Only in Indonesia – The man is pushing his cart loaded with a door frame that must have been 7′ x 11′ down a main road in Jakarta. Behind was two more carts with what looked like parts to go with it. There is no telling how far he ended up pushing this load but it did not seem to matter. I liked the load of boxes because they were all shape and sizes. Big loads tend to be rather uniform. The delivery motorcycle is not really unique in size, but the colors are unusual.

04 August 2007 – Saturday

Well it turned out to be a very unusual Saturday for us. But it started normally with me going out and walking the track for about 45 minutes. I could not run because I managed to get a blister on my heel and every time I tried to run it hurt too much. I still managed to work up a nice sweat. Mary had been awake during the night so she got to sleep in a little. We read from the Kitab Mormon and then hurried to get ready to go to the chapel for a service project.

A couple in the US bought 6 pallets of school books and shipped them to Indonesia so they could be distributed to needy schools. They were supposed to be delivered at 8:30 so all the elders and sisters in the district came down to help out. Also a good number of members of the English branch showed up. Of course in usual Indonesian fashion, the books were not even released from customs by 8:30 so Elder Subandriyo had to go down and get things moving.

The books arrived at about 10:00 and we formed a line to get them from the truck, into the church, up the stairs and into the cultural hall. I stood on the stairs between two elders and hustled boxes of books weighing on an average of 40 pounds. I figure there was probably about 240-250 boxes of books. I – and all the elders – were really sweating by the time we were done. I felt pretty good to keep up my part. After all I am about 20 years older than the two elders combined.

The easy part was dividing the books into grades. Once that was done, we had to figure out what to do with them. Elder Subandriyo decided to make them into sets of 10. After a false start, I figured out how to do this best and for the rest of the day, I was the lead person. I headed up the crew that divided up the books into stacks. I had Mary make an inventory sheet – Elder Subandriyo asked for this – so we could put one in each set so people would know what was there. I had some of the elders counting the books in each section and putting post-it notes on the stack. Then when we got to that grade, Mary would make a list of the books in the section and I would decide how many of each book went in each stack – this was not hard since there were 10 stacks but it took a while before the elders caught on. Once the stacks were made, a crew led by president Marchant and elders Kane and Peterson, came along and boxed them up. We got pretty good at doing this and we were basically done by 3:30. I was very, very tired by then but happy to see that things got done in an orderly manner.

After that we went down to the office and Mary entered our figures for the monthly reports. There were only two problems – first I managed to close one of the completed report without saving it so Mary had to re-enter the information. I apologized many times for that. And then I could not get the completed reports sent to Hong Kong because the file is so big. They really should let us send raw data and they can enter it all there. They obviously have a better internet speed than we do.

Then it was time to come home. Mary had selected a good number of books so Sam had to make a couple of trips to get them all in the apartment. Add to that I forgot my book bag so he had to go back to the church for it and I figured that he deserved a bonus. So I gave him 150,000 R – about $15 and made his day.
I was sore and tired – it is a good tired – but did not try to take a nap. Instead I went down and picked up the dry cleaning and got my hair cut. Now I am about to go take a long, hot shower and try to stay awake long enough to read from the Kitab Mormon.

We did our reading from the Kitab Mormon and I continue to try to read the A&P. I found that studying words in the morning while exercising makes the time go more quickly but does not mean that I learn the words. The Indonesian words pretty much stick, but the English meaning seems to scurry away. But I will continue to exercise and learn – some part of my body should benefit.