Bush Babies Monkey Sanctuary

Our latest adventure to report is a visit to the “Bush Babies Monkey Sanctuary” and for this outing Rachel’s family came along, as you will see in the pictures. Like some of the other sanctuaries in the area, Bush Babies provides a place for for orphaned and abused animals. As they point out in the tour, monkeys do not make good pets and most of the ones they have at this site come from monkeys that have been donated by their former owners. The sanctuary is really beautiful. It takes up several acres of enclosed jungle, which you get to enter and actually be in a forest with the monkeys. The habitat is a natural one for these monkeys; the ones called bush babies were actually indigenous to the area and didn’t have to be adopted. Some of the monkeys were shy and evasive but you could catch them scampering through the trees. Others were very comfortable with humans as you can see.

Here is Rachel's family in a very big monkey's hand.

A close up so you can see they are really there.

Our guide gave us the number of cell phones that the "little thieves" had stolen lately. They really did try to get things out of the guys pockets (we went with another couple, the Clowards)

A monkey who rode on dad's shoulders for quite a while--he just decided it looked like a good place to ride around I guess. See how he has his eye on Maia? He really wanted to take her home with him. We had to hold really tight to the PegBuddies when we had them out.

This one kept trying to get the bag of PegBuddies out of my hand.

This one doesn't look so friendly, but he was just yelling at his friends.

The rocks on poles are monkey seats--Rick decided to try it out and said it wasn't all that comfortable.

This momma was swishing through the forest with her bright eyed baby.

Now haven't you always wanted to walk on a bridge like this. It swayed back and forth just as you would suspect.

Rachel liked the bridges too; they were really artfully done with native wood and twisty vines all joined together with rustic pegs and knobs.

Emma really loved the jungle. She decided to take a break and just enjoy the surroundings.

This was a neighborly warning in a jungle I thought :)

Cool vine-y things--the younger ones were what the monkey swung on.

Michael swung through the forest with the monkeys and climbed on the trees.

A sweet little monkey that hung around us. I think he might be the one that took a ride on dad.

Missionaries in the jungle :)

Here's another mom zipping along with her cargo.

Ring tale monkey

Ruby was exhausted and took a long nap afterwards in a jungle leaf.

Qualifications for Serving a Senior Mission

We live behind the home of a young family with four children. The father, who is serving on the high council, was talking to us about the value of senior missionaries and had some very wise counsel. Because some of the people reading this blog are thinking about serving missions and worry about being qualified, I decided to pass his thoughts along. You'll see that in his opinion, the qualifications are pretty basic.

“You have no idea how much difference senior couples make in a growing area of the church like South Africa. Right now, if I stood before a congregation and asked all of those who were born into the church to stand up, there might be ten. We just don’t have people who have lived a lifetime in the church like the senior couples have. Just by attending meetings in the wards and branches, you can add strength. To our young people, you can be the grandparents, the aunts and uncles that they don’t have. Even for those with families in the Church, you can add another layer of influence to reinforcing what parents are trying to teach. 

Senior couples don’t even have to do much to make a big difference--80% of the good you do is accomplished just by being alive and breathing. Whatever assignment you might be given is only a small part of your effectiveness. Most of the change you will make comes from just being an example. If everything doesn’t run the way you are used to, or the work doesn’t always go well, it doesn’t really matter. You have done your most important work by living your life in the gospel and then by coming here. The training you receive at the MTC is just a couple of weeks, but in reality your whole existence has been your MTC. Senior missionaries are a living testimony, an indication of a life lived well and a life well organized.”

The Importance of Classroom Environment

Soon after we arrived in South Africa, we had our first in-service meeting and one of the topics in the chapter we discussed was classroom environment. The teaching manual talks about things like making sure that all of the students are seated in a way that they can see the teacher, about instructional material, about gospel related pictures on the walls and so forth. We pictured chairs arranged in semi-circles in meetinghouse chapels or students gathered around a dining room table in home study classes. That was before we started visiting the seminary and institute classes.  In the Johannesburg stake area, there is a vast chasm between the rich and poor, and this is true of church members as well. So we have been in some classes that are much like the ones that we pictured. There are more, however, that have humbled us and changed our future definition of “classroom environment.”

We visited an institute class the other night that was held at the instructors home in the heart of Johannesburg. The area was once the business district but has now evolved to dense low-income housing. The class is held in a home to make it more accessible for students who have to travel distances. Even then many of the students walk quite a ways to get to the class. Finding the apartment was a challenge in itself, but when we arrived the teacher was waiting on the sidewalk for us and escorted us into the building. It was already getting dark and there were no lights in the common area of the building so he guided us to the very old elevator that took us up six or seven floors to his apartment. His classroom was the main living area, which was bedroom and front room combined. There was another room, probably a kitchen, toward the back where his wife was keeping his children so that the class could be as quiet as possible.  There was a single small light bulb that half lit the room. He had taped weathered snapshots of his family on the wall, he said so that the students would remember the goal of having their own families. For classroom seating, there were two plastic chairs and a small stool in the room, two of which were given to us. Fourteen students came in and sat quietly on the floor against the wall or leaned against the bed. If you thought that such a “classroom environment” would negatively impact a gospel lesson, you would be wrong. The instructor, dressed in a suit and tie, shared a lesson that could have matched any given in a BYU institute building. The students listened carefully, contributing intelligently and shared their experiences and feelings. This is just a representation of the places that we have gone that are poor in a worldly sense, but rich in the spiritual sense. We are constantly learning and constantly humbled.

