When we stopped at the restaurant, there was this chopped down scooter sitting next to the door. Sam decided to climb on for a picture. On the right hand side you can see an arm reaching for a green branch that is stuck in the fender. This is what they do when a vehicle has broken down. It lets folks know that it is not going to move anytime soon so they might as well go around. It is like us putting out reflective triangles or flares.

14 November 2007

The pictures and comments below covers the time the ceremony was completed, everyone had been seen and hands had been shaken.  After we left the ceremony we stopped at the restaurant we found a few months ago that had the best chicken sate we have eaten. Elder and sister Kane agreed about the quality of the sate and elder Kane loved the nasi goring.
As we drove back into Jakarta we found that we missed a really big storm that blew down trees and signs all over the city. The rain also flooded streets. Sam took an alternate route to miss a mess he heard about on the radio. We hit one bad spot where the street was so flooded that there was only two lanes where we could get through. Since 5 or 6 lanes fed into this bottle neck we were lucky it only took us 15 minutes to get through. As we drove in to the complex we looked back to an area we had driven through not long before and saw that now it was a solid mess. The Lord blessed us in many ways on the way home.

It was a good day for us. We got to see the Kanes and share some experiences. None of us can believe almost a year has passed since we met at the MTC. We talked some about teaching English – we have learned a lot there also. The ceremony was quite interesting, but it was meeting and interacting with the families that made it so special. What to us looked like semi-finished eye-sores, to them were mansions. Hopefully they will not suffer such loss again.

We have truly been blessed to be able to serve this mission. To learn to work together to accomplish tasks and programs. To have good health, to make good friends, to see things we would never have seen any other way. I do not know if we will ever come back to Indonesia, but anything is possible. We will see what the Lord has in store for us. What I do know is that Indonesia will be a part of us the rest of our lives and for eternity. I am sure some of the friends we have met here we will see on the other side of the veil. The gospel changes lives, it unites families, and it provides opportunities to serve.

14 November 2007 – Wednesday

Because the Walkers in Aceh taking part in the handover of a major project, we got to go with the Kanes to a project handover above Bogor. While handovers can be big things – there is one next week that has 450 invited guests and who knows how many people who will just look on – this one was rather small. But it was huge for the people who were directly affected.

In the latter part of 2006, a fire raged through a section of houses that was home to some 23 families with a total of 132 people. After the fire they had no money to rebuild their homes and so they were all living crammed into tents. One of the members of Bogor’s Rotary Club asked them to take it on as a project and they asked LDSC to contribute some of the money.

Today 14 homes were handed over to these families – more than one live in a number of them. Unfortunately they decided to make some alterations to the houses – which they could do – that used up the alloted funds before they were completely finished. But they have waterproof semi-finished homes to live in while they finish them. They are much nicer than the dirt floored, single story wood homes they had before.

One of the alterations is the balcony you see below. It runs all the way around the second story and ties into other older houses. As you see they do not believe in railings – a truly dangerous situation but there was nothing LDSC or Rotary could do about their choices.

The outsides were supposed to be plastered but they used the money for this balcony and extra windows, etc.

The handover ceremony is very formal in an informal way. There were representatives from the home owners, from the local district, from the government, and of course Rotary and LDSC. Each head of household signed the documents in three places. Elder Kane greeted each one after they signed and then signed for LDSC. Afterwards everyone wanted to shake hands and Mary got in the mix with the Kanes.

This young lady in Red got Mary’s attention and she took many pictures of her. Latter the young lady got bored and fell asleep on her mother’s shoulder. The young man has polished off lunch -there is always lots of food at one of these programs – and is washing it down with a container of water. I liked these young ladies who could not stop giggling at having their pictures taken.

Everywhere we go in Indonesia we find small wonders. We had never seen these plants before – we need to get a book of the fauna of Indonesia to see if we can get names for them. When you ask most Indonesians what is the name of a flower, they say ‘bunga!’  Which of course means ‘flower.’

While we sitting waiting for the ceremony to start I looked across the yard and saw this great stone wall. This is another interesting thing about Indonesia. Even in small villages up in the puncak – top of the mountains – you find wonderful stone walls. Usually they are not as detailed as this one which stretched for about 100 feet or so. I can not imagine what it would cost to duplicate this in the US. But I would love to have it along the South side of our yard.

Jakarta fuel truck – this is a much nicer rig than most. Hate to be near it if there was an accident.

Jakarta’s version of a tandem rig – we had not seen this before, but about 20 minutes later we saw another matched pair. You can tell it is the rainy season when more and more loads are wrapped for protection. This is one of the neater ones.

The picture does not do this justice and we could not get next to it so I could show the side view. It was impressive.

