March 1, 2015 - Clark

Sunday, March 01, 2015

These past two weeks have been somewhat of a marathon.  Matt and Ashley are into triathlons and I know I’m not fit for that, but we have been going day and night and Friday we finally had a recovery day.   Kenneth Mofokeng, the Director of all water projects for Southeast Africa was here from Sunday through Thursday.  His assignment is monumental in scope.  He is responsible for 25 countries, 14 humanitarian couples and approving every single water project proposed by them.  We currently have 6 projects he had to review; which means approximately 84 projects at any given time.  

While he was here, he changed the scope and design of 3 of our 6 projects.  He has to write every project development worksheet for submittal to Salt Lake City for approval.  He relies on the couples to prepare their drafts and obtain all the supporting documentation such as competitive bids, maps, Memorandum of understanding between all the parties, government request letters, etc.  This may be the only time during our entire mission that he will make a personal visit.  You get the idea, this week was big.  We hope we supplied him with enough information to garner his support for our projects.  Time will tell.  

I need to share a couple of tender mercies from our week together:

1. Luputa is the largest single water project the Church has ever constructed. (Approximately $4 million)  The trenches for the piping was all hand-dug by members of the community to supply water from the springs to the city center, some 33 kilometers away.  The project was completed in 2009 and is already in trouble because of mismanagement.  The ownership of the project was turned over to a water committee elected by the community.  The water committee had access to cash collected from selling water but had no bank, so members spent the money.  No money for maintaining the system and corrupt leaders.  An audit was conducted, 2 of the water committee members were sent to prison and voila, an opportunity to retrain the new committee members.  The new chairman is a church member and there is some hope.  Shelley and I have visited Luputa twice during our time here.  It is a plane flight and a 5-6 hour drive away.  We had contact with the ADIR engineers who designed and built the system last June when we visited.  We talked to them in September about the possibility of hiring them to retrain the new committee after the audit was completed.  Virtually no other correspondence with them until this past week.  On Monday we discussed Luputa in detail with Kenneth and suggested we financially support training the new committee and I suggested hiring ADIR.  With no contact from us, we received an email from Domique Sowa, the lead engineer at ADIR on Monday that he had sent at 2:50 PM.  He said he had received two unknown number phone calls and asked if we were trying to contact him. We did not call him.  We are in the process of writing a proposal.  
2. Kenneth Mofokeng took a liking to our translator, Steve Mutombo during the week we spent together.  By the time we went to a farewell dinner at Latte Licious with Steve and his fiancé, Matild, Kenneth made the following offering:
1. When you come to Johannesburg to be married in the temple, I’ll take some days off work and show you the city.  Matild has a sister that lives in the town where Kenneth grew up, Bloomfontaine.  I’ll take you to Bloomfontaine to see your sister.  The only problem is that Bloomfontaine is over 400 kilometers away from Johannesburg.

It requires a significant sacrifice for the members here to attend the temple.  They have to raise the money for their passports and the Church will fly them to Johannesburg and put them up in temple housing.  The majority of members have never been to the temple.  When they go the Johannesburg, they have no transportation and usually see nothing other than the temple and the airport.  I was so impressed by Kenneth’s offer that I spoke to him about it.  He said he had been raised in a small village and considered it a privilege to be able to pay back for all those who had helped him.  It is so good to have successful Africans who can serve as role models for these younger members.  I suppose we are in a sense training Kenneth in his work assignment but the ripple effects are obvious.

We are now in a waiting game to see which of our projects will be approved.  Kenneth is constantly on the road, so it may be a while.  We’ll go back to work on the local projects we have with two orphanages and schools.  We did have a fun time on Friday night with the senior missionaries watching “Meet the Mormons”.  The church sent a copy to every mission president.  We had popcorn and banana splits to celebrate.  Our family home evenings have generated a good spirit of cooperation and fellowship among the seniors.  

Today was the Lubumbashi Stake Conference and I was able to follow some of the talks.  The best part of every meeting here is the music.  I recorded a couple of their songs and I’ll try to send one of the recordings.  Being part of stake conference wasn’t quite the same as being the stake executive secretary.  I truly enjoyed that association with great priesthood brethren.  We will enjoy knowing what is said in meetings and being able to have fellowship with the saints upon our return.  The members here are wonderful but our language limits our ability to interact and really come to know them.  

One final bit of news is that the Church has purchased the Mission Home Property with two additional homes.  The closing is scheduled for April 1st and the current occupants have until March 15th to relocate.  We are scheduled to move into one of the vacated homes during that time period.  We also have Lee and Karen Kimball, a short-term specialist in member self-reliance projects (home gardening) coming to stay with us from March 22-April 7th.  Although our daily routine starts and ends the same, there is a lot of variety in between and we have found we need to be flexible.  Have a great week.

Love, Dad (Elder Davis)