Primary Choirs are the same everywhere – this one is from Tangerang 2 and includes a number of our regular English students. A big, colorful load – not heavy but very wide. My Indonesian Giraffe that Mary bought for my birthday.
22 May 2007 – Tuesday

The start of a new work week. Most of it will be dedicated to trying to figure out what to do with a group of English students for a full month. We have a number of TOEFL study guides to go through and to decide how we are going to go about this thing. It is going to need a lot of study, thought, work and above all prayer. As I mentioned before, I think I now know what Nephi must have felt when the Lord told him to build a ship. Or maybe more like Bill Cosby’s Noah when the Lord told him build an ark – “What’s an ark?” “How big is a cubit.” In my case it is “What is a particle?” I suppose I am going to be mumbling about this English class for the next 5 weeks. I need to remember it isn’t raining rain, its raining opportunities to grow.

Regular morning at the ranch. We read through 3 pages of the Kitab Mormon and Mary suggested we stop. This does not happen very often. Usually it is me who calls a halt to our reading. The problem was that she was falling asleep as we read. So I had her lay down and take a short nap before Sam came.

We actually had two visitors today at the office. One was a patron who we helped a week or so ago to fix up his resume. Today we added his picture which should mean he gets more interviews. He is such a nice man and very good at what he does. I certainly hope he gets a good job. The other was a real surprise. It was brother Basuki, the branch employment specialist from Semarang. We had met him when we went there for a Career Workshop. The Bennetts are working with him to help people find jobs. He was in town for his work – he sells insurance – and he dropped by to see us and to meet with a customer. He is the father of four boys – the two middle ones are twins and are serving their missions. One of them is in our district and is as cheerful as his dad.

We got started on looking through the English books we have. There is certainly plenty of information and things to teach. The hard part is going to be choosing what the students need and teaching it in such a way that they become good enough to pass the TOEFL or Michigan test if that is their goal. I do not see any problem with those who just want to improve their English. I am sure we can teach them to speak, read and write English well, as well teaching them ways to keep up their English after they leave the class.

After office hours we went to the mission office to meet with Elder Subandriyo about the English class. He has decided that he would really like all the class to be returned missionaries so he wants to see if he can get a couple of returned sisters to come the class instead of the two young ladies from Bogor. If he can not find them by Friday we will tell the Bogor sisters to come. I am rather hoping that he does not find any since the two young women seem to me to be the strongest candidates and I would really like the pilot to have some strong English speakers.

We also talked some about the mushroom project. I am going to ask the Kanes to buy 10-20 packages of fresh medium and let us try to grow mushrooms in different parts of Bogor and Jakarta to see if it can be done. I am hoping that even if we can not grow mushrooms down here we can get the medium to fill in and in that way we could at least sell it for people to grow in their own homes for food or even to make a few extra rupiahs a month. A kilo a day would provide about 7000 R a day which would mean about $24 US a month. The difference between surviving and doing OK.

After reading another three pages from Kitab Mormon, we watched ‘Letters from Iwo Jima.’ Although it was pretty well done, I must say that it was not the quality I have come to expect from Clint Eastwood. The human interest was good but the true ugliness of war did not seem to come out. Also the Americans looked much too clean – the pictures I have seen of what soldiers looked like after a month on the lines were that they were in rags and looked haggard from keeping their eyes open for the enemy.

When I went to bed I started to re-read the Kitab Mormon sections that we had read earlier. As I read again the part where Alma is explaining what he has learned about the resurrection, I was touched by the fact that Alma states that part of what he is telling his son is definitely true because he had a spiritual witness to the facts. However he also gives his ‘opinion’ about some ideas or questions that come up in a discussion. In this he differentiates between a testimony ‘I know’ and an opinion ‘I think’ and shows that the source of real truth lies in the witness of the Holy Ghost. The section also shows that when we really want to know if something is true, we can sincerely ask God and he will answer our prayers.

These are all the couples who are now serving in Indonesia. Most we know well and they are now close friends.
21 May 2007 – Monday

Up early to study some Indonesian – I went back through some of the verses we read yesterday in the Kitab Mormon and picked out the words I still did not know. This – as usual – led to me digging into the roots of the word and then expanding that to look up words used in the examples the dictionary gives and then… So it ended up – like so much of my study does – in not getting very far with what I started to study but way off on a tangent. It like when in Sunday School class the discussion starts out talking about Eternal Marriage and ends up talking about the beginning of the practice of polygamy in the Church.

After breakfast and a quick trip through the paper – corruption continues to be part of every front page – I finished yesterday’s journal and got it posted. I noticed that the number of posts continue to grow each month. I am glad I do not have to read it all.

It is P-Day so we do the laundry, clean up, and then Sam picks us up to go shopping. First it is we stop at Carrefore to get supplies for our English class. Then it is up a few floors to get TOEFL books so we can have lots of different tests to use in the classes also a couple of books on teaching that we hope will help in the Intensive English Class that starts in about a week.

The next stop is SoGo and BreadTalk – we are still too early for a good selection. I guess Mondays is catch-up day and they had not caught up yet. We will have to try it at about 2 p.m. next time. Our final stop of the day is the mission office where I drop off a bill and talk to Elder Subandriyo. He says it is a go for the English class – he seems to feel that we need to find a place for the students to live. I guess that everything but supplying the money for housing and food will be our responsibility. We talk briefly about the mushroom project – I do not think he is ready to spend much time on this. If it is to work I am afraid we will have to do much of the start up work.

Once we are home we eat some lunch and then watch a movie. We then do a final clean-up before the maid comes. Why does that word some wrong – cleaning lady sounds so much less pretentious. I was surprised to find that one of the members that was visiting the Tangerang branch had nannies for their children – I had never really thought about a member having nannies. Of course there is nothing wrong with that and it does provide a couple of people some work, a good place to live and food to eat. I imagine if we were living here with our young children and could afford it, we would hire nannies, maids, etc. For $250 a month you could hire – 3 to 4 people and they would all love to have the job.

The maid comes we are reading from Kitab Mormon. She gets to hear some of the gospel in our poor Indonesian. I am hoping that it will make her curious about what we are reading. As we have just read – the Lord does great works with small things. After we read, I fall asleep on the bed – Mary wakes me to get money to pay her. She puts in her full three hours because Mary asked her to clean the refrigerator – it really needed it.

I was just thinking about the mushroom project. If it worked a single system could provide 3 families about $200 a month which is a good level of living for a family here in Indonesia. It would be exciting if we could provide enough projects to help 30 or 40 families to earn enough that their children could go to good schools. I feel that there are other things like that which we can start that will do the same thing. I trust the Lord will point me in their direction when I have the time to do something about it.

I am tempted to watch another movie, but I feel that I need to be obedient to trying to learn the language so I spend the time re-reading from the Kitab Mormon and trying to get the words I do not know to stick in my mind. While looking for a pad to write down some of the words, I found some notes I made about the last day we were home . We did a lot of things – including almost getting stuck in the driveway, almost not getting a flight to Las Vegas, and almost being to late t catch our plane to Korea. It was an exciting day to say the least. I wrote that the two hours between when we finished getting ready and Brooke Alexander showing up to take us to the MTC seemed like two of the longest hours I have ever lived. Little did I know how great of a spiritual adventure we would be going to.