Daily Archives: March 12, 2008

Jakarta Scenes

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11 March 2008

11 March 2008 – Tuesday

Before going to the gym this morning, I tried to read from the PH manual in Indonesian and found it tough going. This humbled me because in the past I have found that I could usually read church related things fairly well. But obviously I need to continue to have the Lord’s help in reading and learning the language. I think this struggle with Bahasa helps me to be a better English teacher. It also reinforces my idea that we need to continue to stress learning vocabulary at every level to our students. We also need to stress this need to the couples who are teaching so that they include some vocabulary learning in each of their lessons.

I should mention that I am also trying to learn from a 2nd grade lesson manual. This is even more humbling than the PH manual. I have to look up about 25% of the words and still I am not sure I am really understanding what is being said and asked. I do not remember 2nd grade being this hard – of course that was some 62 years ago.

We read from the Kitab Mormon – we are finishing up Mosiah with the king explaining why he does not want the people to select a new king. Although he puts forward a good case, I am not sure a king would have done any worse than the Judges did. They could not keep the peace and did not seem to have a standing army or police force to maintain it.

We got to see a couple of great pictures of Jim and Kristy on their blog. We are jealous that they have seen Wicked. From everything I have read it is a great musical. We also realized that we forgot to wish them happy anniversary.

Sam is feeling better today and so we are back to having a driver. At the office, Mary worked on her English class and I went through the computer files cleaning them up, organizing, and leaving notes behind that might help the next couple. Speaking of them we heard from the Christensens that the call has been extended to replace us but since they have not had a chance to reply, we do not know anything else.

As usual we went to the mission office so Mary could teach her English class to the staff. While she was doing this, I went down to the conference room, read the latest Church News and then read some of the D&C in Indonesian. I can usually get 95% of the Ajaran dan Perjanjian unless it drops into Isaiah type writing.

After the class we did our weekly shopping and stocked up on a lot of things that are not always available. Of course we also stopped at BreadTalk for some goodies. Throughout the day I took pictures of street scenes and traffic in Jakarta. Interesting scenes that we see everyday and often do not really notice. Jakarta – and Indonesia in general – is full of color and contrasts that can not truly be caught by any camera.

My evening was spent working on the backlog of pictures, writing a few e-mails, and our usual reading from the Kitab Mormon. One funny thing came up – it seems that I really liked November 2007 because I had 1 Nov 07 follow 30 Nov 2007 when I marked where we were in the Kitab Mormon reading. That would not have been so bad if I had not continue to write the wrong month for 8 days before switching over to December.