Rushton Hiltbrand's Missionary Blog: Africa here I come! June 11, 2013

John Wayne airport, 1pm June 11, 2013

After 33 hours, arrival in Johannesburg, South Africa!

Well hello hello.

Okay so yeah the flight went great, I do have anything that I brought on the plane, rolling suit case included. I didn't meet up with any missionaries while in Dallas, but when I got to London there were tons of them. 23 of them were going to Italy, and the 10 others are with me in South Africa, six of which are going to the Kenya mission. We got to the mtc around 11:30 where we met up with some other missionaries going to Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa. There are 4 guys from South Africa, and one from Uganda. They all speak the "Click" language as well as Zulu and English, so its really cool to talk to them. They seriously crack me up, expecially when they speak in Click. They are trying to teach me, but whenever I try to speak it I bust up laughing. The MTC president and his wife are super nice, lovely people. The MTC presidents wife or our "mother" reminds me of Sister Procuniar, looks and all. She's super friendly, and loves to joke with us. We are currently filling out paper work and getting shots.... so they told us that we get 30 minutes to write as we wait. The country of South Africa is beautiful, currently it is winter, so it is 15 degrees Celcius (59 degrees F). I've got to get the hang of my conversions and such so you'll mainly find when I talk about distance and temperature I'll write in Metric. So far all is good, we are going to the temple next tuesday, so that will be cool, a couple of the guys are still needing to get their endownments. Hope all is well.

Love,

Elder Hiltbrand

(We received this email at 5am our time, so he had been there about 5 hours.)

Sister Reber, the MTC president's wife has been sending us pictures and little updates. There are 22 missionaries that just arrived from 7 different countries.