30 December 2007 – Sunday

Read from Kitab Mormon – Alma 49 – 2000 stripling warriors join the fight for freedom. Sam drops us off at Jakarta Raya and we meet and greet with the missionaries. Mary was able to take pictures of three families.

Sacrament meeting was about Goals and how to correctly fill out a tithing form. I guess this was a major problem because the president took about 15 minutes to go through line by line. We then went to Gospel Principles – they did not have any investigators but Marie Sanders and Rudi were there so they could hold the class. It was about the Priesthood and elder Erickson taught it without reading at all from the manual. We ended up going through the ordained PH offices and we decided that branch president was not an ordained office like bishop. Since it was the fifth Sunday PH and RS met together and they had a lesson on family preparedness. It seemed well done except the teacher lectured for 90% of the time – the 20%-80% rule just does not seem to be part of the culture.

It was good to see Johann Salim and president Kencana’s son. Johann is heading back to Taipai to learn more CadCam – we talked about how it would have been better if he had learned this at BYU Hawaii and not just IT…He agreed.

After church we caught a cab to the Selatan chapel where we ran into the Walkers and the Marchants – also elder Subandriyo. President Marchant and I talked about the question of giving keys to District and Branch Presidents. He is still not convinced that he should but will ask in May when he goes to training in Hong Kong.

I talked to the three seminary students who showed up for class today about the trial class English class we are going to start on the 12th. They decided they would like to have it before Seminary and so we will hold it at 1:00 p.m. This should be a challenge because we will also have an Intensive English class going on at that time. It does not seem like we are going to have to worry much about what we will be doing for the rest of our mission. One thing I did learn is that they know a lot more English than they let on – they could understand what I was saying as long as I talked slowly. They seem like very smart young people. I invited elder Subandriyo to come to our first Intensive English class on Tuesday the 8th and the first HS English class on the 12th – he said he would be happy to.

When I got back to the office there was a member who wanted to talk to me. It turned out he wanted to join the Intensive English Class. I could not let him because first he was too old, second the class was already full, and third his English was not good enough – I had to have an interpreter help with the interview. But I told him we would be happy to work with him on a one to one basis on four days a week and he seemed happy with that. We then closed up the office and had Sam drive us back to the apartment.

We spent the rest of the day as we usually do on Sunday. Getting a good nap, working on English, reading from the Kitab Mormon, and watching some TV. I also took care of another project that elder Subandriyo asked me to handle- at least I started to work on it.