I guess I could post 8 or 10 times a day. The missionaries in the district will put on a big Christmas program on Saturday. Mary will play a solo and I will try to hide in the back. More Catch Up –

 07 December 2007 – Friday

I slept in and did not exercise. No ‘Exactly Obey’ for me today. I did manage personal study and we read from the Kitab Mormon. I got a call from elder Cheney that Looky’s young son did die and the funeral will be tomorrow morning. Agus K. told me that he felt the family was doing fine and all the relatives are giving them support. The power of the church to comfort and support is one of its great strengths. 

We went to district meeting in a pouring rain storm. We only got wet going from the car to the building, but some of the missionaries arrived completely soaked. It seems some of them do not have umbrellas. Later we heard that elder Thiemann, who had already been soaked once, fell into a hole up to his chest. I guess it is a good thing he is tall. If his companion would have fallen in, it would have been up to his neck. 

We found that president Marchant was ill and so he had cancelled Zone Conference in Solo. It turned out he has something that exhausts him after working for an hour or so. He also is running a fever. Hopefully it is not dengue fever – if it is he is going to be down for quite a while.  

Due to the storm delays of missionaries coming in, the district meeting was an hour late getting started, but since there was little activity in the district and elder Rowberry gave a good but short lesson on “adjusting your teaching to meet needs,” it was finished in 30 minutes. I asked the missionaries if they ever had the experience of being prompted by the spirit to change what they were going to teach. Elder Rowberry gave a good example of how this does work. He was prompted to teach the Word of Wisdom early on and his investigator gave up all his vices that day.  

We then went to Sogo so Mary could buy even more supplies for cookie making. I told her we could have bought 20 or 30 dozen of good cookies for what she is paying for supplies and it would have saved her the work of making them. She agreed but it was too late by then. 

We hit terrible traffic coming back to the apartment. It took us an hour to travel what usually takes us 20 minutes. Rain and it being Friday seems to have been the cause. It was not fun. I tried reading from MIK but only for a short time. For some reason reading in the car does not work for me. I do not get sick, it just does not sink in. 

Daisy came to clean our apartment – she needs some income until she gets a job. I took a short – for me – nap while she was cleaning. She did an excellent job and Mary gave her a little more than we usually pay for getting our apartment cleaned. Daisy said she would like to clean our apartment even if she gets a regular job. She is a hard worker and I think she wants to save money to go to school. 

It was a strange evening for us. We had pizza and soon after we were finished, Mary lay down on the couch and hardly moved for a couple of hours. I finally got her to go to bed where she immediately woke up and started working on English games she found on the web. She has been spending hours finding and downloading games and activities for our English classes.  

We are fine – just can not post anything but short notes. We are posting this as the 6th so I can fill in later.  Love all of you – we really miss you during this holiday season. Here is some catch up –

06 December 2007 – Thursday 

Normal morning – reading in Alma from the Kitab Mormon. We also work on an antonym matching game for my class tonight and for the future. We are spending a lot of time on English. It was the start of one of our busier days.  

Once we are at the office, people start to arrive. First there is Franky who comes in to up grade his CV. Franky is living in hopes of getting a job either on a cruise ship or at a ski resort. He first came in over 6 months ago sure he would get the Sun Valley job but never got the call. Then he thought for sure he had a job on Holland America – his next chance is sometime in February but he has finally decided that he should perhaps try to find a job here. Just in case the other one does not come through again. He is a very friendly young man who for some reason quit his last job without having another job to go to because he did not think it was good enough. 

Lukas Subandriyo came in for his English lesson. Unfortunately Ezra is sick with the flu. We go through fractured sentences and we find that he does fine when he really stops and thinks about the sentences. I suggest that he writes out the whole sentence and not just try to correct what is there. He has problems with count and non-count nouns – but everyone does.  

When everyone is gone we work on more English class activities. Mary is finding a lot of good ESL activities on the web. They are easy to download and turn into classroom lessons and games. It is truly amazing what can be found there. 

We leave a little early because we were invited to go to a new warung by the office staff. But we got to the office too late to join them and Sam got us lunch from BYU. While Mary taught her class, I talked to the Walkers and elder Subandriyo, and then found a place to take a short nap.  

On the way to Tangerang for the district meeting, we stopped at the mall to get a lot of supplies for more English projects and ingredients for making cookies for the Missionary Christmas Program on the 15^th. We also got donuts for the missionaries. While we were shopping I came across a display of large umbrellas and decided we should really have one. Which turned out to be perfect timing because when we started to go out it was pouring rain. Sam used the new umbrella to get to the car and drove it to a sheltered entry so we could get in without getting soaked. 

When we pull into the parking lot at the Tangerang chapel, my phone rings and it is elder Subandriyo who wants my opinion and help about another of his ideas for Indonesia. This one is a very large one – he has the vision of a tourist destination on Bali that is along the lines of the Polynesian Cultural Center at Laie. I have no idea why he feels I am in any way qualified to help with this, but since the last two things he asked us to do seems to be viable, I told him I would see what I can do. It is strange that he seems to call when I am in the car with something out of the blue.  

We had a very good district meeting with the elders from Tangerang 2 – elders Cheney and Peate, elder Smith from the office and elder Hadi Suyatmo who is one of the zone leaders. Elder Cheney gives a lesson on Obedience and we have a good discussion. I talk some about the statement in PMG that says ‘Be exactly obedient.’ I suggest that we see how often we can record in our journals that we went through the day being ‘exactly obedient.’ I promised them that more often we can do this the more blessings the Lord can give us and the more often that the Holy Ghost will be our companion. They all committed to try this – elder Peate actually wrote down my promise. I also talked about studying English as part of being obedient. I think I will use this as part of my talk at Zone Conference – that is if the president remembers he asked me. 

Because of the rain and because Agus and Catherine’s family did not come, we did not have any English class. It is rather discouraging to go to the effort to have the classes and no one comes. We were asked by president Paul to have the classes on Friday night, so I asked president Sujud to get together with him and see if that would work for everyone. I don’t imagine we will have any trouble changing district meeting.  

After the meeting we give the elders the donuts – it is one thing that all elders enjoy. Then we took elders Hadi Suyatmo over to pick up some things for elder Woodword who came into the mission home because he was very sick. We do a quick inspection of the home and find that they are keeping it very clean. We were impressed since they had no idea we would be seeing it. The trip back to the mission office and then home seems to take forever. By the time we get here we are very tired – we were out for about 11 hours.