time finding any main dishes that I wanted, so I mostly had salad. They serve a lot of lamb here, which I have never liked. They had some seafood dishes the night before, but nothing I liked. The Olsens that we met in Bloemfontein are staying at the hotel and we ran into them at dinner. The Carlyles from Bloemfontein were there as well. Every time we went into the dining room we saw someone we knew. It must be a popular hotel for church members.

This photo shows Sean Donnelly and his wife Diane from our dinner at Moyos on Wednesday.



We spent some time after dinner taking photos of the hotel. It really is a beautiful place and one of the guys who works there told us it was built in 1895, way over a hundred years old. We decided to pretend like it was our house and I got Elder Kyle to pose for me while I took some photos of the place. It was kind of quiet, only a few people around so I took advantage of that and got Elder Kyle in some great poses. This room is a small room off of the great room. Doesn't Elder Kyle look right at home as he leans on the fireplace mantel?


There was a huge great room with lots of seating, another fireplace and a large grand piano. Elder Kyle was actually playing along with me on these poses. He did great, don't you think? You can almost imagine him being the Lord of the Manor...I love old hotels with all that character of bygone years. The wood was beautiful, the ceilings had interesting moldings and swirls. The chandeliers were amazing. Since we have been in Africa, we have stayed in the most beautiful places. We are so fortunate for this experience.