Week 9 - My Batswana Friends

We keep learning new phrases, new concepts, and we keep making wonderful new friends whom my heart grows around, such as Elder Dylan Braganca.  We rubbed elbows with him in the mission office almost daily as this was his last assignment before returning to his home in South Africa this week.  He is one of the most stellar and intelligent young men I have ever had the privilege of knowing, and I look very forward to meeting up with him in Salt Lake as he plans to pursue his higher education at Ensign College.  He inspires me to be more of a peacemaker.  Thank you Elder Branganca for fielding my endless and repetitive questions and for behaving as a true man of God wherever you serve.  

My heart also grew enormously this week with love for these beautiful women of Zion, the beautiful sister missionaries of the Botswana Namibia Africa Mission. 

And my love for these precious young men, some of the most diligent and hard-working young men I've known, these young elders scattered thoughout Botswana.  We drove to Lobatse, about an hour's drive from Gaborone where we live to, visit these elders and improve the living situations in their homes.  Elder Seau from Tonga has been without water pressure inside him home, so he's showered from a bucket on the front porch for over a month without complaint.  He seranaded us with a soothing Tongan rendition of a hymn.

These darling young men led us down a dirt road through the cattle to their home in the village of Molepolole as we delivered household goods and checked for problems at their abode.  They expressed their gratitude by seranading us with an accapella hymn.

This faithful woman is, at age 83, extremely elderly for this country; few live to see this old an age.  As I put my arm on her shoulder, I could feel her fraility and sensed her knees buckle several times.  Yet she makes the effort to attend church each week and stayed afterwards for baptisms.  She does speak English but prefers her native tongue of Setswana, and in her tongue she verbalized how she felt love from our visit as missionaries to her ward today.  I can't help but thinking she has a throne in heaven awaiting her; someone this devout and dedicated to her Savior truly inspires and awes me.

This week saw us feed ever hungry missionaries a lasagne dinner in my tiny flat (they make me laugh and bring me such joy!)…

…and pay a visit to the space that will become our new mission office in a couple of months as we are closing the lease on our current digs.  I am not looking forward moving all that equipment and our storeroom full of pamphlets and office supplies.  Oh the blessings of having robust 19-yr old men close at hand to assist!

The country is Botswana.  A person living here is a Motswana.  The people as a nation are Batswana.  And their native tongue is Setswana.  They are hardworking and industrious despite the trials of living in a developing nation.  We don't see very many homeless folk, but we do see hungry folk.  As well, HIV and AIDS have ravaged this country.  Botswana is number 4 on the planet for numbers of those struggling through life with AIDS (behind South Africa, Eswatini, and Lesotho), and it has most seriously affected young adults ages 15-24 and orphaned countless thousands.  Great stride, however, have been made by UNICEF and other humanitarian agencies to get treatment to the masses with great success.  

These uniformed young men greet whoever pulls into a gas station for a fill up.  They not only fill your tank but they clean your windshield and your rear window and fill all 4 tires with the proper air.  All of this for a mere 10 pula (about 75 cents) in tips. They were quite disappointed when I explained to them the American tradition of self-serve gas, window washing, and tire filling.

P-Day this week was another adventure.  We headed about an hour north of Gaborone in pursuit of a national park called Matsieng Footprints.  We drove past landfills which are not covered but rather open to thousands of scavenging birds, through small villages replete with goats, donkeys, cows and thatched huts, along dirt roads without any signage as to which way we ought to proceed, and finally stumbled upon our destination.  Here a private tour guide greeted us to escort us to and through the sacred "carvings" of footprints which date back thousands of years to their ancestors.  Botswana tradition has it that the first humans on earth crawled out of these water holes to take their first footsteps on solid ground.  The area is most sacred to Batswana, and even today pilgrims come here from all over the country to collect the water from these pools which remarkably never dry up.  When Aaron and I spoke to each other of these rock carvings, we were quickly corrected by our guide who made sure we understood that these are not carvings at all but are actual footsteps left behind in as the molten rocks cooled.  She pointed out multiple footprints and even showed us what appeared to be a lion print in the rock.  Newlyweds today come to gather the algae from these pools and spread them on their roofs, thereby ensuring blessing from heaven on them and their posterity.  I secretly smeared some nasty algae on Elder Kasper's pants to see if it will bless him with a very long life of joy and success and blessings.