Sites Around Kinshasa

You may remember the drawing Sister Smith made of us for the Mission Bulletin Board. Elder Bingham really wanted one in color, so he and I posed for this nice photo and presented it to the Mission Office Staff. We feel it is quite an improvement. Look at the color of that tie! Nice!!! And isn't Elder B looking grand?

Yesterday we spent the day showing the two new couples some of the fun places we have discovered in our travels outside the city. These children were very interested in a carload of mundeles, so we showed them our interest in their smiling faces by taking this photo. Happy children, wherever they are!

We stopped off at a touristy place called the Bonobo Park. A Bonobo is a relative of a chimpanzee that lives in Eastern DRCongo. However, the bonobos were relocated during one of the civil wars there, and they are happily whiling away their time at this park, which is a very decent place to visit. Besides the bonobos, which you know I was thrilled to see, we happened upon this cool termite hill. If you zoom in, you can see the termites making their way up Elder B's arm to his nose. (j/k)

Now we get to the star attraction. If you zoom in closely - no kidding this time -- you will see that the black blob is actually a critter looking right back at you. Bonobo.

A very darling and cuddly Bonobo. (Yeah, right. If you know how I feel about monkeys and anything related to them, you know my heart wasn't really in that introductory sentence.) These guys have learned to come running when the tour guide calls out because they know they will get some sugar cane. They put on quite a noisy show. Interesting to watch (for a minute...)

A cute picture of Fils and his wife Natasha. Fils was our first interpreter and continues to work for us. They were in town to get the paperwork done for their visas to go to South Africa with their little guy Freddy to be sealed in the Johannesburg Temple.

Also at Camp Luka, this woman is using her hand-crank sewing machine ON THE GROUND to sew clothes for her family. Oh my aching back!! She has a very nice-looking men's shirt completed, a small child's shirt, and is working on a blouse. I can't imagine trying to sew with only one hand to guide the fabric while the other hand is turning the crank. Very talented. At least with the pedal machines (like Gramma Bingham had) you have both hands free. By the way, there is no electricity in Camp Luka, so an electric machine is not an option.

Here I am giving the well digger some important advice on how to do his job. This well is at Camp Luka, a very densely populated area where they will never have enough wells to meet the needs of the population. This particular well was dug only 11 meters deep, and even though they found plenty of water, when it was capped off with the pump, so many people came to pump it that it ran dry, so the contractor agreed to take the pump off and dig it deeper. This happened at 3 wells in this area, and it makes us sad that our contractor wasn't more aware of what could happen. He lost some bucks on this project, but he also learned a valuable lesson.

It is with mixed emotions that we receieved our proposed itinerary for our flight home. We can't believe this adventure is drawing to an end. Less than 4 months to go and it will fly! It seems that we wake up on a Monday morning and when we go to bed it is already Friday. How does that happen? We are busier than ever and learning things that we wish we had known a year ago because we would have been so much more efficient. But at least we learned them!

We are spending our spare moments catching up on the Conference talks. We couldn't see Conference - no satellite dishes here -- internet too slow to watch them -- but we can print them out and study them. We are very thankful for that. Today in SS class the teacher listed some topics on the board from one session of Conference. At the top of the board he wrote the date April 1, 2012. Then on another board we went through Jacob 1-4 and listed topics from some verses. At the top he wrote 500 BC. Guess what? We realized (as if we didn't already know) that the Book of Mormon was written for OUR day! The lists were so similar. Great lesson. WE are thankful for the word of God, both from the scriptures and from our Prophet. We are so blessed.

Have a wonderful week! We love you!