20 November 2007 – Tuesday

Study, gym, wrote some letters about the English class, and read from the Kitab Mormon. We continue to plant, prune, graft, dig, dung, cut down and lay up fruit against the season.

The above is as far as I got yesterday before we headed out for a really full day of activities. At the office we taught English to Ezra, help a recently returned missionary start looking for a job and gave him some exercises to help him work on his already excellent English, and did the usual amount of e-mailing. Before we knew it, it was time to head to the mission office so Mary could teach her class.

Since there was a long shopping list, we dropped Mary off at the office and went to SoGo. Sam and I walked through the store a half-dozen times in our search for all the things on the list. They do not have yams but they do have sweet potatoes – in fact they have purple sweet potatoes but I did not buy those. What they do not have in Indonesia is walnuts or pecans…we did not think peanuts or almonds would be good substitutes. Marshmellows sell for $6 a package – and they are not great looking marshmellows. Next time Mary gets to go shopping and I will teach her class.

When we got back to the mission office, I had a nice talk with elder Subandriyo. He told me that while President Marchant was in Hong Kong he was told that starting in 2009, all Indonesian missionaries would go to the Manila MTC for a month’s training. He said he now knew why he had received the vision for teaching English to highschool students. The training will all be in English so the better they know English the more they will get out of the MTC experience.

After that we talked more about the program we will be starting next week in Solo. He is not worried about anything – he will find the money and the way to get this to work. I can feel the power of the spirit working in him and a fire in his eyes when he talks about the program. I feel we are really being blessed to at least be in on the start of this program. Of course I am also a little daunted with the responsibility. I imagine there will be a lot of trips to the mountain.

Mary had two new members for her class. It seems everyone has got the bug for learning English. The main problem she has is the wide range of the level of English skills. I told her about the problem of no nuts and suggested Sam take her over to Grand Lucky to see if they had any. While the did that I went down and talked to the Walkers. When Mary came back – without any more luck with the nuts than I had – she joined us and we invited the Walkers to go to dinner with us.

A little later we were joined by president Marchant so we had a nice discussion of some of the things going on in the mission. The president had to send a young missionary home today for health reasons. It must be hard to call the parents and tell them that a missionary is coming home. At least it is not because of anything moral. As the time came for us to go to dinner we invited the President and sister Marchant to come along so we could show them this great Chinese restaurant.

To make the story short, they came along, the restaurant was closed today, and the substitute one was not very good. But we had a good time talking and it at least filled our stomachs.

We took the Marchants back to their home and the rest of us went home teaching to the Johnson Tobing family. What a great family and what an asset they would be to the English branch. We had a good visit and I tried to give the young people as much attention as possible. After our visit we went back to the mission office one more time to drop off the Walkers and pick up our groceries that we had left there so we had enough room in our car for everyone to go to dinner.

By the time we got back to our apartment we were completely bushed but in a very happy way. It was a full day and I think a lot got accomplished. I did not even look at a word of Indonesian before falling into bed and going to sleep.