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A statue at the Mormon Pioneer Cemetery in Nebraska carries an additional burden this Pioneer Day after 15 people — including 12 on a bus headed to a church youth activity — died last month in Southern Africa.
It has only been 36 years since Lesotho registered The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That’s fewer than the 39 years between the church’s founding and the end of the pioneer era in 1869.
As of the last statistical count at the end of 2024, the church had just 1,890 members in Lesotho, a country of 2.3 million people.
It’s reasonable to consider the Young Women and leaders who died in a terrible, multi-vehicle crash on June 21 as church pioneers in their country.
The Avard Fairbanks statue “Tragedy at Winter Quarters” depicts a father and a mother huddled under a cloak looking down into a freshly-dug grave where their child is buried. President Heber J. Grant commissioned the statue for the cemetery to remember the 600 pioneers who died at Winter Quarters between 1846 and 1848 in what is now Omaha, Nebraska.
Last week, 11 caskets stood on a soccer field during the funeral in Maputsoe, Lesotho. Funerals for the other four victims were held at other times.
The girls were between the ages of 12 and 16. That is another similarity between them and the Mormon Pioneers of the American plains, 46% of whom were younger than 20.
Their leaders also were impossibly young, and died while trying to carve out a place for the youth of the church to find God, follow Jesus Christ and make covenants that provide eternal life with their families and God.
The Maputsoe Branch president was 35. His wife was 33. Both the branch’s Young Women president and her counselor were 24.
Like many young leaders in areas where the Church of Jesus Christ is in the pioneering stage, some of these were returned missionaries whose leadership was priceless.
A BYU database shows that 19 pioneers in the 1800s died after they were run over by wagons, and 16 more died in stampedes.
The vehicles are motorized today, and the trail the Lesotho pioneers traveled was paved. The Tragedy at Winter Quarters monument, which includes a plaque that says “This monument itself is placed directly over the grave of an unknown child & seven other pioneers” — is a world away.
But the real similarity between the two sets of pioneers is their reaction to hardship and tragedy.
From 1846 to 1869, Latter-day Saints who set out on the Mormon Trail sang, “And should we die before our journey’s through, Happy day! All is well!
Last week, the survivors of the Lesotho crash displayed equal determination in their faith.
“Jesus Christ loves us and is with us, even though our hearts hurt,” said Setso’ana Selebeli, 17, whose 11-year-old sister remains hospitalized with burns.
God ”chose some of us to stay behind and testify that God lives,” she said. “No one planned for the accident to happen. But God knew, and he prepared a way.”
Several speakers at the funeral repeated a phrase: “God is still good.”
And the church’s district president said, “We will meet them again.”
I am on the road and won’t be in a place that celebrates July 24 as Pioneer Day.
But I plan to think of the bereft parents carved by Avard Fairbanks into the monument that honors his own Winter Quarters ancestors. I’ll also think of the African pioneers in Lesotho mourning the fresh sting of the loss of their loved ones.
And of their example.
“Trust in Jesus and always look unto him because through him you’ll find peace,” 14-year-old survivor Mpho Anicia Nku said, “and he will help you in the healing process.”
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- The First Presidency announced the dedication and open house dates for the Burley Idaho Temple.
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Behind the scenes
