27 September 2007

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This motorcycle load does not look all that impressive but when you consider that he is carrying about 700 kilos of rice it is rather amazing. We would use a half ton pickup for that kind of load. I thought this cart was an interesting study of color and content. The gentleman was happy to pose for me. He will push this cart through the streets of the city day after day hoping to sell enough to feed himself and his family.

27 September 2007 – Thursday

A good day and I managed to last until the end so I guess I am well again. I kept my exercising to a half hour but pushed it quite a bit. A very normal morning and we read from the Kitab Mormon. As Mary was reading I lost where she was and could not figure out why and then I remembered that my copy of the Kitab Mormon has a duplicate section in the middle. Exactly the same thing happened the last time we reading. We both broke up laughing about it.

We went to work where I sent out some letters about the coming Intensive English class and also some e-mails to some of the BYUH students telling them about planning to do internships during their Junior and Senior years. It was fun to write to Sara Lee because I know her. Mary worked on the workshop participants lists for the districts – hopefully before we leave we will have trained the branch specialists to follow up on them.

From the office we went to the mission office and had lunch from BYU. I talked to elder Subandriyo about the IEC and told him we only needed one more participant. I mentioned that perhaps Elder Mongula from Bogor might want to join. Earlier I had remembered him and called Elder Kane and asked him to see if elder M would like to join. About 30 minutes after talking to elder S, I got a SMS from elder Mongula asking if he could join the class. This means we now have a full class of 6 and the Lord did provide. Strangely enough I have not been stressed about filling the class – at least not after I found that Central Java would provide 4 of them.

I also had an interesting talk with brother Tandiman about scholarships. It turned out that once they started looking they found there were many of them available to the needy good student but that the school must start the application. We talked about how we needed to let those who were about to graduate from jr. high school about this opportunity and tell them what they need to do in high school to stand out so they will be recommended. I really think that CES in Indonesia is the way to achieve this goal – it will take time, perhaps 10 – 20 years, but if we do not get started it will never be achieved.  Mary taught her English class to the staff. Those who need it most do not usually attend. While she did that I read the latest Church News and tried to sleep a little.

We left right from the mission office to Tangerang because we had an ERS meeting at 4. The meeting went well – Lukito and Agus makes our callings possible and effective. I have no idea how we would do it without them. Lukito will do the training at Solo next Saturday and then stay until conference is over on Sunday. District meeting was good – the work is still really slow in Tangerang. They do not act discouraged but it must be hard on them to not see any success week after week.

My English class was not much. Agus and Catherine did not come up with their children so I kept it simple and almost immediately went to the match game which they really enjoy. I am afraid that they do not practice much English outside the hour a week with us. That is not the way to learn English very well.

The day ended with a quick trip back to the apartment and we were soon headed for bed. Thursdays are busy for us but it feels good to work.



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