BY MELINDA WILLIAMS Clipper Staff Writer WEST BOUNTIFUL — Living in South Africa in the age of apartheid meant having two passports and sometimes being shunned by officials from other African countries. That's the situation in which Elder Earl Tingey, a general authority emeritus with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He found himself in the early 1990s, when he was assigned to help the church make inroads into the continent. "South Africa had apartheid at the time and there were no diplomatic relations with other African countries," Tingey told members of the Bountiful Breakfast Exchange Club recently. "We had to get our VISAs on the road and they were only for a 90-day single entry visit," he said. That meant that he and his wife, Joanne, had to have two passports because one was always somewhere being processed. Tingey, a Bountiful native, was called to the First Quorum of the Seventy in 1990 by President Ezra Taft Benson. His first assignment was to join two other general authorities in opening the African area. He was there for three years and during that time he was on the road two or three weeks every month, covering a continent three and a half times the size of the United States, "a distance so large I didn't understand until then," he said. "We covered about 25 countries," he told club members. "It was very difficult to travel," he said, not only because of the VISA situation, but because there were no roads connecting countries. "We had to fly from capital city to capital city," he said. Trips away from major cities were difficult. "There was the challenge of security, where to stay and what to eat, or not eat," he said Because of the hard feelings of government officials toward South Africa in some other African nations, it was sometimes difficult to make contact with them. "If we called and said we were phoning from South Africa, they would hang up on us," he said. "So we would call and say we were Americans and needed to speak to so-and-so, and we'd be put right through." At the time of Tingey's service, 80 percent of South Africa's population was black and 20 percent was white, but it was the whites who ran the country. Most of the blacks lived in Soweto (the southwest township), Tingey said, where they lived in tin shacks. The blacks would then travel to Johannesburg to work, but would not return home each evening. Instead, it would sometimes be months before they'd return home. The kids were raised by a grandmother in Soweto. "That broke up families," Tingey said. That kind of segregation was not practiced in the church, Tingey said."Blacks and whites worked side by side in the temple." Despite the difficulties, Tingey found the people, "gracious, humble and sweet." He said that as the church was presented to Africans,"they had the values that made the church attractive to them." African children in school were taught to read and write from the Bible."They really know the Bible," Tingey said Things have changed for the LDS church since those early days. Now the continent is divided into two areas, so there's not as much traveling. mwilliams@davisclipper.com