Hunting

First, we want to acknowledge the 90th birthday today of Elder Porter's mother, Lois Porter.  She was the first one we talked to about the possibility of serving a mission, and she was very supportive in many ways.  Happy birthday, Mom!

Thanks to Sanford's brother Calvin and all the Florida Porters and her friends for making this a special day for her. The luncheon will happen around 3 a.m. our time, so we will call tomorrow (Sunday night Florida time) to hear all about it and offer our wishes as well.


We started the week out on Monday with a preparation day (P-day) trip to the Rahmat Wildlife Museum.  It reminded us a lot of the Bean Museum in Utah: a rich guy who likes to shoot animals turns his hunting collection into a museum. However, the museum also included a surprising amount of the little stuff including insects, shells, and mice.

As is typical, for museums here, they had two tiers of entrance fees, one for Indonesians and another (3x) for non-Indonesians.  However, usually the Indonesian fee is allowed for legal residents.  Here it was not, so we had the opportunity to make a generous contribution to the museum.

Sanford was entranced when we entered the Insectarium.  They had specimens of the largest ants in the world, Camponotus.

We spent much of the week hunting for a new building for our church.  None of the buildings we looked at during the previous week seemed acceptable for various reasons.  It has to have a larger meeting room than we do now, and it has to be on angkot (bus) routes. Hopefully it will be located most closely to the direction where most of our members live, not farther away for them.  So we spent a lot of time driving around looking....Our district leader flew to Jakarta for the Missionary Leadership Council, so his companion, who is from Surabaya, accompanied Elder Porter on a hunting trip and was invaluable in speaking with one of the property managers.

Sister Porter has been consistent about exercising every morning.  One of the challenges is some guy from India who is often in the exercise room and plays his music loudly rather than using headphones.  Well, last Friday he was on the treadmill and listening to the Learning Indonesian podcasts that had helped Sister Porter learn the language. So she was struggling to listen to lesson 53 through the headphones while he was blaring out lesson 5.

Of course he is younger so probably he will be on the same lesson soon....I finished them before we left Florida, but review with the last parts of the last few dozen lessons.

Elder Porter has been concerned about the impromptu lake that has developed in an open field near the home where we teach English class to the kids on Thursday afternoon.  Of course we are all aware of the dangers of mosquitoes after one of the young elders was recently hospitalized, and there are other concerns as well.  It turns out that there is a dike at the end of the neighborhood that prevents drainage.  One of their neighbors had a few inches of water in his house.  Elder Porter brought gym shoes, but was offered the use of boots.  Which worked really well until they did not come off:)