The African kingdom of Lesotho is in mourning after nine girls in a Latter-day Saint congregation and two adult leaders there were killed in a fiery bus crash.
The girls were part of a group of more than two dozen children, ages 12 to 17, of Lesotho’s Maputsoe Branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who were going to a one-day Young Women church activity Saturday in the landlocked country’s capital, Maseru.
Their bus was involved in a multiple-vehicle crash, which killed the nine girls and two adults, and left another nine people hospitalized, Siyabonga Mkhize, Africa South Area Seventy said Monday. Another eight or nine people on the bus have been discharged.
“The details are still quite sketchy,” Mkhize said in a video interview. “The local authorities are doing a formal investigation.”
When word spread about the accident, the event was canceled — while the reaching out and mourning began.
“We are encouraged by the faith of the members in Lesotho and join with them, obviously, in this very difficult time as they have rallied around each other,” Mkhize said. “They’ve received support, not only from other church members [in the country] and senior church members in South Africa, but the government of Lesotho has also been very supportive, including [condolences] from the prime minister and the queen.”
It is, indeed, “a very devastating situation,” said Nelly Makatleho Moorosi, who is the church’s Lesotho national communication director. “We were able to visit with the families and give the support that they need from the church, including counseling from the church psychiatrist to those affected by this tragedy.”
Lesotho, a mostly rural country inside South Africa with a population of about 2 million, is home to just under 2,000 Latter-day Saints in eight congregations, Mkhize said.
The church has built a strong relationship with the monarchy, Moorosi said, so it got a call from the king’s secretary “expressing their heartfelt sorrow for members of the church.”
The church also heard from two members of the Parliament of Lesotho, she said, “who offered support and assured us that they will walk this difficult journey with us.”
On Sunday, Moorosi said, the two Parliament members showed up at Latter-day Saint services in Maseru, where most members live.
“It was a very heavy moment at church,” she said, seeing family members of the deceased girls and others “who knew them as sisters.”
It was a “very stretching and heartfelt moment that the spirit was prevailing,” she said, which even the members of Parliament mentioned.
Mkhize, the Latter-day Saint area leader, said that after consultations with government officials, the church and family members, a public “memorial service” will be held in roughly the next three weeks. At the service, he said, “you generally will have a lot of government officials, politicians, community leaders and the general public who have been affected by this.”
The public service will be followed by a Latter-day Saint funeral service in one of the church’s meetinghouses, he said. The families are considering having all the girls buried on the same weekend.
“We anticipate it’ll be quite an emotional, heavy weekend for the family members and the kingdom of Lesotho,” Mkhize said, “to bid farewell to those precious souls that were lost in a tragic accident.”
Update • June 23, 3:21 p.m.: The number of deaths as a result of the crash has been updated.
