This  is the bougainvillea at the mission home – they have grafted two plants together to get purple and white. I am extremely jealous of this plant. The Wok picture came from Elder Kane but I thought it was worth sharing. The load on the motorcycle appears to be a full stereo system. I hope he made it home safely.

16 August 2007 – Thursday

Up and did my walk/job until 6 and then went into the gym and did sit-ups. I was surprised to see that my weight was less than I expected. But I still need to lose some weight. I guess I should really avoid BreadTalk. After that it was a normal morning with me studying Indonesian before we read from the Kitab Mormon – we are now sailing through the latter part of 2nd Nephi.

We went into the office so we could do some things and then left for the mission office. When we got there we found that they were having an office party and so we got to join in having lunch. President and sister Marchant and the Taylors were all busy eating the traditional foods.

Mary sat in while Sister Peterson taught the office staff their English class. While she was doing that, I talked to the office elders, the A.P.s and president Marchant. I am still working on the president about improving the English lessons of the native missionaries. Hopefully before we leave there will be a real program in place so the missionaries learn as much as they can before they are released.  After lunch the Taylors went to Immigration to apply for their KITAS. It was the perfect day to go, because everyone was busy getting ready for the big holiday tomorrow so there were few who were interested in visiting Immigration.

We took the Taylors to Tangerang for our District Meeting and English Class. As we traveled we got to learn a lot more about their mission. They had great success re-activating members – hopefully they will do the same in Jogja. I am not sure they learned much or how much they enjoyed the evening with us. Mary taught Catherine a piano lesson, we had a rather joyous District Meeting with a larger than usual group of missionaries. That was because that group of 9 that recently arrived are still waiting for their KITAS and then transfers so the usual group of 4 has been increased to 8 missionaries and then there was the two couples. The new missionaries are super and seem to be able to communicate fairly well with their companions.

The joy of being on their mission just shows on their faces. It is like there is an inner light that just must shine forth. They have the same attitude as Elders Roper and Thiemann did when we first met them. One of the pairs got 93 referrals – someone gave them a map of a kompong with all the names and addresses of those living there. It is great because they can now go around a single area and check out if the people are really living there. However Elder Wiryanto – the DL – wisely told them to not neglect their investigators to check out the referrals. Elder Tuxworth seems to have picked up some bug that made him violently ill yesterday. But he has such a great spirit and fun nature that it is hard for anything to get him down. It is hard to believe that he is a number of years older than most of the other missionaries and has been in the military. I have really enjoyed getting to know him. The other great missionary in the district is Elder Hadi Suyatmo – he is a powerful missionary and is only going to get better. He is also full of joy. He gave a good lesson and used some role playing to make it work better.

Our English class got off to a slow start and never really got large. We had Elder Suyatmo and the other new native missionary stay in the young class. I am not sure how effective the lesson was tonight – we went through propositions, counting and opposites. We also played Simon Says which the Taylors and the new native aced – I gave up trying to get them out.

The trip home was a little long because we had to drop off the Taylors. But it was not as long as the Marchants and their guests. They left at 5 to take a quick trip into the middle of Jakarta and ran into the mess around the train station. They had forgotten that everyone would be leaving or arriving for the long holiday weekend. They ended up taking 5 hours instead of an hour.  As usual on Thursday night we pretty much did nothing after we got home except grab something to stuff in our mouths and then went right to bed.