More pictures from Zone Conference. While feeding the spirit is an important part of Zone Conference, feeding the body is also well taken care of. For many of the missionaries, Zone Conference gives them a chance to eat their fill of a variety of foods they do not often see, let alone eat. As you can see Mary is enjoying her’s with Sister Coleman and Sadimin. Next is Elder Hunter. We really did not know Elder Hunter until he was transferred into the office. I am glad we had the opportunity to work with him for the last 6 weeks of our mission. He is a dynamic Elder who as you can see would rather talk than eat. I would love to see him and Elder Roper work together. That would really be a high energy pair of missionaries. Elder Kusumarmanto is on the left and is the son of the country ERS director Agus who we work closely with. Elder Smith has recently been transferred from the office back to the field. Before leaving he had prepared the excellent slide show of Indonesia that we saw yesterday. As I have mentioned a number of times in this journal, working with the Sisters and Elders is truly one of the great blessings of a mission.
02 May 2008 – Friday
Although we are certainly happy that Sam and Anny are being sealed in the temple and having a wonderful honeymoon doing temple work, until he gets back we are limited in what we can do. But that will end in a few days and we will catch up with our visits.
Normal morning except we left a little late for the office. We read from the A&P – struggling at times but it is a good learning experience for us. It also shows vividly that they were not translated by the same person or persons as the Kitab Mormon. The choice of words is often quite different as is how they express thoughts that are non easily translated into Bahasa.
At the office I spent the first part of my time working with Hani and his distance learning class. It seemed rather difficult to me but I suppose that is part of the idea. This is to help them become more proficient in English and so they first must find out where they are. I told him he could come in tomorrow and work on it some more. As long as he keeps a positive attitude, I think he will be fine. I wrote a letter to sister Bunker about Hani and some thoughts I had with the program.
Mary worked mainly on English and cleaning up the filing and papers that are still everywhere. I continued with the vocabulary lessons. Hopefully I will finish them before we are released. The time seemed to fly by. Unfortunately no one came in for help with a job.
I did get a message from Hendra saying that President Anthony suggested we contact Maria Sandra about the job. That will not work because she does not know enough English and certainly do not know enough Indonesian to tell her about it. In the evening I thought of Lukito and I had him call her. It turned out that was a good move because he found that she has been sick in bed for 3 days. When he told me I suggested that he call her home teacher and branch president so they knew. Hopefully they can help or send help for her.
We continued to read from the A&P – because they use bigger type and more spacing, there is a lot less to read per page than in the Kitab Mormon. On the other hand the words and concepts are different so it slows us down.
I must confess I did not study as much as I either could or should today. I hope that does not mean I am getting trunky. I did listen to more conference talks and we watched the video of Elder Subandriyo’s talk at BYUH last month. He is a fine speaker and even though English is not his first language, he spoke clearly and made few mistakes. Sister Stephie, his wife, gave her testimony and if was easy to see that she was very sad when she talked about their daughter and her death. But she bore a strong testimony and gave a positive message.
The Lord continues to bless us with good health, friends, family and many opportunities to serve. Hopefully we will be able to continue to serve Him and our Heavenly Father through serving our fellow beings. Both at home and where ever the Lord needs us next.