Wednesday, July 09, 2014
I wanted to record some tender moments that we shared with Flavien Kot, our translator today. He served as a missionary in Kinshasa under Brent and Carol Petersen as his mission president. He loved his mission president so much that he named his youngest son Brent after his mission president. Brent Petersen died and Flavien made the trip to his funeral in Utah. This is a huge sacrifice and undertaking for a Congolese. He did this about a year ago because he visited the Bowers, (Wendy) in California on the same trip.
Flavien told us that when he first entered his mission, he didn’t like president Petersen because he was so strict and such a letter of the law person. He said that President Petersen actually sent over 20 missionaries home early from their missions. He said the main thing President Petersen tried to teach his missionaries was honesty. By the end of his mission, Flavien had learned to love the Petersens. At the end of his mission, they gave him a photo album with picture post cards inside the album. He treasured this gift of post cards from his mission president. Post cards are unique here because the postal service doesn’t work. Flavien thought they were beautiful pictures of the LDS sites in Salt Lake and treasured the post cards.
Several months later, Flavien thought he would share a post card with a friend and dismounted it from the photo album, only to find a $100 bill behind the post card. He was sure it was an accident and he contacted Carol Petersen immediately. She assured him that she knew he would want to share his post cards with others and when he did he would be rewarded with 10post cards each with a $100 bill behind them. He said this was the first $1,000 of US money he ever had and it was the key to his success both financially and in his humanitarian efforts.
He also said that unfortunately many couples from the US come to Africa but still want to live in America while they reside in Africa. His advice was that when you live in Africa, you need to live in Africa. Somehow that sounded profound to me. I am sure I have been trying to continue my American connection and haven’t embraced living in Africa. I hope to look at things differently and learn to appreciate our time while we are here in Africa instead of trying to be somewhere else. I shared with him advice I had received from a Hospice worker when Nancy Jo was dying. Her advice was to live in the moment and not try to live in the past or the future. I’ll try harder to do that with Africa, live in the moment.
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