Hey, what a group !!!   We are so grateful for our family and the wonderful love and support they each give us.  We just wanted to take this brief opportunity to send our love to them.      

A Bad Day at The Game Reserve

The following pictures were taken at the same game reserve we went to last month.  I'm glad we didn't run into this guy!

Growing Up Under Apartheid

Dominic Tshabalala is the Church's Public Affairs Director for South Africa.  We work together at the Area Office here in Johannesburg.  The following article appeared last week in the Church News.  He is an incredible individual, and someone I have come to consider as a dear and close friend. 

Dominic Tshabalala’s daily existence was one of walking in fear. Constant violence and hostility surrounded him as a small boy. “It did not engender love or trust or stability or faith in humankind,” recalls Dominic.

That dismal view of life was the result of Apartheid, said Dominic, an official policy of racial segregation involving political, legal and economic discrimination against nonwhites that took place in South Africa from 1948 to 1994.

Police attack dogs were trained to single out his race, said Dominic, and often young boys and men in his neighborhood were rounded up into police vans never to be seen again. The “armed struggle” against Apartheid was talked about on street corners, in homes and in open fields in the segregated black township where he lived. “We were expecting the day would come when someone would give you an AK-47 [automatic assault rifle] and all you would do is shoot. . . . It was assumed that everybody would participate.” Dominic says he is grateful that day never came and that he never has held a gun.

Dominic never knew his father and was allowed to visit his mother only three times a year because she worked as a servant for a family in Johannesburg, about two and a half hours away from his home. Black Africans were not permitted to venture inside the city without a traveling pass, just as whites were not permitted to go to black townships. He said it was only through the good graces of his mother’s employer that he was granted visits with her at all.

Dominic’s bleak world began to change for the better at the age of 12 after witnessing something astonishing during one of the visits with his mom. White female or “sister” missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were given the permission by his mother’s employer to teach her about their faith. Upon conclusion of the lesson, Dominic says, they lovingly embraced her. Dominic had never seen that type of affection generated from a white person toward someone of darker skin. “You don’t understand how big that was, how amazing it was to see that — how shocking. It went against everything society had taught me.”

Dominic says each time the missionaries visited that week with his mother he felt something that he didn’t understand. “It was very foreign but felt good. It felt safe; I felt wanted.” He says he later understood that feeling to be the Holy Ghost  or Holy Spirit.

He was baptized and started attending church and was again amazed by the acceptance he felt. “They taught the same thing to me as the white boy sitting next to me at church. That broke a lot of boundaries for me. That said to me in my heart and mind that we are equal.”

More opportunities opened up to Dominic through the help of Church members. He was able to attend high school, a privilege not often given to children of his race, served a two-year mission for the Church, attended college, married in the Church’s Johannesburg South Africa Temple and has four children. He has served in many callings in the Church, including as the lay leader of his congregation, and continues to serve. He currently works as an employment manager helping others find jobs.

Dominic looks with humility and gratitude at all that he has achieved. They are achievements that in his early life of strife and despair were not possible to comprehend. “The Church rescued me, truly, truly rescued me,” he said, “just like many other boys.”