13 November 2007 – Tuesday

It was a full day for us and it touched all the areas that we work in.  We open the office for helping with employment and Wawan came in to send some resumes. He seems to be really trying to find work, so I am torn between wanting him to succeed and wanting him to go back to Semarang and strengthen the branch. Much of the time, I worked on more vocabulary. Mary got her English material together, practiced the piano, and did some genealogy. She really likes the new Family Search program and is excited that it should be available to everyone next year.

Next came our trip to the mission office. While we were driving I got a call from Lukito saying that he needed the office laptop for our meeting tonight. Since it was back at the apartment, that meant we dropped Mary off so she could teach English and then Sam and I would get the computer. About the time the call came, Mary realized she had left her purse in the office so while we were in the area, we would stop and get it also. And so it happened!

When we got back I found Mary sitting and reading. I thought that they had cancelled the class, but it seems that as soon as she got there, the few students she had asked if they could start early – it seems they all wanted to leave early. Since my meeting with the District Presidency did not start for almost 3 hours, we decided to go to the Mall to look for some more posterboard for Mary’s music and to have dinner. We decided to splurge and eat at BurgerKing. And so it happened.

I had an opportunity to talk to Elder Subandriyo and got some counsel on a problem that had come up. We talked about the teaching of English to the high school students in Central Java. I think it is an inspired idea. I certainly hope it works well. He suggested that we might need to go to Central Java and observe some of the classes to see what might need to be taught.

The meeting that I had with the presidency was very interesting. They want to do something to help with the unemployment and underemployment in the district. They wanted to review the Self-Employment workshop and if it was helping anyone to become successful. We could not point to anyone that had seen their business grow after taking the class.

They had brother Putranto come in. He is the man who is looking for salesmen throughout Indonesia. He has developed a very successful sales organization and he started with nothing. To make a long meeting short, the presidency asked us to come up with a program that helps the youth prepare to be successful and to help those who have no job, and little in the way of skills, to understand they can make a good living by selling products. Either for someone else or for themselves. Brother Putranto is living proof of what can be done with vision and hard work. We will meet again in two weeks to give our ideas.

After the meeting we had a chance to say goodbye to Elder Tuxworth who is heading home to Australia on the Red Eye. We did not work very long with elder Tuxworth but I will miss him – especially his soft voice with a great Aussie accent. The new office elder with elder Rowberry is Elder Smith who we first meet in Tangerang. The new AP with elder Teng is elder Bastian who we do not know at all. The new Zone leader with elder Hadi Suyatmo is our old friend Elder Thiemann who we met at the MTC when we first started learning Indonesian. I wonder how many of these young men and women we will ever see again? Hopefully we will see some at reunions – but if we go on another mission in January of 2009 – that means the first reunion we could go to would be April 2011!

12 November 2007 – Monday

It is interesting that 4:00 to 4:30 seems to be the time I am going to wake up. It is like the Lord is telling me that spiritual exercise comes before physical. I continued to read in PMG – I am now in ‘Sifat-sifat seperti Kristus’ and I can move through it fairly quickly. I enjoyed my trip to the gym – I seem to be sweating less and doing more reps. I am also happy to see that my weight seems to be going down once more – perhaps I have broken a plateau. As I wrote that I thought about how there are times when I seem to be stuck on a spiritual plateau and I only start going up when I make some change in my routine. Often it does not need to be a major change but it has to be something that is different and possibly not at first comfortable to do.

The rest of the morning was fairly normal, except a call from Elder Bennett that took some time but was very informative and necessary. There are some things we need to do and perhaps some fences that need mending. Indonesia is a small country when it comes to the Church. The ripple from waves travel far and fast – especially with cell phones and SMS.  Anyway that interrupted out Kitab Mormon reading for a while but we ended up getting the better part of 4 pages. The reading was challenging but enjoyable. We are getting good at the lists of things that come up so often in the writings.

We went to the mission home to deliver the Michigan tests that our students took last week, talk to president Sujud, speak with the Walkers about home teaching tomorrow night, and just saying hello to others – as well as goodbye to elder Whitmore who is heading home tomorrow. I thought we had missed saying goodbye in person to elder Tuxworth but I just called him and he does not leave until midnight tomorrow so we will see him at the office when we go for Mary to teach her class.

Then we went to SoGo for assorted things. While we were there I went to the ATM to get some cash and came across a modern art display. There were some nice pieces but they wanted too much for them. I think we will go to the gallery sometime and see if we can do some bargaining. The young ladies who were running the exhibit did not seem to care one way or the other.

We then went out to make one of our home teaching visits. Brother Salim has a nice little in house business that has allowed him to send his two children to good schools – including one to BYUH – and to have a nice Indonesian home. His son is in Taiwan learning some graphics so he can work for his uncle’s international business.

It takes about an hour to 90 minutes each way – and that is if there is no real traffic jam. So the round trip including the visit took 3 hours. I figured out it would take me about the same time to home teach a family in Salt Lake or Bountiful. No wonder they have a very low home teaching percentage.