3 May 2007 – Thursday

We managed to read the Kitab Mormon for almost a full hour this morning. We have not been getting our two hours in because there is too many activities early in the morning. At least that is our excuse. All the couples had breakfast together. It was a pretty good breakfast but not as good as the ones at Novotel. The Roberts agreed with us.  It was nice to sit and talk to our friends in the Gospel. There is a bond of love and friendship that seem to be very special as we share the experiences of serving a mission for our Lord. The Bennetts invited us to go with up to see the Kanes – they have a 42 foot motor home with two slide outs. It must be like a mansion inside. I imagine we will make some friends here that are unlike any others. Because no one will be able to really know what we feel when we talk about our service here.

After breakfast we met to have the last two presentations. Ours came first and I think we did quite well. Mary and Sam’s short movie – pretty much a slide show with effects and music – went well. A number of people commented about our garden. Mary did an excellent job of telling about our family and interests. She also covered English classes. I then told about how they could help us with ERS and how important it was. I really did not have enough time to go into too much detail and hope that the handout will let them know what we need.

The Roberts were the final couple and they just talked from their heart. After our more business like presentation, it was the perfect way to finish the presentations. President Jensen then spoke some about how he and sister Jensen felt. He played a DVD that they made to send to the Indonesian missionary reunion at April conference. That wrapped up the conference.

At 1:00, most of us went off to take a tour of the city. President Jensen and Elders Kane, Van Dongen, and Noorda went to play golf. The tour was mainly a bust.  About a half of the tour was what we saw yesterday. There was a tour of a section of town that is a cooperative that makes Tempe. This is a soybean product that is not bad tasting and very nutritious. Pretty much the whole town is involved with small back rooms and areas used to process the soybeans, make them into sheets and dry them. None of this would pass the health department in America – or for that matter most 1st or 2nd world countries – but it works here. What was fun was to have the children tag along. I am not sure if there were so many because it was a holiday or because their families can not afford to send them to school. Either was we grew a big crowd of smiling children who love to have their picture taken. As always they were for the most part clean and neatly dressed – I did notice that there were not a lot of shoes.

The best part of the tour was when we told the driver we did not want to see another temple and could he show us a pottery factory. After one poor choice he finally got us to a fun little shop where there was a lot of very inexpensive but nice looking pottery. My guess it was all seconds but since we are probably going to leave most of it behind when we leave the $7 we spent was not a big thing. Nearby there was a pottery shop where we saw them hand-painting pots to be fired. It was too bad that we were flying home and so there was no way to get a big pot home. We are going to look for something like that around here. Maybe in Bogor.

We got back to the hotel in time to have high tea – without tea of course. This was an everyday thing and we found it the first day. There were lots of Indonesian treats – most of them sweets of some kind. The Bennetts joined us and then sister Kane. After we had our treats, sister Kane whipped out her dice and we taught the Bennetts a new game that we just learned the day before. It is a lot of fun and there is both luck and skill involved. We played two games and the Bennetts each won one…now they are hooked.

It was a relaxing evening. We went down to the restaurant and found almost all the couples already there. The golfers were still not back and the Hashs had gone back to their house. Since they live in Malang they did not see any reason to take the tour. Everyone sat around talking about the conference, the work, their families, etc. When the golfers arrived the party started to break up. Everyone was rather tired and there were a lot of us traveling tomorrow so bed sounded very good.