The class--I know the flash makes their eyes look like zombies, but they were just happy kids.

 The front of the building that the class was held in--doesn't tell too much--it was dark

This was the "restaurant" across the street from the building :)

Food in South Africa

Some people have asked us how the food is in South Africa. That is one of the things that we wondered a lot about when we came so we’ve been having fun finding out the answer to that question. There are some foods here that we wouldn’t commonly eat at home or in some cases, like butternut squash, not as frequently as they eat it here. They like to barbeque a lot or braai as they call it.  A favorite food for a braai is a long rolled up sausage called a boerwors roll. I tried a few bites and didn’t like it, but then I don’t like sausage in general so I’m no judge. Frank enjoyed his. They also like tripe, which neither of us tried, but Frank did eat Mopani worms, which I think are more Botswana than South African. Another thing I won’t try is the termites or flying ants. They come out with the first heavy rain, and people catch them and eat them, saying they taste like peanut butter. I think I’ll stick with the peanut butter, which isn’t that great here either. They eat jerky or “biltong” in all forms from many different animals including ostrich and other wild game. I haven’t seen these, but I guess you can buy a grilled chicken with feet and head—they are called walkie talkies J A staple that a lot of low income people practically live on is pap or cornmeal porridge served in a variety of consistencies but usually very stiff so it can be eaten with the hands. It tastes to me like cream of wheat, but with absolutely no flavoring so it’s very bland. I ordered some in a restaurant though with tomatoes, onions, garlic and cheese added and it was very good. Butternut squash is often called pumpkin here and is served frequently, and usually in combination (alongside not mixed) with creamed spinach. While food in the grocery store seems pretty comparable in price, food in restaurants is considerably cheaper. I'm guessing that must be because of cheaper labor here in Africa.

Our first meal in South Africa--sandwiches made from the cheese Nikki gave us, treats left by the mission office couple who set up the apartment.

Mopani worms--yes really worms! And no, I didn't try them.

Boerwors, tradition African food

Pap (the white stuff)

We had an interesting “traditional” lunch the other day here at the CES office at the end of some training. They were sandwiches called “quarters.” The reason for the name is that you slice a complete whole loaf of bread vertically through the middle and then each of those halves are sliced horizontally to create a quarter of a loaf of bread. The soft inside is then pulled out (by hand) and then filled with any ingredients. I can think of some things that would have made it delicious, but we had Russians which they say is like a hot dog, but is more a small sausage and bologna which is not Oscar Mayer J No vegetables, but some sort of mango chutney and some cheese. There was also a bunch of chips (French fries) added in.  The bread was really good, but the rest not so much and they are way too big and too fat to really eat unless you’re really hungry.

Quarters minus a few bites

A lot of things are very much the same—the chicken (without heads and feet) is very good. I think their beef tastes a little like liver, but they think it tastes the way beef should and that ours is tasteless because of all the antibiotics, etc. that we give our cattle. That may be true but I like the American beef much better. The stores have most of the food we need to cook the things we do, but many are not quite the same. Any hint of Mexican ingredients are either expensive or stale (the case with the corn chips we tried) and I haven’t found what they might be calling tomato sauce yet.  Their bread is very good though. I especially like one that we’ve been buying called brown dumpy bread (why dumpy I don’t know.) It has a really nice grainy texture but stays moist. You can buy good rolls and bread for very little—the equivalent of 15 cents for large bakery rolls. I was worried about having fresh milk since I like milk and thought it would all be the boxed kind. It turns out that their milk is really good, in fact so good that I suspect that the 2% really contains more cream that than. But I’m not letting my suspicions keep me from switching to 1% just yet.

The really great thing about the food is the fruit and vegetables. There are entire big stores that sell fruits and vegetables. Rachel would love the sweet watermelon that are so big you can’t put them in your refrigerator without cutting them in half first. Mangos and avocados are sold on many street corners in little pyramids and bundles at very low prices. Because there is so much fruit, the juice is really good and really cheap. We can buy cartons of 100% fruit juice for what would be a dollar. An interesting fruit that we’ve eaten here is a lychee fruit. They have a fairly hard red shell but a delicious inside. Bananas are abundant too and always ripe—no green bananas in sight. This means that they ripen very, very quickly. And remember the banana tree we had outside of our door, well it kept getting zapped by the electric fence surrounding our property  so the bananas broke down, but didn’t break off completely. I don’t know if they were ready to ripen or they are ripening because they are partly detached, but in any case, we are eating little finger sized bananas from the tree and guess what? They taste just like bananas J I’ll bet none of you have banana trees outside your door! 

The fruit and vegetable STORE!