10 September 2007 – Monday
I slept in today so there was no exercising. We read from the Kitab Mormon and had our normal morning. I called elder Kane and we talked about the committee for coming up with a business plan for employing older men and widows. We only have about 8 months to get this up and running and we are still at square one.
We went to the office for a couple of hours. Mary worked on material for her English classes and I handled the e-mail and then copied some things for English class. We then headed for the mission home so we could have lunch and Mary could teach her class. Besides having a great BYU lunch, I got to talk to president Marchant and Elder Subandriyo about a number of things about the mission and our callings. As we talked I told the president that I was glad he was the one who had to make some tough decisions and not myself.
We learned that sister Artin’s young daughter had fallen down a flight of stairs and was in the hospital. Hopefully she will be OK. One of the problems here is that stairs are all made of concrete and tile so if you fall there is no give or padding.
The Walkers and Davises were not around. They had gone up to Bogor where the Walkers got off to stay a couple of days with the Kanes and then John was driving the Davises over to Bandung through the ‘Puncak’ or the tops of the mountains. We have not made that trip but maybe we will sometime soon. President Marchant loves the trip and takes every advantage of showing it off. He says the besides the great view, it is also cool. It takes about 3 – 3 ½ hours so that means if the Davises come home tonight they will have spent between 6 and 7 hours in the car.
After Mary’s lesson – she had four or five staff members today – we went to SoGo to pick up a few things. We ran into Judi Guttormsen who was doing some shopping. She and her husband just got back from 10 days in VietNam and had a great time. We only bought three things at BreadTalk.
In the evening we had an appointment to meet with the Lurah – one of the leaders – of a local sub-district. He and his office basically run a section of Jakarta. We went to his home which is obviously also his office and meeting area and spent about an hour with him and some of his staff. We mainly talked about the PPMK program and how it works. We found out how to apply for a loan, the limits, and how it is repaid. He assured us that it was available in every sub-district. I will not try to get some of the leaders in other sub-districts to see how it works in their area.
One of the men who was there was a Christian and he had some good questions. Including why were we interested in the PPMK program. This gave me an opportunity to tell him why we were in Indonesia and what we were attempting to do. I suggested that we would be happy to put on Career Workshops and Self-employment workshop for people in his sub-district. I had meant to take copies of the workbooks with us but I forgot and so Sam will take them back tomorrow. I also mentioned that perhaps we could help with some wheelchairs when they come in.
I am hoping that this contact will not help us to understand the PPMK program but also help us to become better recognized in the community. One of the most important thing we learned was that this program is available in every sub-district in Jakarta. So whoever Agus talked to was mistaken when they said it was not available in their area. Now we just have to find out who we must talk to in a sub-district to get an application started.
I am learning so much from this mission. I am slowly learning patience, I am learning to be more obedient, and I am learning the need to be closer to my Father in Heaven and my Savior. I am learning to appreciate more and more my wonderful wife and her great strength. I would like to think that I am learning to be more humble. One thing I have not been able to learn is to be more organized – there are some things that even a mission can not accomplish. Maybe by the time we have served two or three missions I will have learned even that.