Mission Blog of Chuck and Cheri Lambson

  We live in the city of Jakarta. I took this picture last night as we walked home from dinner. I am standing on a walkway that goes over Jalan Jendral Sudirman. You can see the stairs that we took on the other side in the foreground of this picture. Jakarta is a vast metropolis of more than 10 million people. It is a city of incredible wealth and poverty. Traffic is totally wild and the traffic laws seem to be mere suggestions. The people who live here are caring and helpful and almost without exception very polite. The weather is hot but not too hot. We are very close to the equator so days are always 12 hours long and the sun sets just before 6 pm every day. The average high temperature is 86 degrees and it seldom gets over 90 degrees. It also seldom gets below 80% humidity. Average rainfall is 72 inches per year which means it rains a lot and hard. Right now is the "dry" season so it doesn't rain every day but when the monsoon season picks up, starting in December or ...

The woman in the pink shirt felt inspired to help the orphaned and abandoned children in her city in the northern part of the Island of Sumatra. In July of this year she registered a foundation to care for these kids. She lives with them in a house near our chapel in Medan. She and the children have been attending Church with us for several weeks. We walked over to visit them with the Humanitarian missionaries, Elder and Sister Stephens and Elder Lee. They were there to assess how the Foundation of the Church can help. She has three children of her own and has decided that, in addition to her own children, she would dedicate her life to helping other children in need. What a marvelous example of pure love and faith. The gentleman in the center of this picture is the local Christian Affairs officer in North Sumatra. We visited him with our physical facilities representative, Brother Dean, who is just to his right and, Brother Poliman, our public affairs representative. This was a courte...

As communications specialists, one of our responsibilities is to help foster relationships. This picture was taken during a courtesy visit to the office of the Communion of Churches in Indonesia. The Church has cooperated with them for many years on disaster relief and humanitarian efforts. This was the first time to bring along two of our young full-time missionaries and talk about their service in Indonesia. Elder Chrystiawan on the far left and Elder Tomlinson on the top right spoke to the group briefly as did President Tandiman, the mission president, located in the center. The man standing next to him is the Reverend Golmar Gultom who chairs the interfaith organization. Our church is not a member of this organization because there is a minimum membership requirement which we don't meet, however, they consider us friends and a member of our Church, Brother Poliman, serves on the disaster relief committee of this organization. Brother Poliman is on the back row, second from the ...

This was a busy week. We covered the fitting of prosthetic limbs in Garut, the school addition in Bogor and a potential water project also near Bogor. Over 60 prosthetics were provided by the Church Foundation to 53 individuals in the district of Garut, some required multiple prosthetics. These prosthetics are much simpler than the ones you may have seen in the US but they are practical and we are able to serve many people in need.  This is Tatan. He is 42 years old and has two children. His left leg was amputated below the knee a little more than one year ago due to a long illness that affects vascular circulation. At first they thought it was leprosy (yes, leprosy is still around in some parts of the world). Eventually they diagnosed a different disease which neither me nor Elder Lee have ever heard of. He is confident that he will be able to work doing carpentry now that he has a prosthetic leg. This is a very happy day for him and he expressed immense gratitude for those who ha...