There is an Angel in This Picture

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 courtesy visit to get to know each other. He was very helpful in explaining the role of Christian Affairs and offered his help anytime we need it. We also met several wonderful people in his office.

As in many cultures, sitting down to a nice meal is a great way to get acquainted. The folks with us on this occasion are our brothers and sisters of the Islam religion. The organization they represent is called Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). They have a University here in Medan and the operate many other schools throughout Indonesia. We have an ongoing relationship of cooperation with members of NU in educational and humanitarian projects. This was the first time meeting with the NU leaders in Medan.

Sister Lambson and this woman, whose name I forgot (sorry), became good friends during the dinner. Sister Lambson using all of her newly acquired Indonesian and the woman using all of her English skills. I was sitting next to them and translated when they got stuck. When we sit down together like this and talk we thoroughly enjoy each other's company because we have much in common. We have been here for two and a half months and my Indonesian is beginning to become more fluid. There is a process in my brain that gradually switches from thinking in English (which then I have to convert to Indonesian before speaking) to eventually thinking in Indonesian and directly speaking as I think. That process is moving along pretty well. I'd say I am at about 70% thinking in Indonesian now. Sometimes 100%, if the conversation is simple. 

We also had a dinner with the local Christian interfaith group, PGI. This was also the first time meeting with these leaders in Medan. It was a great time especially for Sister Stephens and Sister Lambson who made some new friends. The Indonesian people are very fun to talk to especially in this part of Indonesian because the people of Sumatra are culturally outspoken.

This is a cacau tree. For all you chocolate lovers, this is where your chocolate comes from. Bang Dharma cut one open so we could taste it. The white fleshy stuff around the beans is actually pretty good to eat. It's just like manggis (mangosteen) for those of you who know what that is. There is a big process that this pod would need to go through of fermentation and roasting before the beans would taste anything like chocolate.

This is a rubber tree. Every tree in this plantation has a slit in the bark like you see here and the sap (latex) is dripping into a half coconut shell to be collected later.

Since we were visiting Sumatra we went to a national park on Saturday. We went specifically to see wild orangutans and we saw three of them but I don't have good pictures because there were way up in the canopy and my pictures just show dark spots up in the trees. We got a good picture of the long tailed monkey in the first picture, a jungle peacock in the second one and the snake like creature being held up is not a snake, it is a gigantic earthworm. We also tasted a large ant that tastes exactly like lemon juice, however we also didn't get a good picture of that. 

Today I will leave you with this picture. We are in a county that we truly love but we must say that we love and miss our own country very much. It took me 10 minutes of talking to guards at the consulate to be able to take this photo of outside our consulate office. It was actually taken by the guard so that he could control what was in the picture. Its late and my eyes are burning so I will read this tomorrow and fix all the spelling errors.






 















 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Young Missionaries Returning Home And Searching For Family History On The Far Off Isle of Alor

Image
  I'm sure all missions have traditions when a group of missionaries complete thier missions. In our mission we gather at the mission home for a devotional where we sing, hear testimonies of the departing missionaries and messages from our mission leaders and after the devotional is over the mission leaders cut off the ties and scarfs of the missionaries. This group is special to us because they have overlapped with us for almost our entire mission. The two sister pictured here, Sisters Cook and Pickett, arrived a week after we arrived so they have overlapped for the entire mission. Three of the Elders were in the group that we escorted to the Cebu temple. Hard to say goodbye. This is Sister Sri Anon. She is the Church Historian in Indonesia and she came to our office this week to interview us. She interviews all of the senior couples before they leave and submits transcripts with her Church History reports. Sister Sri is 80 years old and is a pioneer in the Church here. She joined
Read more

Final Mission Post

Image
  The picture on the left is our last day in the Jakarta office and in the picture on the right some of the young missionaries stopped by our apartment to say goodbye in the evening before our flight. We left our apartment at 3:00 am on Thursday and arrived at the Salt Lake City International airport 26 hours later at 4:00 pm of the same day. By 7:00 pm we had been released from our full-time missionary service as communication missionaries in the Indonesia Jakarta Mission. People sometimes asked us, "What is the hardest thing you face on your mission?" A mission is hard. We often miss that point when the talk about our missions because we tend to hang on to the sweet memories and not dwell on the challenges. This blog, for example, is written mostly about happy times and uplifting experiences. I will not go into all of the challenges we faced except to say that, for us, the hardest part was being far away from our family for so long; our 5 children, 2 daughters-in-law, 2 son
Read more

People Who Help People See

Image
  This week we were asked to attend a special meeting on behalf of The Church. This was the annual opening session of the Indonesian Association for Blind People which operates the Eye Bank. One of the areas of focus of this organization is register people to donate their eyes for cornea transplants after they are deceased. Members or the Church have helped to promote and register people as donors for several years so the organization invited us to attend this meeting. The humanitarian missionaries were all out of town so Cheri and I attended in their place. These are wonderful people, many of them are medical professionals in the field of opthamology. They have been operating for many years performing cornea transplants and gradually increasing donors. A group of blind dancers performed at the event. I admire the people who have turned their hearts to helping these blind people to have a way to develop and express their talents through performances like this.
Read more