Another Week in Indonesia

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We had a busy week.  On Tuesday after district meeting, we used our car to pick up the Young Women president and her daughter and grabbed another young woman and made visits to three families whose young women are not coming regularly right now, for a variety of reasons.  It was a positive experience.  At the last house, they fed us a noodle soup. We continue to be amazed at our driver, who knows this city so well and can get us to place to place without hardly consulting a map

This picture is of one of the young women who is working at her family's warung (roadside restaurant) in this picture (yummy fried bananas!), but looked very nice today when she taught an excellent lesson.  

As we mentioned a few weeks ago, Sanford took family portraits as part of our Family History Weekend.  He has spent the last few weeks getting them cleaned up and printed and framed, with a family tree on the back.  Then we have the pleasure of delivering them.  There has often been a sweet spirit as we brought them into the house.  One brother took a picture of the picture and posted to Facebook with his thanks.  

In addition to our English class at the kampung north of town, where we are still getting over 20 kids every week, we were asked to teach a class in another neighborhood.  Over 30 young people showed up, including some teens.  Next week we will need to plan to split the group and maybe have Sanford take the advanced students out on the porch for conversation while a younger missionary takes over his ipad and helps me inside with the younger ones.  We don't have a keyboard for songs there, but I bought some decent speakers and figured out that if I use Windows Media Player, I can slow down the speed of the song to 80 percent. We always start with the Hello song and they are learning the vocabulary to sing "In the Leafy Treetops."

We had taught the Articles of Faith for the church leaders' English class on Sunday, so that meant five English classes during the week.

And our usual Wednesday and Friday classes were challenging because it turned out that our only television at church, the one we use for our class, is now displaying upside down.  They knew this last Sunday but nobody thought to tell us.  Yikes!  We used a projector on Friday, and hopefully the television will be replaced soon.

In my spare time, I am preparing a report for the incoming mission president's wife, who will be taking over the duties as mission medical coordinator.  On Friday while Sanford was in a meeting, I was typing about one common complaint here in Indonesia, and right then the phone rang with a call from a missionary who had that very problem. 

This week we had a treat outside our window one day; it was so clear that there was actually a horizon. Usually the background fades into haze, smog or smoke drifting over from fires in the rain forest of Kalimantan.  But we could finally see the towers in the distance.