So I have a great friend from the mission, BJ, who married this awesome girl, Celeste who likes to sing.   His wife just got back from a trip to Africa with the Jenny Phillips Choir.  Honestly, I have never heard the choir (although I hope to one day), but she shared this experience with us today.  I felt the spirit as read about the wonderful work they did there, so I asked her if I could pass it along.  She agreed.  Enjoy.   

We spent a day at an orphanage and that was an incredible day I will never forget.  We had put so much work into this day and I had been waiting for it like it was Christmas or something.  We had a huge yard sale and raised money to build them a schoolroom a few months back.  We were supposed to paint it when we got there but it wasn’t quite ready for that yet so we left the paint for when it is ready.  We had a blanket and stuffed animal for each child and also a bag with crayons, paper, pencils, scissors and stuff like that.  The children 12 and older got a walkman with Mormon Tabernacle Choir CD, 3 of Jenny’s CD’s and a Hillary Weeks CD.  We wanted them to have some inspiring music to listen to.  We gave them lots of batteries to hopefully last them a year or so.  The kids were beaming from ear to ear.  We took tons of books for their schoolroom and some educational toys so we read to them and played games.  We took a polaroid camera and took each of their pictures so they would have something when they grow up of when they were young.  I think it will be difficult to keep track of them though with all those kids.  We made frames that said “I am a Child of God” and put their picture in it.  The thing the children wanted most was the physical contact.  They just wanted you to love and squeeze and hug them.  They were adorable and just melted our hearts.  I so wish I had the money, means and sanity to adopt 2 of them.  I just don’t think I could handle that right now.  I think I would want 2 instead of just one so they would always have that someone to really relate to.  Maybe one day.  Jenny is looking into the process and will probably adopt a little girl she fell in love with there.  Anyway, at the end of the day we sang them some songs and then they sang some to us.  They sang us a song about “Jesus, we love you very much”  it was angelic!  Oh, by the way, there are 66 children and only about 5 caretakers.  

The fireside that was my favorite was in a town called Hazyview.  We held it at some Christian church and it was amazing how we got this set up.  As Jenny was researching places to stay she felt strongly she should stay at this hotel.  When she booked it, a link came up that said they do day tours of Swaziland from this hotel.  She had wanted to get into Swaziland to do a fireside but couldn’t find a way into the country because they are very strict about tourists.  They wouldn’t just let us drive in ourselves.  So that was the first blessing from this hotel.  Then Jenny felt inspired to send the owner a CD so she did.  The lady emailed her back and said she completely fell in love with it.  She claimed it made her feel so good inside.  She took it to her pastor and let him borrow it and he fell in love with it also.  They decided it wouldn’t hurt to ask Jenny if our group could possible perform for them since she knew we were in the country to perform.  Of course she said yes, we would perform.  So we were able to perform at a non-LDS church in front of a crowd with no LDS people there.  The spirit there was one of the strongest times I have ever felt it in my life.  There were so many amazing and wonderful people there and they loved our program.  We didn’t really change it at all.  It’s about the apostle Peter so we didn’t feel the need to change things because being a Christian church, they were already familiar with his story.  We gave out free CD’s to everyone after the program and hopefully they will all go to  Jenny’s website and find the link to Mormon.org and find out more about our church.  Anyway, it was incredible.