Our friend the monkey – lives on a fence in front of a cemetery.
18 May 2007 – Friday

A good morning. Mary slept well and does not have a black eye. The cut is clean and hardly shows but the bruise on her chin is quite evident. Her stomach has also quiet down so all in all she is in good shape.

I spent most of my free time catching up this journal and going through pictures we took over the last two days so I could put some of them in the blog. I am getting better at that and now it does not take as much time to get the pictures posted. We read in the Kitab Mormon and are now waiting for Sam so we can go to District Meeting.

I forgot to mention that yesterday we found our good young friend Elder Roper had developed a hernia and had been sent home to have surgery. His father agreed to pay his way back to Indonesia so instead of spending the rest of his mission in the States, he will come back in a month or so. Mary asked for his e-mail address so we could send him our best wishes and tell him to hurry back. I find it interesting that the Church medical people did not think that either Singapore or Hong Kong had good enough doctors to operate. Either that or they felt that since he will need a month to recover, that it would be better to do it where his parents could watch over him.

The rest of the day was normal with a visit to the mission office for district meeting – on the way there we stopped and Mary took some pictures of the monkey we have seen so often – and lunch followed by a quick trip to SoGo for necessities -mainly from BreadTalk. We found an alternate source for Mary’s Rye bread so it was a great success.

The Peterson’s invited us out for dinner so we came home and rested until it was time for them to pick us up. We had a great time – decent Mexican food and lots of good talking. It was celebrating my birthday. The Petersons are great, down-to-earth people who are always full of the spirit. But that is how we have found all couples we have met here.

We managed to get in our hour of reading before Mary headed off to bed and I sat watching TV until I was tired enough to join her.

On looking back on the last three days, they at first do not seem to have been very productive. However each of them fit in with what we are doing here. Wednesday we gain important information that will help us in the future – especially the mushroom project. We helped the Kanes come up with a program for teaching about the family. Thursday helped cement our relationship with one of the branches we work with. We got to talk to a lot of people and see them outside of church. Friday we learned from the district meeting and I think we also gave the missionaries an idea or two that might help them as they teach. On all those days we studied from the Kitab Mormon and each day improves our ability to read Indonesian. Hopefully it will eventually lead to us being able to communicate in Indonesian.