Why are we so blessed? The Joy of a mission just keeps coming!!

"I am so happy we are an eternal family," says Mosa Mphethe

Mphethe family on the backside of the Johannesburg Temple

Do you think this family is happy?

Mphethe family with Grandma Ruby

Mosa loves flowers

Bophello loves flowers too

The best part of life is being an ETERNAL FAMILY!

We are working in the Family History library preparing names

Wedding Day #2

Elder Chandler showing off in the courtroom

Brother Mphete says "I Do"

Exchanging rings

Elder Sorensen enjoying FHE at MaPalesa's home with all the children

Can you tell this villager is drunk?

Brother Mphethe's Uncle and Aunt's home

Elder Chandler and Uncle Mphethe

Dinner & Preparing names for the temple

Our granddaughter, Monica and her new husband, Jacob, at the Payson Temple

Wow!  A double rainbow at a wedding reception.  Does that mean good luck?

Mphethe's passports are finally finished

Showing the first vision to the weavers.  It was amazing!

I'll bet you've never seen a black Joseph before!

President and Sister Thompson and daughter Nicole at the weavers

The Thompson's at the weavers

Our wonderful wool spinner

Singing and dancing with the weavers

Our weavers all together

Does that look like a happy group?

Elder King's farewell dinner

I am going to Johannesburg!!

Elder Khophoche and Elder Matlanyane heading out to Botswana

Elder's love eating!  Did you know that!

Sister Monesa and her little niece.  Saying good-bye at the airport

Sister Monesa's family at her setting apart

I think this family is ready for their daughter to go to Sierra Leone

MaLucy and Dr. Echo.  Next month I will tell you their story,

Teaching an older Sister

The Office people at the EMT College.  They always want pictures

Our Mormon Helping Hands Activity

Planting the garden at the Senior Sisters Center

It has been a busy couple of months here in Lesotho.  Missions are so amazing.  I hope you all have the opportunity to go someday!  We are rejoicing daily as we end each day.  So many experiences we could only have had in the mission field.

Because it has been a couple of months, I hardly know where to begin.  I guess, we will start with our wonderful little Mphethe family who has been preparing for months to go to the temple.  We had to make several trips to their villages to get documentation for them.  Then they had to have a civil marriage. (Enjoy all the pictures). We invited them over to our home to prepare their family names for the temple.  We so enjoyed our meals together and our time to prepare their ancestors names.  We needed to have them come twice because we didn’t have enough time the first time around.  What a blessing in a senior couples life to have these wonderful families in our home.  They worked tirelessly getting birth certificates and passports for themselves and their two children.  It is not a simple process to get paperwork completed to leave this tiny little country.  Then on Monday September 26^th we loaded into the Bakki and drove to Johannesburg to the temple.  It is a 4 ½ hour drive and the children were perfect (not even a fuss from the baby or the 3 year old).  The Temple experience is so hard to explain to you.  So peaceful and comforting, I guess describes it fairly well.  What a blessing to see these beautiful families being sealed for time and all eternity in the House of the Lord!  These temple experiences are icing on the cake for our mission. 

In the meantime we missed our first grandchild being sealed in the temple.  What an example for our entire family!  Monica came home from her mission in Florida in May and Jacob came home from his mission in Arizona in July.  They were still very much in love and it didn’t take long to plan the wedding.  They were sealed together in the Payson Utah temple September 30^th, 2016.  It was so hard not to be there, but we FaceTimed them when they came out of the temple.  Then at the reception a little storm blew in the most beautiful sunset and double rainbow that any newly weds could dream of.  They were truly blessed for their faithfulness!

President and Sister Thompson and Elder and Sister Sorensen came to Lesotho for District Conference in August.  The Sorensen’s stayed with us and we had too much fun!!  We did a little sight seeing in the area and went to the weavers and the Kome Caves.  It was such an enjoyable weekend we hated for it to end.  Then Elder  Chandler on Monday night had a virus attack around his heart and we thought he was having a heart attack.  After about 5 hours we decided to drive the 1 ½ hours to Bloem to have him checked.  No heart attack, but a virus that mimics a heart attack.  They put him on medicine and all is well!  Whee!  That was scary! 

When we were at the weavers with the Sorensen’s and Thompson’s we had such an enjoyable time, singing and dancing with these delightful sisters.  About a month before we had asked them to do start on a weaving of the First vision for us.  We had asked them to wait until we could show them the video of the First Vision before they started, but they didn’t understand so when we got there one morning on our way to Leribe to check on them, they had already started and we had a black Joseph.  We chuckled on the way home, but decided to go back in a couple of days with the video and explain more clearly what this weaving was about.  It was a wonderful experience.  They kept looking at the video and then over at Joseph saying in Lesotho that he definitely was not a black person.  We so loved sharing the truthfulness of this gospel with them and so many others that we meet!  It is pure JOY to do so!  President and Sister Thompson and Nicole their daughter along with the Sorensen’s truly loved the experience with these delightful weavers.  I hope you will enjoy the pictures.

We had several missionaries leave on missions from Lesotho.  Elder Khophoce and Elder Matlanyane got their visas finally for South Africa and got to leave for their missions in Botswana.  They had a great first experience serving here for a few months though.  We truly miss them now.  Sister Monesa left on her mission for Sierra Leone.  It took some doing to get all of her paperwork completed, but she was so happy to be ready and to go serve.  Brother Sekholomi received his mission call to Johannesburg.  He enters the MTC on December 8^th.  We have only a couple more calls to come in before we leave.  We have the blessing of being a part of the Elders lives here in just a small way, but we love to feed them and take care of some of their physical needs.  Elder King was AP and got to come to Lesotho to work for his last transfer.  What a joy it was to have him working here.  He got to train a new Elder Parsons and they were great teachers together.  We will definitely miss him. 

We had a fabulous Mormons Helping Hands work activity at the Senior Sisters home very close to where we live.  They were so excited to have us do so much work for them.  We also went in to meet them.  They do not live there, they just meet there and do good things for the villages, like explain about dementia.  Uneducated villagers kill the Elderly, because they think they are possessed of the devil.  Hard to believe that still happens in the world, but it does!  What a great work these sisters do.  We asked them if we could come in and leave a spiritual message from time to time and they said yes!  Our first time there we taught about our Savior, Jesus Christ.  The spirit was so strong and the love of those sisters for us and us for them was powerful.  This experience would probably not have happened except on a mission.  Oh how much we will miss our mission.  Only 5 months to before we are finished again.

We hope and pray you are all happy and healthy at home!  We miss you all so much!  The gospel of Jesus Christ is the best thing that ever happened to Elder and Sister Chandler and we rejoiced every day to have the privilege and blessing of being a part of it.