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.