10 August 2007 – Friday
I think the alarm wants to make sure I wake up. Once again I had trouble finding the switch to turn it off. I tried hard to silence it before it wakes up Mary but I do not seem to able to do that. My morning exercise went well and it seems I am finally starting to remember the vocabulary words. Hopefully it will help. We read from the Kitab Mormon – a humbling experience to say the least. I continue to read from the A&P which is much easier.
As we pulled out of the driveway, I found that I had not brought the keys to the apartment. So we had to turn around – which is not easy in Jakarta because there are not many places to cross from one side to the other. In this case it takes about 10 minutes. Not much happens at the office. I tidy up the e-mail and resumes. I also did some work with prepositions – an area that is so important in learning English. Sam gets me lunch from the street. Today’s food is not as good as usual – rather limited in variety. Good and filling but not great. Not long after lunch President Marchant calls and invites us to have dinner tonight with them and the 13 new missionaries.
After the office we have time to go back to the apartment for naps and to get ready for dinner. I spend some of my time cataloging and writing captions for all the pictures we took while in Jogja. That is a major task when there are over 300 pictures to go through. Decisions, decisions, decisions.
Because of the possibility of bad traffic, we leave early for the mission home. At first it looks like it may be really slow going, but after a while it opens up and we get there in plenty of time. We finally got to say hello to Elder Roper only to find out that he had lost his voice and could hardly be heard. This of course did not stop him from talking – but it did slow him down a little.
It was great to meet all the new missionaries – 12 young men and a sister from Jogja. She is especially impressive with almost perfect English. Sister Tippetts sent us some phrases to use when we met the elders – they were surprised when we used them and wondered how we knew them.
Dinner was Italian and we sat at the table with some of the new missionaries. I enjoyed it more than sitting at the table with the Marchants and Petersons who we get to see all the time. We got to share some thoughts about missionary work, our calls, etc. It was very pleasant. After dinner we had a short testimony meeting – all the new elders and the sister bore their testimony as did sister Marchant. It was a good spiritual experience and we were able to understand most of what was said. Some of the US elders have a pretty good vocabulary and others you can tell are struggling with the language. But they are all strong missionaries and should do well.
It was a very nice way to end another day in the mission.