28 February 2007 – Wednesday

I was just looking at the traffic cams in SL valley. The snow looked beautiful and but foreign – here about the only thing that is sometimes white is a cloud and even that is not very often. Most clouds here are some shade of gray or black and full of rain. Anyway it was fun to look at home.

Another month is about to end – I am not sure where February went. It really seems like we have been here for much longer than two months and yet it also seems like we got here yesterday. I think we have pretty much adjusted to Jakarta and missionary life. This morning for breakfast I had cold pizza and a diet coke…seemed quite normal.

We neaten the apartment so that the maid – that sounds so upper class – could clean the floors and surfaces without moving half of our possessions. We have so many different things going on that we tend to spread out here even more than we did at home. This is fine except there are times when we are so spread out we can not find anything. Last night I wanted to read in ‘Book of Mormon Stories’ and could not find them anywhere. Finally I looked under the bed and there they were. I guess the mice wanted to read them.

We read from the Kitab Mormon. We are in 2nd Nephi and finished chapter 1. We did pretty good today – we only had trouble getting tenses (they usually are not provided so we must guess at them from context) and deciding how they are using words such as kebenaran which can be anything from rightousness to truthfulness with a few in-between. Even when we look up a word we are never sure that we get the right meaning because some words cover a wide range. There are words that can have completely opposite definitions – like meaning good or bad – and we must figure out which is meant. So far the record is 17 different meanings for one word.

I had a fairly busy day – at least up to 5. At work I sent off a lot of e-mails to different people. I am determined to find resources and schools. The Jakarta Post had an article on a government micro-loan program that almost no one has heard of. The article talked about the corruption involved as the people in charge gave loans to their relatives and friends. The money was not used to start of help their business and there was never any intention of paying back the loans. I asked Lukito to look into it for me. It sounds like a great thing for our small business people.